A Russian solution to US problem

Emigres' formula for math success pays off in Newton
By Scott S. Greenberger

NEWTON - Irene Khavinson loves her new country. So she pauses, staring sheepishly at the table top, before offering her opinion on how mathematics is taught in American schools.

''I hate to say this, but everything is wrong,'' Khavinson finally says in her heavy Russian accent. ''The approach is wrong. It's too easy. It's not connected. They jump from topic to topic, and topics should be connected in math.''

Khavinson taught math for 15 years in what was then Leningrad before immigrating to the United States a decade ago. She shied from teaching here, fearing she'd have trouble managing unruly American students. But now, after stints as an accountant and working at a drapery company, she's back in the classroom - using an Old World approach in an unlikely setting.

The Russian School of Mathematics, in an unassuming white house with blue shutters a block from Newton Centre, has grown rapidly since Khavinson, 50, and another Russian emigre, Inessa Rifkin, 43, launched it three years ago. Starting with only a handful of students, the two now run after-school classes for about 360 students, ages 5 to 17. The children of Russian immigrants make up the bulk of the enrollment.

But at a time when getting children into top colleges has become a suburban obsession, the apparent success of the Russian School's approach - the SAT scores of many of its students are sky-high - has begun to draw the attention of American-born parents. Even though Khavinson and Rifkin advertise only in Russian-language newspapers, they now teach 40 students whose parents aren't Russian, compared with none three years ago.

''The boys would rather play basketball and soccer and do Cub Scouts - and they do all those things. But we told them we thought this was important for their schooling and their ability to get into college. They agreed and now it's fun for them,'' said Kent Lucken, who recently enrolled his sons Alex, 9, and Ryan, 6.

Alex, wearing his Cub Scout uniform at the school one day last week, says he loves that he's already studying algebra - at least five years before he'll get it in public school. Ryan says the Russian School gives him ''fun things to do, like subtraction.''

Khavinson says there's nothing wrong with teaching young children advanced mathematical concepts such as algebra - in fact, she says, it's essential. Khavinson says American schools ask too little of younger children, then dump trigonometry on them in high school.

Russian parents who remember their own schooling agree.

''It was a surprise to me how they jump from doing nothing in middle school to working on a pretty serious level in high school, at least at Newton South,'' said Natalie Gershman, a Russian immigrant whose son Jeff, a freshman at Newton South High School, attends the Russian School.

''It's too much of an expectation change all of a sudden.''

Betty Kantrowitz, a Newton South math teacher, agreed that students who are exposed to advanced concepts at an early age do well later on. But Kantrowitz, who has won three national awards, cautioned against lumping all American math teachers together. And she noted that the Russian School serves a population that is predisposed to success.

''Clearly, the students who go to the Russian School are interested in learning more than what is being presented to them elsewhere,'' said Kantrowitz, who has at least one student who attends the school. ''Motivated children are always easy to teach and easy to stimulate.''

Motivated and engaged parents don't hurt, either. Rifkin recruited Khavinson and launched the school after she realized that her eighth-grade son didn't know that he could add fractions with different denominators. Rifkin, then a software engineer, began tutoring him. Then she added a few of his friends. Soon, the children of Russian immigrants were coming to her in droves (Rifkin didn't need state accreditation to run a tutoring program).

What Americans might imagine as stereotypical Soviet-style discipline isn't evident in Russian School classrooms: Rifkin and Khavinson don't wave pointers menacingly or rap any knuckles. The students sit in rows of desks and raise their hands to answer questions, just as they do in American schools.

But there are some obvious differences. Teachers at the Russian School don't rely on textbooks or teachers' guides - they make up their own problems, so it's easy to speed or slow the curriculum to fit a particular group. And they say they go deeper than just memorizing formulas.

''We don't tell kids, `This is just the formula, remember this,''' Khavinson said. ''We try to discover the formula together, using all our previous knowledge.''

Most important, expectations are exceedingly high.

One night last week, Rifkin asked her class of high-school students how they did on the SAT math section.

''I got 660,'' said one red-headed boy, apparently proud of what is generally considered an excellent score. A perfect score is 800.

But Rifkin wasn't impressed.

