Meet The Buckingham Learning Center That Makes Math Fun

Good news, parents! Math doesn’t have to be scary — and Buckingham’s Mathnasium, a learning center at Peddler’s Village, offers customized tutoring by pinpointing children’s learning needs, meeting them where they are and taking them where they need to go.

How does it do it? Buckingham franchisee Tammy Goldberg explains the Mathnasium Method and how the Buckingham location’s specially trained math instructors transform the way children understand and appreciate math.

Patch: What is the Mathnasium philosophy?

Goldberg: We believe that all children can be taught to think in the ways that natural mathematical thinkers do. We teach our students to use efficient and reliable “schema”– organized ways of thinking – that are innate to the mathematically gifted among us. For many kids, math is something that doesn't come naturally, but they can be taught to think in the ways that the naturals do.

Patch: Tell us about Mathnasium as a franchise and the locations that you own.

Goldberg: Mathnasium is an educational franchise with over 750 learning centers in North America. My husband, Marc, and I own the five Mathnasium centers in Manhattan in addition to our Buckingham location. We have been franchisees since 2008, and we have personally authored 2,000 or more pages of the elementary and middle school curriculum materials that are currently being used in Mathnasium Centers nationwide and abroad.

Patch: What happens inside of a Mathnasium Learning Center?

Goldberg: When you step inside a Mathnasium Learning Center, you will find a positive and motivating environment filled with kids who are excited to learn and are happy to be there. Through excellent instruction driven by top-notch curriculum materials, Mathnasium significantly strengthens their students’ math skills while building confidence and cultivating a positive attitude towards math. At Mathnasium, children grow to not only understand math, but to love it as well!

Patch: Can you tell us a little bit about the initial student assessment and customized learning plan process?

Goldberg: Students begin by taking a highly detailed assessment, which pinpoints their needs based on grade-level standards, allowing us to meet them where they are and take them where they need to go. We then design a customized learning plan that addresses the skills and concepts that need strengthening.

Personalized instruction from Mathnasium’s highly trained and caring instructors and a well-sequenced learning plan ensures that each student fully understands prerequisite concepts before moving on to higher level skills. Our students are given a post-assessment at the end of each learning plan. Our post-assessment scores far exceed the franchise averages across all of our locations. Students are then assessed on the grade-level assessment, and a new learning plan is created.

Patch: What is the most popular service that the center offers?

Goldberg: Our enrichment program is the most popular offering. The Mathnasium Enrichment Program combines individualized instruction with independent work in a semi-private setting. Each instructor works with up to three students at a time as students work within their own customized learning plans. A portion of each session can be used for classwork assignments, if necessary. Enrichment program students attend twice a week for one-hour sessions. Students in our enrichment program may be struggling in school and looking for extra support, average students who are striving to excel or above-average students looking for a challenge.

Patch: What are the benefits of choosing Mathnasium over a private math tutor?

Goldberg: As a former private math tutor in Manhattan, I can tell you that private tutors focus primarily on current school work and there is a tendency for students to become overly dependent on their tutor. This is part of the reason that I started looking into education franchises in 2008. I felt that I was just putting on “band-aids” and could not “stop the bleeding” unless I had the time to dig deeper into prerequisite skill gaps.
Mathnasium focuses primarily on identifying and filling underlying foundational gaps that are likely causing the difficulties with the current school work in the first place.

Our approach and methods build true understanding and mastery instead of just trying to help students on tonight’s homework assignment or tomorrow’s test. Working through our program yields measurable results through utilizing pre and post-assessments. We do provide a level of schoolwork support, but we believe that it is in the student’s long-term best interest to focus primarily on their Mathnasium learning plans. Mathnasium students also get the benefit of the uplifting and fun environment at our learning centers.

Patch: Under what circumstances should parents consider enrolling their child at Mathnasium?

Goldberg: Mathnasium serves kids that range the entire spectrum of math ability, and we propel all of our students to reach new heights that never seemed possible. Typically, parents who are drawn to enrolling their children at learning centers — or hiring private tutors — are those with children in serious need of remediation or are so advanced that they are “bored” in school.

Mathnasium certainly serves many students in both of these circumstances, but perhaps surprisingly, the students that fall in “the middle” make up the majority of our student population in all six of our centers. Oftentimes, the students who gain the most benefit from Mathnasium are those middle-of-the-road students who do not typically get the extra attention that the remedial and advanced students receive in school. Mathnasium provides such a tremendous opportunity for these students to become high achievers in math.

Patch: What is Mathnasium’s take on the current educational climate in the United States?

Goldberg: Today’s children are dealing with an educational system that is in flux, and they are, unfortunately, at the mercy of a few powerful textbook publishers who have filled their textbooks with questionable ways of teaching the loosely defined Common Core Standards. Add to this the pressures of new standardized tests, and you get students who feel defeated and are losing their passion for learning.

Mathnasium takes a refreshing and holistic approach that focuses on each student’s long-term mathematical growth and success. Students at Mathnasium quickly learn that math can be fun and interesting as well as extraordinarily useful, both in terms of succeeding in school and for the valuable life skills it provides.

Patch: Tell us about the Buckingham team. What are the some of the staffers’ backgrounds?

Goldberg: The center is led by our educational director, Kim Ismaili, who grew up in Central Bucks and has a teaching degree from West Chester University. Our instructors are college graduates with the exception of an occasional math education-studying senior in college. They generally have education or math-related degrees, and they have all demonstrated their teaching skills through teaching samples and their mastery of the math content by passing a math test. Several of our staff members are teachers, though some have never taught in a formal classroom setting. We have a few members of the team that are retired and were looking for ways to give back to students and stay connected to their mathematical background. All of our instructors love math and want to help our students to love math too!

Patch: What’s your favorite Mathnasium event?

Goldberg: My favorite event would definitely have to be our Math Fun Night! We get a chance to have fun and let loose with some of our current students as well as show other students what we are all about. Usually, we hold these events a couple times a year, and they are free to attend.

Patch: How can readers contact you or otherwise learn more about Mathnasium?

Goldberg: We can be reached by phone at (215) 302-6174, email at buckingham@mathnasium.com, or you can visit our website. They can also follow us on Facebook and Twitter.

Photo credit: Mathnasium of Buckingham