The essence of mathematics lies in its freedom
– Georg Cantor (1845-1918) German mathematician
SINGAPORE is a country that takes the Internet seriously.
Last week, its Ministry of Defence granted a deferment for the country’s compulsory National Service to a Singaporean teenager so he could finish competing in the finals of the World Cyber Games, the Olympics of online war games.
For a tiny city-state of six million, Singapore is obsessed with nurturing every ounce of talent of every citizen.
I see this firsthand.
Even as an expat, I have the privilege of serving on a sub-committee of the International Advisory Panel (IAP), which advises the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) —their version of Bank Negara Malaysia (BNM)— on financial sector reforms and strategy.
And it’s not just gaming or banking where Singapore is pushing the envelope.
Although its fourth and eighth graders already scored at the top of the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) tests, Singapore has been adding a more liberal touch to its education system.
Its government understands that in a flattening world, where more and more jobs can go anywhere, it’s not enough to stay ahead of neighbours only.
It has to stay ahead of everyone including us.
It is not racing us to the bottom. It is racing us to the top.
Instead of cutting wages, slashing regulations, or lowering standards to stay competitive, Singapore is betting on innovation, higher wages, better standards and superior outcomes.
In other words, it is playing to win — on its term.
As Clare Johnstone, principal of Stamford American International School (SAIS) put it to me, Singapore has got rote learning down cold.
No one is going to out-drill its students.
What its school is now focusing on is how to develop more of STEM’s strengths: getting Singaporean students and teachers to be more innovative and creative.
Numerical skills are still king but it is also encouraging its students to think beyond equations while also giving teachers more freedom to experiment.
The classrooms have been loosening up and allowing people to grow their ideas.
They have shifted the emphasis from content alone to making use of the content on the principle that knowledge can be created in the classroom and doesn’t just have to come from the teacher.
Gone are the days when the teacher was the “smartest guy in the room,” simply pouring information into students’ heads.
I wish I had grown up in this kind of system.
Back in my additional math classes, I had a habit of fact-checking and challenging my teachers.
That wasn’t exactly encouraged.
In those days, questioning the teacher was seen as ‘kurang ajar’—rude, even disrespectful.
The expectation was simple: follow the steps and get full marks.
As a result, I struggled with that.
Frustrated with my efforts kept getting shut down, I started skipping school.
Singapore, however, is taking a different approach.
Some of its schools have adopted a math teaching programme called AwesomeMath, developed four years ago by two Goldman Sachs quants in collaboration with Columbia University’s Infinity Mathematics Project (IMP).
With a team of math and education specialists, the AwesomeMath group said to itself: If you were a parent anywhere in the world and you noticed that Singapore kids, or Indian kids or Chinese kids, were doing well in math, wouldn’t you like to see the best textbooks, teaching and assessment tools, or the lesson plans that they were using to teach fractions to fourth graders or quadratic equations to 10th graders?
And wouldn’t it be nice if one company then put all these best practices together with animation tools, and delivered them through the Internet so any teacher in the world could adopt or adapt them to his or her classroom? That’s AwesomeMath.
No matter what kind of school their kids go to, parents all over the world are worried that their kids might be missing something.
For some, it is the right rigour and for some, it is creativity.
There is no perfect system.
What they have tried to do is create a platform for the continuous sharing of the best practices for teaching math concepts.
So a teacher might say: ‘I have a problem teaching congruence to 14-year-olds. What is the method they use in India or Shanghai?”’
Singaporean math textbooks are top-notch, but they’re pretty static— lots of numbers, not much in the way of illustrations or animations.
My kids’ school, Dwight in New York, uses them.
I popped by recently to cheer on them, their schoolmates, and their teachers taking part in MathWOOT, an advanced Olympiad training programme co-organised with AwesomeMath, several Wall Street banks and the US Embassy in Singapore.
It runs until February 19.
What sets AwesomeMath apart is that the lessons apply animated visuals to remove the abstraction underlying concepts, provide interactivity for students to understand concepts in a hands-on manner and make connections to real-life contexts so that learning becomes relevant.
Its mission is to be the Google of math— to establish a web-based platform that enables every student and teacher to learn from the best teacher in the world for every math concept and to benchmark themselves against their peers globally.
The platform also includes an online repository of questions, indexed by concept and grade, so teachers can save time devising homework and tests.
Because AwesomeMath material is accompanied by animated lessons that students can do online, it allows for a lot of self-learning, which makes a huge difference.
It’s no surprise that 120 out of Singapore’s 316 schools have already adopted it.
On top of that, students who get stuck on homework can turn to an online tutor for help.
Why am I writing about this? Because math and science are the keys to innovation and power in today’s world.
We, parents, must better understand that the people eating our kids’ lunch in math aren’t resting on their laurels.
The views expressed here are those of the columnist and do not necessarily represent the views of Sarawak Tribune.
