

Miracle Math (2006) - frossie
http://educationnext.org/miracle-math/

======
tokenadult
I have used the Singapore Math materials for all of my four children. My
oldest has been a state champion on AMC tests and a member of our state's ARML
"A" team. Most of the best students in my weekend supplemental math classes
got their grounding in math through the Singapore Primary Mathematics series.

I have to strenuously disagree with yet another stupid comment from an
American schoolteacher about international comparions in education, quoted in
the submitted article:

"Gail Burrill, a former president of the NCTM, suggests quite bluntly that the
success of Singapore Math cannot be imported. 'These are books used by a
different culture, a culture that is more homogeneous, and a culture that has
a consistent way of thinking about mathematics.'"

To call Singapore "more homogenous" than the United States, in an
educationally relevant sense, is beneath contempt. Singapore's population
consists of a minority of Malay people descended from the historically
earliest inhabitants of that region, and a majority of ethnic Chinese
inhabitants who are mostly the descendants of indentured plantation workers.
But there are also descendants of Indian plantation workers. In fact,
Singapore is the only country in the WORLD that has four different official
languages (English, Modern Standard Chinese, Malay, and Tamil) from four
different language families, and people born in my generation most likely
spoke NONE of those languages at home, being predominantly speakers of other
Sinitic languages (or possibly other Indian languages) not mutually
comprehensible with the official languages, and certainly not cognate with
English, the sole language of school instruction. Singapore's achievement in
school math instruction is as if we suddenly switched the language of
instruction in the United States to Arabic but expected all pupils to keep up
with school instruction.

But, yes, sigh, the Singapore Math materials are hard for United States
elementary teachers to use, because they mostly don't know even very
elementary arithmetic.

<http://www.ams.org/notices/200502/fea-kenschaft.pdf>

"The understanding of the area of a rectangle and its relationship to
multiplication underlies an understanding not only of the multiplication
algorithm but also of the commutative law of multiplication, the distributive
law, and the many more complicated area formulas. Yet in my first visit in
1986 to a K-6 elementary school, I discovered that not a single teacher knew
how to find the area of a rectangle."

~~~
frossie
I agree about the homogeneous culture comment - even if it was true (which I
accept your point that it isn't) I still don't understand what "a culture that
has a consistent way of thinking about mathematics" means!

You have expressed some views on education in the past that I find very
interesting. I would really like to ask more but I am guessing this is not the
forum. If you don't mind being pestered please drop me an e-mail, my address
is in my profile.

------
frossie
For those who find this too long, I suggest you skip to the "Bar none" graphic
insert about 2/3 of the way down.

I would be interested if anybody here would defend the "Guess and Check"
method, because personally I find it a terrible way to teach math (though I
grew up in a system that taught Math more along the lines of the Singapore
system, so I may be biased).

