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As the number of year 12 students enrolled in advanced and intermediate maths continues to slide, the chairman of the national committee for mathematical sciences, Hyam Rubinstein, said because maths was viewed as a difficult subject in schools, only the best and brightest were encouraged topursue it at an advanced level.Cross posted here.
"If a school wants to maximise their performance, they may feel that 'if we encourage weaker students not to take maths, our results will look better'," he said.
Saturday, August 11, 2007
Discouraging news
It seems that in the UK and Australia, students are being discouraged from taking upper level math to boost academic averages. Instead, students pad their last couple years with subjects they can do well in with less effort.
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Singapore isn't immune from this, especially since lower-streamed students are discouraged from taking subjects that are perceived to be "higher stream only", especially in the neighbourhood schools.
In the US I recently told my sister to screw her guidance counselor's recommendations and pursue AP Calc in her 11th year. The problem was that in her eighth grade when we came back, her middle school had an extremely inane math course that unlike me, when she went to high school, she ended up taking some integrated algebra course for a freshman year, which soon prompted my hatred for non-rigourous math courses.
Luckily (or not so luckily?) the stuff you learn in Precal isn't that absolutely vital for AP Calc, since we almost don't use anything that we learnt in Precal (save the mental exercise) in AP Calc, often because we're studying for the AP exams and they don't require you to memorise how to solve conic sections or use the cosine rule to solve a triangle.
So we plan on getting the school to skip precal for her, with hopefully me able to tutor her if she encounters some prerequisite concept she needed before. I actually should get cracking now, but I don't have any textbook to work with (since they are all returned to the school).
But really. If they for example, require you to know logarithms, the general attitude is like, "You probably forgot how to do these. Here's a refresher." and you learn the concept over again ... because it is true even the top students in the school forget them because the syllabus is structured in such a way that it is hard to exercise them all year.
I remember the seniors would cry, "awww, you mean we had to remember those?" when there was a rare AP problem that required us to know a trig identity we had learned a year before. And the teachers would respond, "of course. You didn't learn them for nothing." and implying it was our fault (but begrudgingly teaching them to us again). But somehow, even though it was partially our fault for not revising the concepts we had learned over the years (even when we had been assigned no work that dealt them after we finished the unit) I often wonder if it is someone else's fault as well.
I mean, imagine all the time that has to be used reteaching a concept, and generally just in time for the examinations, before we put them in the closet again.
If we reinforced them all along, I wonder if students would save so much time and progress so much quicker that doing linear algebra in your senior year would be no big deal.
gosh
that is just AWFUL
Singapore isn't immune from this, especially since lower-streamed students are discouraged from taking subjects that are perceived to be "higher stream only", especially in the neighbourhood schools.
Interesting.
Well, not totally awful. I just have to cross my fingers. My grievance is that I can only imagine all the things I would be learning right now if the syllabus were structured a little better.
In Singapore, they don't teach you complex numbers till JC or university (or poly, if you take that route). Because I took precal, I did a fair amount of them -- something my Singaporean peers wouldn't be familiar with.
But thanks to the total non-exercise of them the following year, my grasp of them seems to have regressed.
When I went a math meet last year, me and the rest of my peers taking AP Calc arguably had a *disadvantage* compared to those taking precalculus, ironically -- simply because those doing precalculus had done problems involving de Moivre's formula, etc. recently and the various nth roots of unity, while we had barely done anything involving solving triangles, etc.
The meet also had nothing involving differentiation or integration or anything involving calculus, so the irony was that the lower grades tended to score better than us.
Which is why I think for example, that if my sister skips precal, she won't be too disadvantaged in precalculus, because we hardly exercised *any* of that knowledge in the AP exam. Except for the occasional calculus problem requiring the use of the double angle formula.
The discouragement differs. For example, if you are in a lower stream or not regarded as a "top" student, in the neighbourhood schools especially, the principal may actively discourage (or at times forbid) you from taking triple science (that is, all three subjects of physics, chemistry and biology). You might be encouraged to pursue less rigourous courses. This peeves me because how well you do in mathematics or English doesn't necessarily dictate how well you will do in geography, history, etc.
In my second secondary school year I wasn't really happy with the O-level system and I was counting on the IB programme to allow me to get out. But entry to the IB programme is based on your performance in the O-level system. So even if you would do better in the IB stream than in the O-level stream (whether or not you are Special or Express), you might be refused based on your current performance in the O-level stream, generally via the school administered exams and the government-administered final at the end of the year (it was my second year, so I hadn't taken the O-levels yet, but they started pulling kids in at the end of their second year).
Singapore's education system isn't a complete bed of roses. It has its pros and cons. But I dare say spiralling (as the teacher-parent people seem to call the principle) is one of the pros. However, I think our streaming system needs a complete overhaul.
Though the neighbourhood schools aren't exactly a source of neglect and they're not exactly the "inner city" schools that you might find in other countries, they are heavily stigmatised and I think the government's attitude towards them hinders progress.
The other thing concerning "discouragement" in Singapore is that the IB stressed coursework over examinations, and subjects like theory of knowledge (epistemology) and philosophy, etc.
If you were felt to be a weak student, it was perceived you would be killed by these subjects. But I felt that these were the exact same subjects that would boost my grades. Alas ...
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