A ‘new’ math

SINGAPORE Sling. Singapore Airlines. And now Singapore Math, which isn’t Singapore natural-born, but if it’s a success there, who’s to mind the name?

It’s the new math that alumni of the old school find so disconcerting, especially when they have to help their children or grandchildren with the homework. Where’s teacher in all this?

Thankfully, for the moment only private schools, about 200 of them all over the country, are doing the math the S’pore way. The “home of S’pore math in the Philippines,” a company called EdCrisch International, started it in 2005 in fits and starts, taking small steps until Ateneo de Manila’s grade school provided what CEO Simon Crisostomo calls the “turning point” – and S’pore math became the rule. Graders didn’t like it when they were introduced to the style, but as three teachers from St. Scholastica Marikina told “Bulong Pulungan,” it gets easier with practice, as with lots of other stuff like exercise and music.

The experts describe the old-school arithmetic as a “spiral” system and S’pore math as an approach that utilizes concrete materials (for example, three oranges), pictorial representation (a drawing of three oranges), and abstract algebra [this is where the message got lost in translation]. It would require more than a page this size to explain how the thing works, but the living proof that it’s “simpler than you think” is Filbert Ephraim Wu, a third grader at MGC New Life Christian Academy, who topped a math Olympiad held in Singapore some months ago.

The system is in use in 11 languages in 50 countries. At an additional cost of P300 per pupil for one year, in addition to the cost of the books (e-books are free for teachers and parents), the expected reward is the child’s ability to “build concepts and understand word problems relating to real life” in a world that is worlds apart from the one inhabited by his grandparents. The child is not the problem. Kids have a terrific ability to absorb, adopt, and learn. Even when they’ve had, say, a year of Kumon, it will be no skin off their nose to tackle this new method – as long as they have a teacher with a head for numbers and a marvelous way of teaching, like my physics teacher, Sister Teresita Canivel, MIC (Missionaries of the Immaculate Conception).