Yet even professors of mathematics education enroll their children in enrichment classes. Jon Star is an associate professor at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education who studies how children learn mathematics, and he sent his then 5-year-old daughter and 8-year-old son to The Math Circle for a semester (the family is spending a semester abroad, and the children are not taking after-school math now). While he didn’t see a radical change in their performance, he says that it’s hard to know what the long-term impact of the instruction will be, because “in math education we don’t often ask longitudinal questions.” Star adds that there is no easy way for parents to evaluate these programs.
Glenn Ellison is an economics professor at MIT and the father of three girls ages 8 to 17 who have taken classes at four different programs (Girls’ Angle, IDEA Math, the Math Circle, and the Russian School). As a coach for middle school math competitions, he doesn’t need academic research to convince him that the programs work. Ellison says that those students who have been exposed to algebra early through programs like the Russian School are simply quicker than their peers who have not had extra instruction.
But Ellison believes it’s important to gain understanding that goes beyond rote memorization, and some programs instill what he calls “the wonder of math” better than others. “The Math Circle is very good at teaching kids to think creatively,” he says. “It’s very much anti-Russian School in that it’s teaching things that they are not going to learn in school in the next five years, maybe even ten years.”
