Singapore Math
By Bob
The Hoover Institute's Hoover Digest has an article taling about Singapore Maths lack of adoption in the U.S. It is interesting how little attention has been paid to the tiny city-state's math ciriculum considering they are the world's top scorers. My guess is, as the article suggests, that our math teachers are resistant because of their poor math skills and the differences in the way its taught. There aren't a lot of pretty pictures in the Singapore Maths books:
Unlike many American math textbooks, such as Math Thematics, published by Houghton Mifflin, which are thick, multicolored, and multicultural, Singapore’s books are thin and contain only mathematics. There are no graphics (other than occasional cartoons pertaining to the lesson at hand), no spreadsheet problems, and no problems asking students to use a calculator to find the mean number of dogs in a U.S. household. With SM, students are required to show their mathematical work, not explain in essays how they did the problems or how they felt about them. While a single lesson in a U.S. textbook might span two pages and take one class period to go through, a lesson in a Singapore textbook might use five to ten pages and take several days to complete. The Singapore texts contain no narrative explanation of how a procedure or concept works; instead, there are problems and questions accompanied by pictures that provide hints about what is going on. According to the AIR report, the Singapore program “provides rich problem sets that give students many and varied opportunities to apply the concepts they have learned.”At the end of the article, it notes that people in Washington state are pushing for it to be adopted state wide. If they do it, hope they do it right and not let it be sabotaged by the forces that be.
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