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Here is a fantastic presentation by a maths teacher, Dan Meyer, explaining what is wrong with virtually every maths textbook out there: What I like about his idea is that it focuses on first understanding the concept, and only then applying the maths. It harnesses your intuition about a problem you would normally encounter in the real world to get you on the hook, so you have no choice but to learn the maths to get your answer. He speaks as if this is a problem unique to the US, but it is not. As he says, teachers from all around the world have approached him about his ideas, because they resonate on a global basis. Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman has a famous essay on the irrelevance of mathematics textbooks in a similar vein . Notice that Meyer identifies five symptoms of bad maths teaching. I think all of us in our school system have suffered from these symptoms at some point; the aversion to word problems and the over-eagerness to harness a simple formula must ring a ...

The following is a letter I've received from Anucia with regards to the recognition of diplomas and degrees from some of overseas universities. I am a student almost completing the Graduate Diploma in Education in the University of Western Australia and have been very much looking forward to serving the country. I completed my undergraduate Science degree in USM Penang and opted for an internationally recognised teaching qualification for security purposes. Before I go any further, I would like to apologise if this piece comes across as emotionally driven. I recently applied online on the Ministry of Education’s website for the Guru Sandaran Terlatih position and have been regularly checking the site for updates since getting through to a person I could speak to about my circumstances has proved to be very hard. I managed to speak to an officer from the ministry last week and he informed me that the route to a permanent post is via the same route, ie initial probationary period su...

Some on this blog has called for my comments on this issue. Some have even emailed me privately to "declare my stand". Well, I wrote on my Facebook early today a short note on my position, which I copy below. I've also taken the liberty to also include some of the 40+ comments on this issue so far in this post. "Tony Pua hopes that schools in urban areas where the students, teachers and parents are keen to retain English as the medium for Maths and Science will be given a choice to opt out of the switch back to BM/BC, especially in secondary schools." I've also made the following short comment to another Facebook friend who had asked the same: "My stand is that PIBG should have a say/choice in the language use, particularly in urban areas where competency in English is already fairly high and in demand. You/we should push for this. Rural areas can't help it, especially with teachers who can't even string a sentence together in English....

Thank you to the anonymous commenter who brought this to our attention ; I am sure Tony and Kian Ming will have a lot to say about this. Here is the story from The Malaysian Insider , and here are some graphs from The Star . My take is as follows: This is horrible. But anything which had a realistic chance of happening would be almost as bad. In a perfect world, students would be learning all subjects in the best language for them individually, and also learning Malay and English perfectly fine regardless. But we do not live in that perfect world. In the next best world, we would have a consistent policy (sticking to either English or Malay for Science and Maths, if not all subjects) and competent teachers able to implement this policy. This being Malaysia, and our politics being our politics, what we got was a silly compromise that made nobody very happy, and a paralysed bureaucracy uninterested in making this policy work. One of the most telling graphs in the link to The Star above i...

A friend of mine, Rajan Rishyakaran, has written a good blog post critiquing the Malaysian university admissions process . While I don't know enough about local universities to comment on many things he raises, there are a couple of points which I think are worth emphasising: the difference between policy in theory and policy in reality, and the importance of decentralising some decisions. There are many illustrations of the difference between something in theory and something in practice, but Rajan's example of coursework is as good as any. In principle, adding coursework to the evaluation process for university admissions would be a good thing. After all, a major problem with our education system is that it focuses a lot on examinations which only assess students at one point in time, and often encourage rote memorisation instead of actual learning. If you fall sick during exam period, it can dramatically change your life's course, because you might not get into the unive...

Amidst the political turmoil in our country, this little story headlined Student alleges sexual assault by teacher appeared in Malaysiakini. For the benefit of those without a subscription, a Form 2 student claims her male teacher physically assaulted and sexually abused her in front of her classmates—and when she reported it, the discipline teacher told her to keep the matter a secret. She told her parents, who confronted the principal—but the principal claimed the teacher had only scolded the girl for not bringing her Malay grammar book to school. Sexual and physical abuse is a clearcut issue, so let's talk about a related problem: discipline. I am not opposed to caning in the household or in school; I think used properly, the cane can reinforce a good lesson. But the problem is, caning is difficult to do responsibly. And the reason it is hard to cane responsibly is that it is hard to discipline young people responsibly. A big problem with expecting schools to enforce dis...

I've found that one of the most controversial debates when it comes to education, especially in developed countries, is what is the best way to spend the scarce money we have on education. The debate often boils down to a choice between two things: smaller classes, or better teachers. Personally, I've always felt it's obvious that we should pay teachers better, especially in Malaysia. There is no reason to hold teachers to a rigid pay scale based on seniority, let alone the pay scale of the civil service. Teachers perform a much more important job than civil servants, and I daresay deal with a lot more stress. It only makes sense to pay them more, and especially to pay the outstanding teachers more. The argument for smaller class sizes seems rather vague to me, and it's predicated essentially on the notion that it's hard for good teachers to pay attention to more than 20 pupils at a time. While I think there is probably room to rethink the traditional classroom dyna...