How I Became Interested In Singapore Math
Part 1
Part 1
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!
Making this change, however, would not be easy. The lessons in the heavy 600+ page textbook we were using did not begin with problem solving. In fact, the word problems were the last thing on the page and often times we were so busy practicing procedures that we didn't even get to
