Inside SOMATH 2026: A Founder’s Tour of Our Membership, Schedule & 24-Class Syllabus

If you only have 60 seconds, here’s the short version. SOMATH (School of Math) is a small-group math school on the Upper West Side at 226 W 79th Street. In 2026 we run on a monthly Membership model that lets your child start any week, in one of 12 leveled programs, on a 24-class cycle that restarts every 6 months. Same instructor, same room, same rate. The video above is a tour through our website — what each page does and how the pieces fit together — so parents can decide whether SOMATH is the right fit before they ever pick up the phone.

The opening: twenty years preparing students for MIT and Stanford

The tour starts on our homepage with a line we don’t say lightly: Twenty years preparing students for MIT and Stanford. Now we teach it to your child. SOMATH was founded by two educators who spent two decades preparing more than 3,000 students for admission into MIT, Harvard, and Stanford’s graduate programs. In 2024 we brought that same method home to New York and turned it into a neighborhood math school for grades 1–12 — including SHSAT, AMC 8, SAT, and the full AP math track.

That’s the through-line of the whole site. Every page — Membership, Schedule, Programs, Team — is just a different angle on the same idea: a structured, hand-built curriculum, taught in small in-person cohorts, by instructors who’ve actually done this work at the top of the field.

Membership — the new way to start math at SOMATH

The biggest change in 2026 is how families enroll. We moved from semester-based registration to a monthly Membership. The hero on /membership reads “Start math any week”, and that is the point.

Here’s how it works in plain terms:

• Pick a tier. Plans start at $246/month for once-a-week Little Newtons classes and scale up from there. Same ~$61/hr SOMATH instructor rate at every K–8 tier.
• Start any week. No waiting for September. Your child takes a free 60-minute evaluation, gets a written diagnostic, and is placed into the right leveled cohort within days.
• Pay monthly. Simple monthly billing — no upfront lump sum required.
• Pause when life shifts. Up to 4 weeks of free pause per year — for travel, illness, or a heavy school stretch.
• Cancel with 15 days’ notice. No long-term contract. No early-termination fee. You’re billed for the remaining 15 days and it stops.
• Sibling discount. $30/mo off for every additional child.
• Make-ups built in. One free make-up session per month if life gets in the way.

Membership replaces the “pay-per-semester” model that most NYC enrichment programs still use — the rigid, all-or-nothing commitment that punishes families when a school trip, illness, or a strong week of basketball gets in the way. We wanted a model that respects the realities of an NYC school year.

The weekly schedule at 226 W 79th St

The schedule page is the single most useful page on the site. Open it and you’ll see one continuous grid: Monday through Sunday, hour by hour, every cohort that meets at 226 W 79th St.

A few things worth pointing out:

• Weekdays are 3:00–10:00 PM — structured around after-school. Younger programs are early; AP and SAT prep run late.
• Saturday is 9:00 AM–6:00 PM, Sunday 10:00 AM–5:00 PM. Weekend cohorts exist for every program in case midweek doesn’t work.
• Every program meets in person at one address. 226 W 79th St, 1st Floor. No commuting between locations, no Zoom workarounds.
• Make-ups are arranged. If your child misses a session, the schedule itself is the menu of valid make-up slots that week.

In the walkthrough you’ll see the grid annotated — circling that the cycle is 24 classes, that classes run on a 6-month rhythm, and that we hold roughly 4 cohort-meetings per week per program so families always have a fit.

12 leveled programs, grades 1–12

SOMATH is not one tutor who teaches everyone the same thing. We run 12 distinct, leveled programs — each with its own age range, its own pace, and its own 24-class syllabus:

• Little Newtons (Grades 1–2) — number sense and operations foundation.
• Little Newtons (Grades 2–3) — multi-digit fluency, intro to fractions.
• Kid Einsteins (Grades 3–4) — multiplication/division fluency, first pass at fractions, word problems.
• Kid Einsteins (Grades 4–5) — advanced fractions, decimals, proportionality, pre-algebra readiness.
• Young Fermats Pre-Algebra (Grades 5–6) — integers, variables, expressions, ratios, percents.
• Young Fermats Algebra I (Grades 6–8) — equations, inequalities, systems, functions.
• Young Fermats Geometry & Trigonometry (Grades 8–10) — proofs, similarity, right-triangle trig.
• SHSAT Prep (Grades 7–8) — the four math sections, computer-adaptive practice, full-test pacing.
• SAT Prep (Grades 10–12) — full math content review and section strategy.
• AP Pre-Calculus (Grades 9–12).
• AP Calculus AB / BC (Grades 10–12).
• AP Statistics (Grades 10–12).

