The Bae Family and Dr. Kimura, Kumon Instructor

If X is 6 and Y is 7, then they are old enough to be taught mathematics

By Renee Stovsky
Of The Post-Dispatch

* The Kumon system has 18 centers and 1,800 students in the St. Louis area, and two Ladue boys are taking full advantage.

Like many children their age, Junu Bae, almost 8, and Sonu Bae, 6, are spending their summer break swimming, attending sports camps, taking Tae Kwon Do, playing with Star Wars Lego sets and caring for pets Hershey and Snowflake, school guinea pigs who are vacationing at the boys' Ladue home.

Under the watchful eye of their mother, Helen Bae, 37, they also are keeping up with their academic skills. Each day, the boys spend two to three hours reading (Junu is deep into "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone" for the third time), practicing piano, studying Korean and English vocabulary words, and completing several math worksheets.

But that's where any similarities with their peers end.

While Junu's second-grade friends at Forsyth School may be mastering multiplication facts, he is solving problems such as the following:

Given the three points A (-5, 0), B (5, 0) and C (3, 6), obtain the locus of point P (x, y) such that PA 2 + PB 2 + PC2 2 =170. (Junu's answer: A circle with center (1, 2) and radius square root 30.)

And while Sonu's kindergarten pals are brushing up on basic addition, he's adding mixed fractions such as 5 1/4 + 2 11/12. (His solution: 7 14/12 = 8 2/12 = 8 1/6.)

Though Junu says he "thinks it's interesting to solve problems," he seems to have no professional mathematical aspirations as yet. He says he still wants to be "a policeman, fireman or maybe an artist" when he grows up. Sonu, for his part, is bent on becoming a basketball coach.

The boys' advanced math abilities may be mostly innate, but they also hone their computation skills through the Kumon (pronounced KOO-mawn) math-instruction system, first developed 45 years ago by Japanese math teacher Toru Kumon.

The Kumon home-study approach to mathematics is based on a progression of learning that begins with preschoolers counting dots or tracing lines - a precursor to writing numbers - and continues through 23 levels to an introduction of probability, statistics and permutations.

Entering pupils - they range from 3-year-olds to college students, though most are in elementary or middle school - are given a diagnostic test to determine their appropriate skills levels, independent of grade levels. Then they are assigned a series of worksheets, usually five to 10 daily, to complete as quickly and accurately as possible. Parents are responsible for enforcing the habit, as well as correcting the assignments. Students usually visit a Kumon center weekly to check in with a teacher, exchange worksheets, perform timed computations and perhaps work on a number game or puzzle.

Though some American educators have ridiculed the Kumon curriculum for its emphasis on rote skills rather than conceptual instruction, and the popular press has nicknamed it everything from "samurai math" to simply "math class from hell," many parents eager to help their children, whether struggling students or math whizzes, have embraced it wholeheartedly. This year, more than 3 million students are enrolled in 6,200 centers in 42 countries around the world. In the United States, 102,422 children attend about 1,200 Kumon centers and pay an initial registration fee of $50 plus $90 monthly to take part in the program.

Dan Kimura, senior computer science professor at Washington University, opened the St. Louis area's first Kumon center in 1984. Today 18 centers in the area serve more than 1,800 students; he heads the Kumon Ladue center and has just opened the Kumon Florissant center as well. And although he claims that anyone can learn math - "it has nothing to do with brains, and everything to do with hard work" - he admits he is astonished by what the Bae brothers have accomplished so far.

"Junu is completing level L, the end of what is considered Algebra II in high school, right before calculus," he said. "Sonu is working on adding fractions with common denominators - something most fifth-graders have not yet achieved. Both boys are ranked No. 1 in their grade levels nationally by the Kumon Educational Institute.

"I like to tell people that with 750 hours of practice, any child can pass level I, which includes square roots, quadratic equations and the Pythagorean Theorem. That's the equivalent of a 650 score on the SAT. But in close to 20 years of teaching Kumon, I've never seen this level of achievement in such young children before."

Kimura is quick to add that while the Bae brothers may be unique in the United States, in Japan it is not unheard of for first-graders to be working on calculus problems. "We still don't really know what children, given the right guidance, are capable of doing," he says.

The Baes certainly didn't know Junu's capabilities when they enrolled him in Kumon when he was 3 years old. They only knew that he was counting at 20 months, adding simple numbers at 2, multiplying at 2 1/2 and starting to do simple division by the time he began preschool.

"We were familiar with the Kumon system because it is popular in Korea," says Dr. Ty Bae, 42, a professor of radiology at Washington University Medical School, who emigrated from Seoul when he was 22. "We thought it would be fun for Junu to be exposed to math with a more organized structure."

"I needed something to help keep Junu occupied," recalls Helen Bae, who worked in a research biology laboratory before her children were born. "He used to play flash-card games with me that would last for three hours at his insistence."

At first, Junu's poor penmanship kept him from progressing rapidly at Kumon. But once his handwriting improved, his adeptness at quick calculations soared. Within four months, he was solving problems at a fourth-grade level.

"To be honest, Junu's achievements are in large part attributable to his mother," says Kimura. "What Kumon did was provide a path for them to study math. I would explain it, answer any questions and provide the curriculum. But they followed the path, walking through it together."

Motivation has never been an issue with Junu, his mother recalls.

"He used to wake up in the morning and start doing his worksheets," she says. "He is a perfectionist, though, and when he doesn't solve a problem correctly, he gets frustrated and starts it all over again. He doesn't want my help."

Sonu, who also started Kumon at 3, is a bit more rebellious but also more competitive, his mother says.

"They are only 20 months apart, and Sonu always wants to do everything his older brother is doing," she says.

While many educators in the United States question the premise of exactly what small children, even those such as Junu and Sonu, are doing by learning rapid-fire calculations instead of using math manipulatives to solve pragmatic problems, Kimura is convinced that it instills not only a sense of self-confidence but also an appreciation for the beauty of mathematics.

"Like the Suzuki method of musical instruction, Kumon is based on the premise that children develop the facility to perform certain functions, be it playing violin or doing arithmetic, prior to grasping theoretical foundations," he says. "It also teaches an appreciation for the elegance of the form, the construction of a complex system made of simple components, whether they are musical notes or numbers."

British philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, Kimura says, talked about math as a set of tautologies, or universal truths, that have nothing to do with the real world.

"Since math is a logical world unto itself, with nothing to do with the world, it can be mastered without any knowledge of the world. That is why young children, such as Junu, can master math with only limited experience about the world," Kimura says. "It is only later, when they are more mature, that they can apply that knowledge in 'useful' ways."

In America, Kimura adds, we are always concerned about learning math as a tool: to produce better engineers or scientists, for example. In Japan, math is taught as an end unto itself.

"Everyone who graduates from high school must learn calculus, even janitors," says Kimura. "Educators simply want to teach people an appreciation of the system."

As for the Baes, philosophical considerations have little to do with their involvement in Kumon math.

"We just like to think of it as learning, a form of brain training," says Ty Bae.