At the tender age of 7, while most kids were learning to ride bikes and play video games, Natalia was pondering early principles of multiplication and algebra two hours per week in her Russian math class.
“I thought my daughter could do more than what she was offered [in school],” her mother, Anna told The Post. The 44-year-old, who did post-grad work at Stanford and is now a data scientist and investor, enrolled Natalia in the Russian School of Mathematics seven years ago, paying $3,000 for the tutoring — on top of $30,000 annually for tuition at an all-girls private elementary school.
“If she wants to be a doctor, an engineer — math will never hurt. Her math will increase the understanding of the world,” said the mom of four who lives in Clyde Hill, Washington. “The sky is the limit.”
The latest must-have for well-to-do parents eager to give their children any and every advantage is Russian math classes. They utilize a method that was developed in the Soviet Union during the Cold War and prioritize reasoning, critical thinking and abstract principles over brute memorization. Companies offering the instruction are seeing a boom in enrollment as wealthy families look to infiltrate the Ivy League.
“Money is the fix for anything,” a 40-year-old Manhattan mom recently told the Cut of hiring a Russian math tutor for her preschooler. She also paid a consultant to help get the child into a top-notch private kindergarten.
The Boston-based Russian School of Mathematics was founded more than 25 years ago by immigrants from Belarus and Ukraine and now boasts more than 70 locations across the US. Its first Manhattan chapter opened in 2017 on the Upper East Side; uptown has since acquired two more offices while additional outposts have popped up in Battery Park, Brooklyn and Scarsdale, NY.
“Growth has been steady,” the school’s director of outreach, Masha Gershman, told The Post.
Kids can enroll as young as age 5.
“Earlier is always better, as with any other type of development,” Gershman said. “Math is a tool to shape how a child thinks.”
The school is quick to note that it has no current ties to Moscow.
“We stand unequivocally with the Ukrainian people against Putin, his regime, and Russia’s war on Ukraine,” a statement on it website reads. “We named our school to reflect the historic tradition of Russian mathematics that we all share. This is a tradition that predates Russia’s current government and will exist long after it.”
Another company, Russian Math Tutors, is considering changing its name due to the ongoing war. But founder Alexander Kolchinsky, who immigrated to the US from the Soviet Union as a child, truly believes the Russian method is superior.
“In American schools they start with the easy problems and work up to the hard problems, where as we start with the hard problems in the beginning of the lesson,” said Kolchinsky, a former Silicon Valley software developer who started his online tutoring platform in 2020. “Then they brainstorm.”
His program introduces algebraic concepts to his third-grade-level pupils. Most American schools don’t teach such ideas until students hit ninth grade.
Some New York City-based teachers, however, are critical of the tutoring.
“The kids [in Russian math] learn how to do the math in their head, and they’re not showing the actual work, so they make careless mistakes. They make it harder for the other kids because they start to ask them these math questions that are not age-appropriate and the other kids feel bad about themselves,” a teacher who works at an Upper West Side private school told The Post anonymously. On top of this, she added, “the parents argue with teachers that their kids can do more advanced work.”
Anna has no issues with her kids doing schoolwork at a more advanced level than their peers. After seeing Natalia’s success, she signed up her younger son, Matthew, when he was 6. He complained about doing math classes at 9 a.m. on Saturdays when his friends were playing sports, but it paid off. Matthew, now 10, was able to skip the third grade.
“I want them to understand that life is not about fun and what’s easy,” she said.
Natalia, now 14, is already gearing up to take the SATs, while her extracurriculars include swimming competitively and playing the piano. Getting into a top-tier college is key, her mother said.
“We definitely would like to try for something a bit higher than a state school.”
