The Needs We Address
With the wide range of math levels and learning styles in a class of 10 or more students, it’s extremely challenging for a teacher to individualize the lessons and teaching style for everyone. Students learn the best when they work on appropriately challenging problems; otherwise, they get bored or frustrated and their learning suffers. Further, as every student learns differently, large classes which use canned lesson plans and lack individualized teaching often yield suboptimal learning results.
While numerous after-school math programs exist in the market, they are often too large in class size, too rigid with canned lesson plans, too mechanical with mostly drills, or offered in the less engaging online format convenient for the teachers but not optimal for the students. None provides the core elements of an optimal math learning experience - individualized, social, and in-person learning in tiny classes guided by compassionate expert instructors focusing on developing problem-solving minds beyond procedural fluency. Learn about the virtues of artisanal math education in this blog.
The off-campus learning centers also require families to shuttle their children during busy work days, which is inconvenient for many parents.
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Cogito ergo sum. (I think, therefore I am.) If you would be a real truth seeker, it is necessary that at least once in your life you doubt, as far as possible, all things.
Rene Descartes
Mission and Philosophy
Descartes Learning Club’s raison d'être is to develop problem-solving minds and inspire a lifelong love for learning through world-class math and logic education, fostering investigation and tailored to each student's unique needs, all within a nurturing and playful environment.
We stay true to our mission in the tradeoff choices we make:
We offer a tiny class size of 2-4 students for our platinum tier, 5-6 students for our gold tier, and 7-8 students for our silver tier, even though larger class sizes of ten or more students are more profitable.
We don’t compromise the quality of our instructors for the speed of business growth or profits. Our instructors must demonstrate strong math backgrounds, communicate well, and love teaching children with genuine compassion. We further invest in rigorously training and coaching them on an ongoing basis.
While online classes are easier to scale and often cost less to produce, we focus on in-person classes to build human bonds, engage students’ multiple senses, and thus optimize the students’ learning results.
We customize our curriculum, lesson plans, and teaching styles based on the students’ needs and real-time progress, even though scaling a rigid cookie-cutter operation with canned lesson plans is simpler.
Finally, we do so without inconveniencing parents by offering our program at the students’ daytime schools through school partnerships even though it's often operationally easier to manage fewer locations.
To Bring Our Program To Your Child’s School
Beatrice Pang
Founder
Beatrice has been an entrepreneur, executive, and education enthusiast. Previously, she was the CFO of a technology company in the healthcare space - Trusted Health. She has also co-founded and sold two e-commerce businesses (True&Co and ModeWalk), led finance and operations at venture-funded growth-stage technology companies Wonolo and Tempo Interactive, and worked on mergers & acquisitions at Microsoft and Merrill Lynch.
She holds a BA in Economics from Colorado College, where she graduated with the highest GPA in its Economics Department, and a Master of Business Administration from Stanford Graduate School of Business.
Before coming to the US, Beatrice studied for one year, majoring in Applied Mathematics, at Tsinghua University, a top university for science and engineering in China. Due to her passion for education, she has also taken graduate-level early childhood education courses.
Beatrice lives in San Francisco with her husband and son.
Lexing is a professor of mathematics at Stanford University. He received a B.S. from Shanghai Jiaotong University in 1998 and a Ph.D. from New York University in 2004.
Before joining Stanford in 2012, he was a post-doc at Caltech and a professor at UT Austin. He received a Sloan Fellowship in 2007, an NSF Career Award in 2009, the Fengkang Prize in 2011, the James H. Wilkinson Prize in 2013, and the Silver Morningside Medal in 2016. He was an invited speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians 2022.
Lexing Ying
Advisor
Xiaomin Chen
Xiaomin teaches Combinatorics as a guest lecturer at Shanghai Jiaotong University, a top university for science and engineering in China.
Xiaomin has also coached the Chinese IMO (International Mathematical Olympiad) team, recently winning numerous international gold medals.
Since 2018, Xiaomin has organized the Semicircle Math Club in China. Students from the club have won 9 IMO (International Mathematical Olympiad) gold medals and one IOI (International Olympiad in Informatics) gold medal and published two journal papers.
Xiaomin holds a B.S. in Computer Science from Shanghai Jiaotong University and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Rutgers University.
Advisor
Our Values
Excellence
Aristotle said, “We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit.” We relentlessly pursue excellence in everything we do and instill this as a habit in our students.
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Curiosity
The most lasting gift we can give our students is a deep curiosity and a lifelong love for learning. Our classes inspire the joy of learning, build the courage to question and develop self-driven minds.
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Compassion
Students learn the best in a psychologically safe environment full of love and free of judgments. We understand how children’s brains differ from adults’ and how novices learn. We work with children as their partners and always look at the world from their eyes.
Get in touch with us
Whether you are interested in enrolling a child in our program at one of our locations, introducing our program to a school as an extracurricular program, or simply learning more about our program, please fill out the form below. We will get back to you shortly.
If you are interested in working for DLC, please apply at this link. Thank you.