Anonymous
map-marker Kuala Lumpur, Kuala Lumpur

Kumon may actually damage your child's way of doing maths

Kumon has this disastrous method of giving you sheet after sheet of homework to make you good at maths. This in my opinion is useful for younger kids to give them a head start because they do not need to use calculators and Kumon does not allow you to use calculators. However, Kumon still brings this 'more worksheets equals more learning' mentality into the advanced level which just doesn't work. The employees can't explain how the questions are done and just give wrong worksheets back to your child and expect them to get it right just after they did it wrong. Kumon is also an arithmetic program, not mathematic. They only teach you to calculate without assistance, and this will not work out well for your child in school where there are many problem solving questions and question-in-questions which involve calulators and methods which differ from Kumon. Your school actually explains how to solve equations for example, but Kumon just shows a few example answers and starts giving you variations which sometimes are really hard and were not explained properly. Kumon also does not follow school methods of teaching because arithmetic methods have to use other ways of calculating mathematical equations which make using the things you learn in Kumon hard to implement in school. If you know a kid who is successful in Kumon and doing good in school exams he/she is probably just in level G and below. We have a quarterly magazine which highlights students' achievements. Most kids who get interviewed are very young and i have never seen a student on the magazine that is a level O or M, because most of these students are just average in school because the school can teach what Kumon teaches just as well, if not better. Your child will not need extra tuition like Kumon. Do not waste 100 dollars a month to get fed repetitive, boring, soul sucking work that does not reward your child in any way. The only good thing i can say about Kumon is it's advanced learning technique. You can progress past your school level in a year or two and can be doing quadratic graphs at the age of eleven. But this method also has its drawbacks as your child will probably forget what he learnt long ago.
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Reason of review:
Bad quality

Preferred solution: Change how Kumon teaches and the way they feed knowledge to students

1 comment
Guest

Kumon program messed up my child's brain and gave her mental problems.

Anonymous

Only useful in early years(6 years of experience)

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I am a Kumon student currently doing level N and progressing to the last level O, in maths. I can say that Kumon did help me in the early levels and years when I was in primary school, where the only hard things were division and fractions here and there. Kumon really falls out when you go to advanced levels like I or M. Kumon's main method of getting students to learn is through brute force. They bombard you with many variations on a single question or concept, and expect you to learn and use it correctly. This is useful if you are very bad at mathematics, and can't properly divide large numbers. Kumon helps you with constantly giving questions based on a single formula/concept, which will help you do improve over time. But the pros basically end there. Brute force really isn't a practical way to 'teach' students at a higher level. For example, you wouldn't expect a student to solve Maxima and Minima problems by just showing them basic formulas and principles and letting them fend for themselves. I have personally experienced this myself, when I just couldnt solve a problem at level K and all the instructors at my centre could not as well. This probably gives you a perspective on how hard the questions Kumon gives to teenagers-children which the franchise claims the children will be able to solve with relative ease. Kumon also has this brilliant idea of charging an exorbitant amount of money just to hand you paper worksheets with maths problems on them. Where I study Kumon, there are instructors who mark your work for you and teach you so the cost is partly justifiable, but I know for a fact that there are some centres who tell parents to mark their own child's work! Kumon really suffers when it comes to school work. My mom has always questioned why I never excelled in my school maths exams when I was 2 years ahead of my school level in kumon. The thing is, Kumon doesn't really follow any syllabus. Yes, you would know how to solve simultaneous equations easily but would you know that you were supposed to apply this method when a simultaneous equation is changed into a word question? Probably not. I have encountered this multiple times in my maths exams, where I was really good at solving unknowns for equations in Kumon but I didn't understand the word version in school. Kumon is basically pure maths but on an easier level. Pure maths doesn't really take into account real world usage of maths. A question in a Kumon worksheet would follow something along the lines of : Using the Quadratic Formula shown above, solve the following questions. 1)Solve 6x2-7x-3=0 Answer : 7 However, a question on a school test utilising the exact same formula would sound like : 1)A garden measuring 12 meters by 16 meters is to have a pedestrian pathway installed all around it, increasing the total area to 285 square meters. What will be the width of the pathway? Answer : 1.5 metres. Tell me, which question would be easier to solve? Would you even know that the second question uses the Quadratic Formula? Do you even know what the Quadratic Formula is? Well, I had to learn this when I was just 13 or 14. I am now 15. These flaws of Kumon are why I think parents should not let their children continue long-term with the company. Its really great to let him be enrolled for a year to two to get an advantage, but its honestly suffering for the child. The child must complete a worksheet a day (with varying numbers of pages, level A-D would have a set 5-10 pages to complete which are double sided, meaning up to 20 pages of questions a day), within the set time limit usually an hour, with no breaks even on holidays. Kumon may require you to go to the centre every week even though its a holiday or its the year end holidays. I have been in the programme since 2012 and I have probably done more than 25,000 pages, with an average of 6 pages every day since I started without fail every day. If this isn't killing your child and robbing his/her freedom, I dont know what is. Again, do not ignore Kumon completely. Send your child when he/she is young and get them to learn the basics, then pull them out once they reach the levels of F or G. School takes over at that point. Thank you for reading my personal 6 years and counting of experience with the company.
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Cons:
  • Does not focus on problem solving skills
Reason of review:
Bad quality
1 comment
Guest

As a victim of being at Kumon, I couldn't agree more. I didn't even need help at school; I was just dragged along by my folks with no consideration of my feelings, and it seems I'll be thrown right back in (I got a 'B' in maths, not an 'A', haha) and yeah, after F and G it's pretty useless.

Anonymous
map-marker Port Dickson, Negeri Sembilan

MALAYSIA NEGERI SEMBILAN PORT DICKSON

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the teacher named LUNA CHONG, angry of her student without reasons and talk loudly to student.
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Anonymous
map-marker Kuala Lumpur, Kuala Lumpur

Don't let your children to come to KUMON

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OKAY , now i have to tell you guys. KUMON is a center which is obviously ***. My nephew has been go to KUMON like 1/2 years , he didn't learned anything from KUMON. KUMON was just given my nephew that *** and useless homework. The homework was same by every week , the big problem is KUMON didn't change the chapter. otherwise , my nephew told me that the KUMON teacher didn't teach him. they just simply teach my nephew , they didn't care either my nephew is understand or not. please don't let your children go to KUMON anymore. It's will destroy your children's study. whatever who sees this please share it and tell your friends or family that.
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Cons:
  • Equipment quality
Reason of review:
Poor customer service
2 comments
Guest

My son was was behind in math in forest grade. We put him in kumom for reading and math.

We also have two other children 2 years apart. We also put them in kumom at the same time. It took 9 months to start seeing the improvement.

My youngest daughter started kindergarten doing two digit addition. My son and my other daughter are now ahead of their class in math.

Guest

Maybe you should go to Kumon because the grammar in this comment is horrendous.

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