Looking at the table M.1, I can totally see myself as the kid who went through the traditional and conservative way of Math education for most part of my elementary and secondary school years. I was the perfect kid in these classrooms: I listened to instructions obediently and did exactly what my teachers told me. I was more of a doer than a thinker. I never really doubted or raised questions about why we had to solve Math problems in a certain way and not the other way. By doing all these during my secondary school years, I managed to get A's for both of my E.Mathematics and A.Mathematics in the GCE O level exams. However, since I started doing some tutoring/teaching, I realized there are many different ways of getting the correct answers. Then I started asking the questions, was I being trained as a memorizing machine or was I really learning Math back in my school days. I am still asking this question up until this day and I found that I became more open minded when students/other fellow teachers suggest alternatives to solving Math problems. I believe that I will need to pass this (open-mindedness) to my future students.
Another thing I found myself lacking sometimes is critical thinking. Being the obedient and quiet kid in the classroom, I was taught to follow instruction and execute task with efficiency. There were a lot of teachings on "how" to do things but not "why". Maybe it was the Asian culture of discipline and organization that students are taught how to tackle exams rather than to ask why such math problem is solved in this particular way.
Finally, the third thing I see in this article is that one size education does not fit all. During the cold war and technology competition with the USSR, we see that the US government implemented a lot of harder mathematical topics into schools in preparation for everyone to become a rocket scientist. Obviously, students who had no intention of pursuing a career related to math suffered. This made people think that Math was just something very distant and they would try to keep Math out of their lives. This kind of thought still exist in a lot of students. So as Math teachers, how do we change this perception in our generation of students?
Hi Ivan, I also consider myself as the product of traditional and conservative teaching. Even during my high school years (which more than 10 years ago) here in Canada, I still feel like the mathematics taught focused on fluency, precision and correctness. What do you think about that? Do you really find the teaching to be different compared to back home?
ReplyDeletehi Chloe, yes I totally agree with you. I feel like for teachers, focusing on fluency, precision, correctness and results make life easier for them. However, I would say the teaching back in Asia was even more rigid, to the point where students can memorize examples so when they see similar problems appearing on the exams, they can just replicate the method (switching some numbers) of doing it. This is a huge problem that students do not even have to understand the concept and do well on exams.
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