''That's very low,'' she said.

Rifkin gave another boy some credit for scoring 720 - considering his age.

''And you're in ninth grade? It's good,'' she said.

Photographs in the school's hallways celebrate the most successful students: ''Rita Rozenblum, SAT IIc 800/800''; ''Levon Margolin, SAT Math, 800/800''; ''Ilya Abyzov, SAT 1580/1600, 11th grade.''

Not bad for the $12.50 an hour parents pay. Younger children attend for an hour one night a week, but older students have twice-weekly, two-hour sessions. Students traveling long distances - some live in New Hampshire - opt for marathon weekend classes of three or four hours.

But the Russian School isn't a mathematics sweatshop.

Rifkin and Khavinson realize their students are first-generation Americans, not Russians, so they tolerate a certain amount of fooling around. The students speak perfect English, wear Green Day T-shirts and flip-flops, and engage in easy banter with their teachers.

They are all-American - but they are immigrant strivers, too.

''At first you kind of resent it,'' said Jeff Gershman, who plays three sports at Newton South. ''But then you make friends there, and you understand that it will help you in the long run.

This story ran on page A01 of the Boston Globe on 5/7/2001.
(c) Copyright 2001 Globe Newspaper Company.

Special math classes helping kids amount to something

It's 11 o'clock on a Sunday morning. In a storefront at a Marblehead strip mall, six students aged 10 to 12 sit at folding tables and stare at math equations handed to them moments before by their teacher. For the next two hours, they will puzzle out dozens of math problems with little assistance.

The students are among the first 35 pupils at the newest satellite branch of the Russian School of Mathematics. The school, which teaches algebra to kids as young as 5, began in founder Inessa Rifkin's Newton kitchen 12 years ago.

At the time, Rifkin believed her son was underachieving and decided to start a small class for teenagers. Eight months later, after more than 100 students were taking her class, she quit her job as a software engineer and decided to open a full-time school to supplement the students' regular school math curriculum.

Today, the school has 1,800 students at its Newton location, a camp in New Hampshire, and branches in Acton, Marblehead, and San Jose, Calif. The North Shore branch opened earlier this month.

"We teach them to think; we don't want to explain anything," said Rifkin, who traces the school's teaching methodology to the Russian development psychologist Lev Semyonovich Vygotsky.

Classes are offered to students in grades K-12, and the tuition is $855 to $2,484 a year. While younger students take two hours of classes a week and have an hour of homework, kids in the seventh grade and older have double that workload.

While teachers assess each student's learning level, students mostly work unassisted, solving problems that integrate two key branches of math - algebra and geometry. Teachers do not sit during class but move from student to student to check their progress. If a student is stuck, the teacher is allowed to give hints until they solve the problem. Students frequently stand at the board and explain their answers to the rest of the class.

While the Marblehead students say they don't mind spending Sunday mornings doing math equations, their parents see the class as an investment in their futures. With the economic downturn and the job market shifting ever more toward technology, parents say mathematics is essential to future careers. And with juniors from the school averaging 770 (out of 800) on their math SAT scores and most graduates going on to prestigious colleges and universities, some parents say it's not too early for students to look for an edge on the future.

"It's a competitive world," said Julia Hersey of Marblehead, who grew up in Russia. Hersey is happy with public schools, but said she enrolled her 11-year-old daughter, Alex, in the program to help her better understand logic. "It's about critical thinking and feeling comfortable and being in an intellectual environment where it's OK to be a geek."

"It could help them excel," added Nancy Buczko of Salem, who sends her 10-year-old daughter, Audrey, to the school. "It'll leave a lot of options open to her so she's in a position to pursue whatever it is she wants down the road."

Rifkin says that 40 years ago American schools taught a more focused math curriculum. Now, she says, teachers have to cover 20 different topics a year, and don't get to algebra until middle school or ninth grade. "The American style has a huge curriculum, which is a mile wide and one inch deep. Ours is not wide, and four inches deep," said Rifkin, who grew up in Minsk and attended the prestigious Minsk Secondary School 50 for mathematics and physics.

Before kids can even read, Rifkin works with kindergartners to count and identify triangles, rectangles, and other shapes. By the end of the year, she says, the kids understand the beginning concepts of algebra.

