Miracle Math (2006)

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."

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).