You MUST Ace the Math Exam

You MUST Ace the Math Exam

"Where's your working?" riled the exasperated mother at her young daughter. Poor little girl was attempting a set of poorly typeset mathematics questions on a stack of dull blue paper.

"How do you minus? How do you minus?" mother asked hurriedly.

I was seated in McDonald's and it was nearly 5 pm on a warm Deepavali evening. Looks like darkness still shrouds this little girl's world until the devil of her mother is annihilated.

"How you check? How you check? How do you know you minus correctly? How you check? How you know buy ... left from $100 is correct?"

All the while, I heard nothing from the little girl.

"Who says check like that?" mother raised her voice. "Another way of checking is this, isn't it? This and this, it is $100. Isn't it? Isn't it?"

Of course it ISN'T. For *fill in name of your preferred god*'s sake, it is NOT obvious. If it is obvious, then this is not learning mathematics.

Nothing in mathematics is directly obvious, especially at the entry learning stage.

"What's your method? What's your method?" mother demanded. "This is only your working. Teacher must see your method! What's your method?"

By then, I glanced her direction. Of course, long before this, I had already made some less than complimentary comments about such an oppressive mother killing her daughter's interest and confidence in the subject.

This poor girl knows f*cking nothing about methods and workings. The indefinitely ongoing syllabus has made even the teachers see stars. What the older woman knows was in the days long past, when students were drilled into doing mathematics the "correct" way. These days, if sh*t can be eaten, the syllabus probably would say, candidates are required to eat sh*t during the mathematics exam.

Everything has gone bonkers.

"Look at you! It's all wrong! What did you get here?"

Silence.

"How come come down it becomes this?"

Silence.

"Why here you get this and then here you get this?"

Students make mistakes. This is part and parcel of learning. Students are still trying to make connections in their minds. As they learn, their connections between steps will be stronger and they are better poised to remember how to carry down preceding information more accurately.

On my right, another mother was looking at two girls doing primary 4 mathematics practice. She was quiet and she let the two girls do their own work.

But by then, the sight of one parent trying to make her daughter fulfill the dream that she could not have and another parent who gave no hoot about her daughters' work, I've decided I needed to go out and get a breath of free air.

After all, the afternoon tea should be one where it is partaken with little stress, especially during a warm Deepavali afternoon. How is it that I begin to see the dark clouds gathering?

I had wanted to tick the naggy woman off (in my capacity as an ex-Math teacher) but I decided I knew better. Why equip her with more advanced thinking and strategies that she could draw on to further add stress to her girl?

Like I always told my ex-students: If you are really good, you'd have done well in your national exams. Maybe you didn't because something happened. As a result, you've been posted to some ordinary ordinary school with ordinary challenges. Surely, if you're good, you'd been able to excel in any of the past 3 years you were with us. But, in none of the exams you've excelled. What is that telling us?

If the girl is good, she'll make it. Why stress yourself excessively? Why turn the young one off learning and when she goes to some ordinary school, she excels only in ordinariness?