Rifkin also insists that the program is not selective and anyone can learn to do math. "We cover four to five topics a year, and every topic has about 120 problems. We want the children to have enough time to master each topic," she explained. She chooses specific problems that cover previously learned material that includes addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, and other forms of math. "Every problem requires up to five steps, and most of the steps are from previous problems. We don't have gaps because we're solving our problems that include old material," she said.

Memorization of formulas is discouraged. "We do not ask students to memorize anything they can't prove," said Rifkin.

Christopher Boucher, acting chairman of the Salem State Mathematics Department, agreed that younger elementary school students are capable of learning algebra and geometry. But he questioned whether part of the school's success could be traced to having kids doing extra work in a subject. He also believes after-school programs such as this one draw better students.

"If it's an enrichment program, those kind of programs usually - whether intentionally or not - sort of cherry-pick the best students and the students who have the most interested parents. And these students are likely to do better on the SAT anyway," said Boucher.

But Rifkin said most kids are capable of achieving a high score if they work hard at algebra. As for the SAT, Rifkin believes it's also a matter of focusing on algebra and geometry. "Most of the questions involve simple mathematics. It's international curriculum that's taught in the eighth grade in Russia and Europe," she said, adding that the test is two-thirds algebra and one-third geometry.

Alina Kuznetsov agrees with Rifkin about the necessity of learning algebra at an early age. For the last two years she has tutored her son, Misha, in the subject. Even though Misha, 12, had yet to take an algebra course, Kuznetsov believed her son was ready for the subject.

"What my kids did in fourth grade in public school, Russian kids do in the second grade or even in the first grade," said Kuznetsov, who grew up in Russia.

Misha said he wants to become a doctor when he grows up. "I think I could have learned it when I was much younger. It's hard, but I understand it."

Steven Rosenberg can be reached at srosenberg@globe.com.

Israelis swell ranks of math school

September 29, 2009
By Elise Kigner, Advocate Staff

When children from Israel move to the United States, they find math to be their easiest subject. When American children settle in Israel, they tend to need a year of math tutoring to catch up.

That is the observation of Orly Bejerano, an Israeli whose three daughters, Gal, 11, Dar, 9, and Shai, 7, were born in the United States.

The Natick mother, like many other native Israelis, sends her kids to "math school," after-school and weekend classes at the Metrowest School of Mathematics in Framingham. About 15 percent of the student body is made up of children of Israelis and many others are Jewish as well, according to Principal Anna Charny.

Bejerano said she knows at least 12 Israeli families who each send two or three children to the school.

Since opening in 2003, the school has expanded in enrollment by 30 percent or more each year. After outgrowing its old Framingham location, the school moved around the corner this month to a two-story brick building at 5 Auburn St. The school has 350 students taking one or more classes. It now occupies just one floor, but Charny expects it will eventually take over the second too.

At the opening celebration, guests munched on a Sudoku cake and kids played with a giant chess board. And the ribbon that was cut? A Mobius strip, a mathematical oddity.

The party exemplified how the school makes math fun, while pushing students to learn more than they would in public school alone.

Administrators, teachers and families offered varying reasons— such as the Jewish work ethic and the power of word-of-mouth—for the large Israeli enrollment.

Charny, who was born in Moscow, came to the United States in 1987 after being a refusenik for 10 years.

Besides Israelis, she said, the school has large Indian and Russian contingents and smaller numbers of Chinese and Brazilians.

"The way the demographics work is once a small community starts coming, the word spreads," Charny said, noting that it's not just immigrant groups who are concerned about math education.

"The need for quality math education is widely recognized by the community at large - business people, politicians, the heads of large companies, the educational community," she said.

The Metrowest school is affiliated with the Russian School of Mathematics. The Metrowest school is co-owned by Charny and the co-founders of the Russian School of Mathematics, Inessa Rifkin and Irina Khavinson. All the classes are offered after the public schools let out.

The schools use a curriculum based on the theories of early 20th-century Russian educator Lev Vygotsky. Algebra is introduced as early as kindergarten, and middle school students are encouraged to take the SATs.

