CSH Lower School: "Singapore Math Demystified"

"Singapore Math Demystified!"

Singapore Math Demystified!

Singapore Math:

Can It Help Solve Our Country's Math-phobia?

Editor's Note: Due to the interest expressed over our previous posts about Singapore Math and the non-Singaporean-specific classic, "Why Our Kids Don't Get Math" here, The Daily Riff is featuring an exclusive original four-part series by Bill Jackson, Math Helping Teacher, Scarsdale, NY Public Schools, one of the highest performing districts in the country.

We asked Bill to share his truly incredible (which is both humbling and exhilarating) global journey into math education from Singapore to Japan and back again to the United States in an original series for The Daily Riff. His posts are becoming classics in the Singapore Math lexicon. - C.J. Westerberg

How I Became Interested In Singapore MathPart 1

By Bill Jackson

In 1997, I attended a series of workshops on the Third International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS). That study compared math achievement in over 40 countries in grades 4, 8 and 12. Singapore and a handful of East Asian countries performed extremely well, much better than the United States, which had a mediocre performance. I was an 8th grade teacher at Public School No. 2 in Paterson, New Jersey at the time.

At the workshop we watched videotapes of mathematics classrooms from Japan, Germany and the U.S. The U.S. lesson looked very familiar. The teacher showed his students how to do a procedure and then they practiced while the teacher helped individual students. The Japanese lesson looked very different, however. The teacher began the lesson by posing a rich problem. Then the students solved the problem based on what they had learned previously and shared different solution methods. Important mathematical points of the lesson were brought out through class discussion of the various methods. The students looked very engaged and they even clapped for each other. After watching the video, I felt that my students were getting shortchanged and I became determined to learn how to teach like that Japanese teacher!