Vedic Maths or Abacus? What we tell parents who ask us at Girish Park

Last Saturday a mother stood at our gate for a good twenty minutes with the same question we hear nearly every week. Her son is in Class 3. The boy upstairs has been going to abacus for a year and can add long columns of numbers frighteningly fast. Should she put her son in abacus too, or in our Vedic Maths batch?

We teach Vedic Maths, so you already know which way we lean. But we try to give parents a straight answer rather than a sales pitch, and that means saying a few kind things about the abacus first. It has earned them.

Two very different tools

The abacus that most Kolkata centres teach is the Japanese soroban: a frame with rods, one bead above the bar and four below. A child learns to push beads to add and subtract, then to multiply and divide. After a year or two of practice, good students stop needing the frame. They picture it, and move imaginary beads in their head. That mental version is what produces the eye-catching speed you see in videos.

Vedic Maths has no object at all. It is a set of sixteen short rules, called sutras, written out by Bharati Krishna Tirtha and published in 1965. Each sutra describes a pattern in the digits themselves. "Vertically and crosswise" tells you how to multiply two-digit numbers in one line. "All from 9 and the last from 10" gets you from 1000 to 1000 − 487 without borrowing. There is nothing to hold and nothing to picture. The method lives inside the number.

Whether those sutras really trace back to the Vedas is argued about by historians, and we don't pretend otherwise. We teach them because they work, not because of the name.

What the abacus does well

Three things, and they're real.

It is tactile. A five-year-old who cannot yet sit still with a notebook will happily flick beads, and the beads make place value physical: this rod is tens, that rod is hundreds. For a very young child that is a gentle way in.

It is superb for long addition and subtraction. If the job is adding a column of twenty three-digit numbers, a trained abacus child will beat almost anyone, including us.

And it builds concentration. Holding a bead picture steady in your head while someone reads numbers out is hard work, and children who do it for a few years tend to focus well in other subjects too.

So no, the abacus is not a waste of money. The question is what happens after Class 5.

Where Vedic Maths pulls ahead

It doesn't run out of road

This is the big one. The abacus is an arithmetic machine. Once a child has mastered add, subtract, multiply and divide, the frame has given everything it has. But school maths is only getting started at that point. Class 6 brings fractions and LCM. Class 7 brings algebra. Class 8 and 9 bring squares, roots and identities. Class 10 and beyond bring the board exams.

The sutras keep going. The rule a Class 4 child uses to square 35 is the same identity she will meet as (a+b)² in Class 8. The crosswise multiplication she learns at nine is exactly how you multiply two binomials at fourteen. Nothing gets thrown away. We have students who learnt their first sutra in Class 2 and are using the same habits in Class 11 trigonometry, because less time lost on arithmetic means more attention for the actual problem.

It agrees with the school textbook

An abacus child does arithmetic in a private language. When the teacher asks her to "show your working" she often cannot, because the working happened on a bead frame nobody else can see. We have had parents tell us their child was marked down for correct answers with no steps.

Vedic sutras are the school method with the slow parts removed. Take multiplying by 11. The sutra says: write the two digits apart, put their sum in the middle. So 26 × 11 = 2 (2+6) 6 = 286. That is just the distributive law, 26 × 10 + 26, folded into one step. A child who learns it understands why it works, can write the standard steps if an examiner wants them, and can check the result in her head in two seconds. Nothing has to be unlearnt.

The child goes home with something on day one

The abacus has a long quiet start. Months of bead-pushing go by before the frame can be put down, and some children lose interest in that stretch. With Vedic Maths the first class ends with a trick the child can perform at the dinner table that same evening. That first "how did you do that?" from a grandparent does more for a child's relationship with numbers than any amount of praise from us.

It carries its own answer check

One of the sub-sutras is about digit sums, what older textbooks call casting out nines. Add the digits of each number, do the sum on those tiny totals, and the result should match the digit sum of your answer. It takes five seconds and catches most slips. We teach it early, and the habit of checking your own work is honestly worth more than the speed.