The first Russian School of Mathematics branch, which is in Newton, has more than 1,700 students. The Marblehead branch enrolls about 60, while 220 attend the Acton school, which now in its second year has tripled its enrollment. The school also has a branch in Santa Clara, Calif., where Khavinson is the principal.

Immigrant families account for 40 to 50 percent of those sending students to the Greater Boston schools, said Rifkin.

Rifkin estimated that at her Newton school more than half the students are Jewish.

While she didn't have figures, Rifkin said she can tell the school is drawing more Israelis. She said when the parents talk, their "hands are everywhere."

Rikin, who is Russian, started the school in her dining room in 1997 as a way to give her son and daughter a supplementary math education. She saw low math standards in the public schools, even in Newton. She quit her full-time job as a senior software engineer, and began teaching math after school in her home with Khavinson. They began the year with 10 students and ended with 60.

Rifkin's children are now in their 20s, and both have jobs on Wall Street. She said she never expected the schools to become as successful as they now are.

"When I quit my full-time job, I was pretty sure I was doing a mitzvah for my kids," she said. "Now, I realize they did a mitzvah for me"

This summer, The Russian School of Mathematics received a "2009 Best of Newton" award from the US Commerce Association in the after-school programs category.

The Newton school charges between $900 and $2,556 for one year of a class; classes meet one to four hours each week. The schools employ 60 part-time and full-time teachers.

Lessons From the Russian School of Mathematics

By Melanie Smollin, Education Editor, Takepart.com

I recently spent a long weekend in Mass visiting a couple of friends and their two children.  Their 6 year old son is gifted (is it OK to say gifted? Not p.c.? What’s a good word for a first grader who’s enjoyed reading chapter books to himself for years and loves to add sets of three-digit numbers in his head for fun?) 

Anyhow, his parents are concerned that he isn’t receiving enough stimulation in his public school classroom, and are considering extra programs to enrich his learning.  His father mentioned that an after-school program called the Russian School of Mathematics seems to be all the rage, and I made a mental note to myself to check it out.  It so happens that the Boston Globe just featured an article about said school which appears to have a lot of lessons to teach about math education – and I don’t just mean to its students. 

First, the skinny on the school:  The school began 12 years ago when founder Inessa Rifkin decided to start her own math class for her son and his teenage friends who were underachieving.  The school has since grown to include 1,800 K-12 students at its location in Newton, Mass, as well as branches in two other cities in Mass, one in San Jose, Calif., and a summer camp in New Hampshire.

Up until 7th grade, kids take classes for 2 hours per week and do an hour of homework  Older kids do double the work.
I’ve said before that the key to reform in education is where the rubber meets the road: the interface between teachers and students.  What impresses me most about the school is its approach to curriculum and pedagogy.  Teachers assess each student’s level, and then assign problems that build upon previously learned material and become progressively more complex.  So children can’t move forward until they’ve mastered earlier material, and there are no gaps in their learning.  In addition, knowledge is not delivered to students via lessons from teachers but constructed by students themselves who spend class time puzzling through problems while teachers circulate among them to monitor progress and help them through rough patches without feeding them answers.  Memorization of formulas is discouraged - when children learn something, they truly understand it.  As far as curriculum goes, depth is the name of the game – not breadth.  Students focus on 4-5 topics per year with a strong emphasis on algebra and geometry. 

I’m not surprised that the school successfully teaches basic algebra concepts to children as young as 5 years old – not all of whom are as gifted (?) as my friend’s son – and that Rifkin insists that all children can learn to do math well. I think this building-block approach to learning that lets children build progressively on what they already know, challenges them to construct knowledge, and encourages them to think for themselves, is the key to educating all children well. Further, I wish this depth vs. breadth approach could be incorporated into President Obama’s call for national standards and better assessments.  Why is American curriculum, as Rifkin says, “a mile wide and one inch deep”?  What if assessments could measure deeper learning of fewer concepts?  Wouldn’t our kids be better off? 

Melanie Smollin
Originally posted on Takepart.com

RSM Principal is quoted

Wednesday, November 28, 2007
Ms. Rifkin is quoted in Newton Tab article by By Chrissie Long
"Results put focus on math and science"