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Ly Thi Dieu, a mother in District 6 in HCM City, said that she decided to send the son to a mathematical thinking class. “They do not set up any fixed programs that children have to fulfill during a certain period. Therefore, my son does not feel the pressure of racing with his friends,” she said about the education curriculum.
“The most interesting thing of the class is that teachers here always smile to children and they never storm at children,” she added. “I decided to bring my son to the class not because I want him to become a math talent, but because I want him to have interesting lessons”.
Nguyen Thi Mai in district 3 in HCM City also said that her daughter is studying at a center, where the girl follows a curriculum from Malaysia. “I attended a lesson and I believe the lesson was very interesting. Children felt at ease when making familiar with numerals,” she said.
What are they – mathematical thinking centers?
As a lot of such centers have been established recently, the centers have to compete with each other to lure learners. Therefore, all the centers have been trying to advertise themselves as the best center in Vietnam.
K center, established in 2006, is providing the special mathematics teaching to the children aged from three to 12. The curriculum applied at the center has been designed by a Japanese. In Vietnam, K has nine branches with more than 8000 learners. Being a famous brand, the center has been attracting the special attention from parents, despite the high tuitions of 30 dollars a month
The main principle pursued by K center is that teachers never compare these students with other students.
The training courses at M center target primary school students and kindergarten children with “First Steps” curriculum. Applying the teaching method developed by an US professor – Larry Martinek – over the last 35 years, M center commits to help children develop their logical thinking through mathematics, and help them become clever, dynamic and self-confident, which can help them settle their problems in their lives themselves.
Here, at the center, tuitions are collected according to service packages, about 2.1 million dong for three months and 7,560,000 dong per year. Besides, every student also has to pay the enrolment fee of 300,000 dong.
The intelligence center U in Binh Thanh District has also affirmed that the children following its training curriculum can quickly improve their retention, imagination, and high-speed calculating capability thanks to the intellectual abacus. The curriculum here is designed for the children aged from four to 12.
Meanwhile, an officer of V mathematical talent academy in district 10 said students of the academy follow a US developed curriculum, affirming that considerable improvement in students’ capability can be seen just after three months of learning. The tuitions here hover around 1.5 million (12 weeks of learning) and 5.4 million dong (48 weeks), not including the enrolment fee of 200,000 dong.
Besides the special curriculums carried out with special teaching methods, centers are also offering extra help to the students who are bad at mathematics. At K, for example, a teacher takes care for one student. At V, if students do not understand the lessons at the classes, teachers will apply different methods to help them.
Commenting about the movement of going to mathematical thinking classes, Dr Dang Duc Trong, Dean of the Mathematics Faculty of the HCM City University for Natural Sciences, said that Vietnamese parents want their children to follow the training courses partially because the centers can provide the things that are still lacking at schools.
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