Every student is placed by a SOMATH lead instructor after their evaluation — not by grade level on paper. A strong 5th-grader who’s ready for Pre-Algebra goes into Pre-Algebra. A 7th-grader who’s still shaky on fractions starts in Kid Einsteins and accelerates from there.

The 24-class syllabus — what each cycle actually looks like

This is the part of the walkthrough most parents tell us they’ve never seen at a math program before. Every one of our 12 leveled programs has its full 24-class syllabus published on the programs page. Click any program and you’ll see exactly what your child will cover, class by class, from class 01 to class 24.

For example, Young Fermats Pre-Algebra runs:

• Classes 01–04 — integers, the number line, absolute value, ordering, adding/subtracting integers, multiplying/dividing integers, order of operations.
• Classes 05–08 — variables, algebraic expressions, the distributive property, one-step equations, evaluating and combining like terms.
• Classes 09–12 — one- and two-step equations, word problems, inequalities, graphing on the number line, solving one-step inequalities.
• Classes 13–16 — ratios and rates, proportions, cross-multiplication, the three percent problem types, percent increase and decrease.
• Classes 17–20 — fractions/decimals/percents fluency, exponents, scientific notation, square roots, the coordinate plane.
• Classes 21–24 — slope as rate of change, geometry preview (angles, triangles, Pythagorean theorem), statistics (mean/median/mode/range), full Algebra I readiness review.

Every program is published the same way. AP Calculus has its 24 classes mapped from limits through Taylor series. AP Statistics has all four College Board units mapped from exploring categorical data to inference for regression slope. SHSAT Prep has its 24 classes mapped from the four math question types to full timed practice tests.

Why publish it? Because nobody should be paying for a math class they can’t see. Parents deserve to know what their child is learning, in what order, and what skills they should be carrying home each week.

Why we built it this way

If you sat through the full nine minutes of the video, you’ve heard the same word more than once: structure. SOMATH is structured, not improvised — and that is the explicit choice we made when we built the school.

The honest truth is that most NYC math help falls into one of two buckets. Either it’s a worksheet stack at a chain that runs your child through the same packet they ran the kid before through. Or it’s a private tutor who’s warm and well-intentioned but is improvising lesson-by-lesson because they don’t have a curriculum behind them.

We wanted neither. We wanted a real math school: small cohorts, a real syllabus, the same instructor every week, written feedback to parents, and a path that takes a child from 1st grade arithmetic all the way through AP Calculus BC and AP Statistics — one structured cycle at a time. That’s what you’ll see if you tour the site for yourself.

Parent FAQ

Do we have to wait for a semester to start?

No. Every SOMATH program runs on a rolling 24-class cycle that restarts every 6 months, so your child can start any week of the year. They’re placed at their actual level after a free 60-minute evaluation, complete the remaining classes in the current cycle, and continue into the next one.

What is the difference between Membership and what we used to do?

Before 2026 we ran on semester registration: families paid per semester, locked into a fixed start date, and a child who joined late was simply behind. Membership flips that — it’s monthly, it’s start-any-week, and it includes pauses, make-ups, sibling discounts, and progress notes by default.

Are the instructors really Harvard- and Northwestern-trained?

Yes. Every SOMATH instructor is personally vetted before stepping into a classroom — same teacher every week, so your child builds real rapport instead of meeting a rotating cast of strangers.

How much does it cost?

Plans start at $246/month for once-a-week Little Newtons classes. Standard rates are ~$61/hour for K–8 programs, $80/hour for SAT Prep, and $100/hour for AP courses. Sibling discount of $30/month per additional child applies across every tier.

How do we book an evaluation?

Go to schoolofmath.us/evaluation or call (646) 668-6151. The evaluation is free, takes 60 minutes, and you’ll receive a written diagnostic within 48 hours — even if you decide not to enroll.