19.08 Math Taught the
SPRINGFIELD, New Hampshire, August 19 (by Karin Zeitvogel for RIA Novosti) In a woodland setting on the banks of a New Hampshire lake, the sounds of summer camp waft through the air as counselors sing songs and put on skits, lake water splashes during a morning dip, and theres one more added extra kids take math lessons. But not just any old math instruction, this is math taught the Russian way.
Run by the US-based Russian School of Mathematics, the camp offers the usual activities like arts and crafts, theater, archery, making smores and singing around a campfire, but also 90 minutes of math every day.
The camp was started in 1998 by Russian immigrants Inessa Rifkin and Irina Khavinson, who four years earlier had set up the Russian School of Mathematics (RSM) in Rifkins home in Newton, Massachusetts, an upscale suburb of Boston.
Rifkin was prompted to start the after-school mathematics program by what she calls her terrifying realization that her teenaged son Ilyas level in math was not where she thought it should be as he was about to start high school.
He couldnt grasp simple equations with fractions. He didnt understand the beauty of math, the beauty of learning, Rifkin, who trained as an engineer in the former Soviet Union before emigrating in 1988, told RIA Novosti.
Rifkin started to work one-on-one with her son, using the Russian books that shed learned math with in the Soviet Union, when mathematicians were among the rare academics who were not subjected to state interference or censorship and the discipline was in its heyday in Russia.
