[Peptobismol]

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/01/education/01math.html

Singapore Math - Making Math Lessons as Easy as 1, Pause, 2, Pause ...

By WINNIE HU
Published: September 30, 2010

"FRANKLIN LAKES, N.J. — By the time they get to kindergarten, children in this well-to-do suburb already know their numbers, so their teachers worried that a new math program was too easy when it covered just 1 and 2 — for a whole week.

“Talk about the number 1 for 45 minutes?” said Chris Covello, who teaches 16 students ages 5 and 6. “I was like, I don’t know. But then I found you really could. Before, we had a lot of ground to cover, and now it’s more open-ended and gets kids thinking.”

The slower pace is a cornerstone of the district’s new approach to teaching math, which is based on the national math system of Singapore and aims to emulate that country’s success by promoting a deeper understanding of numbers and math concepts. Students in Singapore have repeatedly ranked at or near the top on international math exams since the mid-1990s.

Franklin Lakes, about 30 miles northwest of Manhattan, is one of dozens of districts, from Scarsdale, N.Y., to Lexington, Ky., that in recent years have adopted Singapore math, as it is called, amid growing concerns that too many American students lack the higher-order math skills called for in a global economy.

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Singapore math may well be a fad, too, but supporters say it seems to address one of the difficulties in teaching math: all children learn differently. In contrast to the most common math programs in the United States, Singapore math devotes more time to fewer topics, to ensure that children master the material through detailed instruction, questions, problem solving, and visual and hands-on aids like blocks, cards and bar charts. Ideally, they do not move on until they have thoroughly learned a topic.

Principals and teachers say that slowing down the learning process gives students a solid math foundation upon which to build increasingly complex skills, and makes it less likely that they will forget and have to be retaught the same thing in later years.

And with Singapore math, the pace can accelerate by fourth and fifth grades, putting children as much as a year ahead of students in other math programs as they grasp complex problems more quickly.

“Our old program, Everyday Math, did not do that,” said Danielle Santoro, assistant principal of Public School 132 in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, which introduced Singapore math last year for all 700 students in kindergarten through fifth grade. “One day it could be money, the next day it could be time, and you would not get back to those concepts until a week later.”

Singapore math’s added appeal is that it has largely skirted the math wars of recent decades over whether to teach traditional math or reform math. Indeed, Singapore math has often been described by educators and parents as a more balanced approach between the two, melding old-fashioned algorithms with visual representations and critical thinking.

In Franklin Lakes, teachers are learning the new math system as they pass the knowledge on to their students. One morning last week, Ms. Covello and six other kindergarten teachers worked with a consultant on how to reinforce the number 8 for students. First came a catchy tune about eight oranges; then they counted off one by one while throwing up their arms in a wave.

Singapore math was developed by the country’s Ministry of Education nearly 30 years ago, and the textbooks have been imported for more than a decade. The earliest adopters in the United States were home-school parents and a small number of schools that had heard about it through word of mouth.

Today it can be found in neighborhood schools like P.S. 132, which serves mostly poor students, as well as elite schools, including Hunter College Elementary School, a public school for gifted children in Manhattan, and the Sidwell Friends School in Washington, a private school attended by President Obama’s daughters." [snip]

it has been 2 years since the ny times report came out. sg math has now taken the u.s. by storm after producing fantastic scholastic results since its early official inception in 2008, although unofficially it has been in the u.s. for over a decade, mostly for home schooling. it is now adopted in most of the top ranking schools on both coasts. the heartland and middle america has started to embrace it.