It needs a pencil, not a kit

No frame to buy, no level books, no grade exams every six months. A notebook and a child who is willing to try. For the families we serve, where a tight budget can decide what a child gets to learn, that matters.

How we keep the classes hands-on

A sutra written on a board and copied into forty notebooks is not Vedic Maths. It is dictation. The method only sticks when the child does the thinking, so almost everything about how we run the batches at Girish Park is built to get the sutra out of our mouth and into their hands.

1. We start with a race, not a rule

   The first thing a new batch sees is a sum on the board, say 98 × 97. The children do it the long way on paper. The teacher does it in their head and writes 9506 before most of them have finished the first row. Then we wait for the question. It always comes. "How did you do that?" is the best possible opening for a lesson, because now they want the rule.

2. Every trick is shown one move at a time

   We never present a finished answer and work backwards. The digits move on the board step by step, and we stop after each step to let a child predict the next one. Our programme page has three of these walk-throughs animated exactly the way we do them in class, with a Next button so a child can go at their own pace. There is one further down this page.

3. The children teach it back

   Once a child has a trick, they stand up and explain it to the rest of the batch, with the teacher sitting at the back. If you can't teach it you haven't quite learnt it, and the explaining child almost always finds the one step they were fuzzy on. The others listen harder to a classmate than to us, too.

4. Games before drills in Classes 1 to 3

   Nobody in our junior batch "practises number bonds". They play a card game where you have to make 10. Skip-counting is done as a circle chant that speeds up every round. Times tables arrive through patterns the children spot themselves, like why the digits of every multiple of 9 add up to 9. The sutras come in only once the number sense is there to hold them.

5. Word problems become number stories

   Bare digits get boring. So the sum becomes the story: a shopkeeper near Girish Park Metro, a bus with 47 seats, a cricket score. The child has to find the sum hiding in the story before applying the sutra, which is exactly the skill exams test.

6. A short quiz every week, a timed drill every month

   From Class 4 up, each week ends with a five-minute mental-maths quiz, marked by the child sitting next to you. Once a month there is a timed speed drill. The children keep their own times and compete with last month's self, not with each other. The digit-sum check is compulsory on every answer before it is handed in.

7. Three bands, so nobody is lost or bored

   Classes 1 to 3, 4 to 6, and 7 to 9 run as separate batches with their own sutras. A Class 2 child learning bonds to 20 is not sitting next to a Class 8 child doing square roots. The class-wise syllabus is on the Girish Park page if you want the full list.

8. Try before you decide

   We built a free online demo, five short lessons with our mascot Mavi, a quiz at the end of each and printable worksheets, so a child can try the method at home before a parent spends a rupee. If you would rather see a real class, the first demo lesson at the centre is free as well. Just call or message us.

I used to take a full minute for big multiplications. With Vedic Maths tricks, I solve them in my head in seconds. My classmates think it's magic!Soham K., Class 6, from our student success stories

Try one now: square any number ending in 5

This is usually the second trick we teach in the Class 4 to 6 batch, and the one children show off most. Press Next and watch it unfold.

Why does it work? Because (10a + 5)² = 100a(a + 1) + 25. A Class 8 child will recognise that. A Class 4 child doesn't need to yet. That is the whole point.

So which one should you choose?

Here is what we told the mother at the gate, and what we would tell you.

If your child is four or five and you want something physical to play with, the abacus is a perfectly good choice. Let them enjoy it.

If your child is in Class 1 or above, and especially if you are already thinking about Classes 9 to 12 and the exams that come with them, Vedic Maths is the better bet. It starts paying off in the first week and it is still paying off ten years later. The abacus, however well taught, stops at long division.

If you can manage both, there's no harm. They don't fight each other. But if you have to choose one, choose the one that grows with the child.

And whatever you pick, pick something. A child who is comfortable with numbers at eight is a child who isn't scared of maths at fifteen. That is really all we are trying to do.

Questions parents ask us