A grade 3 Singapore math question made some waves among netizens in yesterday’s local paper. https://bit.ly/3VOzpHP

Debatably, the root of the discussion centers around the “right” way to do multiplication.

Process v. Product

In Singapore, it’s not uncommon for elementary school teachers and tutors to witness a student’s incorrect method of solution to a word problem that produces the correct answer. This frustrating situation arises far too often than what many of them would want to admit.

Due to a shortage of time, most school teachers pay lip service to the method of solution, pretending not to see that the students’ workings fall short of what is expected of them. These time-starved civil servants would simply look at the children’s answers and conveniently mark them “correct.”

In some cases or circles, it’d not be surprising too that some teachers or tutors themselves are oblivious of the correct method or procedure to solve a (routine or nonroutine) math question.

Personally, I’d want to give these school teachers the benefit of the doubt that they’re merely “lazy” rather than because they’re conceptually blind to the mathematical stain on their students’ worksheets.

Getting students to master a math concept with understanding requires time and effort (and also patience and pain), and most stressed teachers can’t afford either one in the name of having to “rush to complete the syllabus.”

For example, students’ or parents’ parroting that “multiplication is repeated addition” gives teachers and tutors quasi-zero clues whether they’ve understood the multiplication concept or not.

With regard to this grade three routine question that made the headlines, writing the correct procedure, without the teacher explaining to the student why he or she went wrong, only solves half the problem.

Understandably, some parents would argue that teachers shouldn’t be too rigid or radical about their children’s half-baked solutions to avoid dampening their self-esteem. For mathematically puritan math educators, the process is more important than the product.

Procedural proficiency with little understanding of math concepts would only produce elementary school drill-and-kill math graduates—the whys are as important as the hows.

An early penalty is better than a later one when it comes to a child’s learning of basic mathematical concepts in their formative years, which must be accompanied by a teacher’s or tutor’s explanation of the incorrect solution.

And in this grade three routine multiplication question, order matters.

© Yan Kow Cheong, May 11, 2023.