Singapore Math, A Singaporean Perspective

After reading many articles over the fuss about Singapore Math, I thought a discussion on the topic from Singapore's perspective was missing. With quite a number of accounts focusing on how dreadful Math can be for American youths and adults, it made me gape inwardly and then snicker. You see, Math in Singapore was very enjoyable and many students preferred the subject to English or Science. Why is this so?

Although English is the official language in Singapore, more than half of the population used Chinese, Malay or Tamil as their main spoken language in households in the 1990s. This meant that children in 50% of all households were weak with their English Language. As a result, our English and Science scores suffered in school. Lucky for us however, we were able to find refuge in Math.

Math in primary school (for 7-12 year olds) was one of the easiest subjects to ace. It did not involve language application as extensively as Science. Although the word problems in Math papers still involved the English language, it required us only to write one-liners as conclusions. Many of my peers and me scored consistently in the region of 80-90 marks out of 100 in Math. Being able to score so highly in Math (as opposed to barely passing English or Science) easily made Math our favourite subject in school!

That may have been so in the years between 1990-2000, but there has been a rising trend of schools setting impossible-to-pass Math tests and examinations in the late 2000s, as if to generate even more stress for our poor parents. In almost every primary school, parents marched in hordes to confront teachers about the abysmal standard of Math of their children. However, being the passive sort of citizens we generally are, no schools were closed nor were cars overturned. Many parents simply signed their children up for more Math tuition classes!

It is true that the Mathematical concepts are built year upon year and concepts that have been taught are not taught again, but merely revisited briefly. This is as opposed to the slightly incoherent system in the US, where kids can sometimes wonder why they are doing the same things again. While this arrangement may appear to be harder on Singapore students, I actually felt it was very easy on us. In fact, we felt that it was a gift from heaven to be able to do fractions at primary 6 again, right after we learnt something similar the year before.

It might appear as though a Singapore student would have had to spend many hours poring their beady eyes other Math textbooks and Math problems to acquire such 'astounding' proficiency in the subject. The truth is, the pace of learning was rather fine. I could do quite well in school without having to attend extra lessons (tuitions), and school only lasted from 730am to 1pm, Monday to Friday. There was still ample time for monkey business after 1pm.

To sum up, I am positive that Math in primary school was enjoyable for most students in the 1990s. This might have changed with the increased difficulty of exam standards in the late 2000s, but we will come to address that in another article.