China's school kids are now the smartest in the world

Posted to Facebook on 31/7/2020 11:03 AM
Commenting on “https://www.theage.com.au/national/victoria/students-told-to-reject-box-hill-tafe-after-it-waters-down-free-course-20200212-p54082.html”
https://www.nst.com.my/world/world/2019/12/544468/chinas-schoolkids-are-now-smartest-world

Throughout history, education helps many poor people break out from the poverty cycle.

While some of these poor people that made it to the top worked very hard to self-support financially, many did have to be supported by parents, loved ones or people that have faith in them, because education was and is neither cheap nor free.

For decades if not centuries, wealthier countries seem to give their citizens a head start by promoting and providing free education for early learning age and primary schooling citizens.

Besides provision of Human Resources, some wealthier countries provide a lot more facilities, hoping the the students will excel in their academic performance.

From my personal experience, the latter assumption may not guarantee high success rate.

Chinese teaching styles and learning styles are very different from the Western education system. Chinese characters are single words not made up of a combination of alphabets.

Written in the traditional style, many of the characters can be identified by looking at the root words or radicals that form the word, and sometimes the pronunciation can be guessed. Unlike English words which are to great extent phonic, the Chinese words are tonal and almost all Chinese words have their unique sound.

That is why learning Chinese really begins with memorisation of words and their associated sound. This is the start of the rote system if learning.

I am a firm believer of rote learning, a system of repetition and drilling. The whole idea to get the information into our brain and stored for future use.

We all have two states of mind - the conscious and sub-conscious states. While we pay attention, our conscious mind is at work, in addition to our eavesdropping sub-conscious mind. Unfortunately, the things stored away by sub-conscious mind may not be in well organised manner and retrieval can be a bit difficult.

Repetition is a reinforcement, so that the sub-conscious mind is just as aware as the conscious mind.

Thank you for reading.

China's schoolkids are now the smartest in the world

No difference between public and private schools after accounting for socio-economics

Posted to The Age (5/12/2019) on 8/12/2019 (Not published by the newspaper)
Commenting on “'No difference' between public and private schools after accounting for socio-economics”
https://www.theage.com.au/national/nsw/no-difference-between-public-and-private-schools-after-accounting-for-socio-economics-20191205-p53h5s.html

Our education system has been chopping and changing to the detriment of the students at the receiving end. It seems the system pendulum swings from one extreme to another, but nothing in between the both.

Recently I submitted a comment to an article in The Age but not published. It outlined the problems of our education system and explained why the previous teaching methodologies must be reintroduced in order to build a firm foundation, upon which other “knowledge” can be built.

Pouring money to build facilities and training more teachers with the current ways of delivery will not solve the problems. There are alternatives to achieve outcome with far less outlay. Simply, the system is to teach / coach / train children from young, even from the early learning childhood days the techniques of learning, memorisation and application. Besides all these, the learners must learn and practise discipline and respect.

While this may sound complex, it is far from it. Let’s talk through this logically, since according to some research,  90% of the population have their Logic mind, or left side of thinking brain, turned on.
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If you learn how to learn, then you can add layers of knowledge in your brain more easily and quickly, just like how to make a snowball. However, this acquired knowledge must be stored, or else you will be like a dementia sufferer who can recall long term memories but not the current ones, because the recent memories are discarded and erased. Without the stored knowledge, it is unlikely that you can do or complete anything constructively with the minimum time.

Before promoting the modern learning techniques, such as meaningful learning, associative learning, and active learning, I am advocating the reintroduction of rote learning as a precedence and foundation building prerequisite.

During one of my primary school years, and another in secondary school years, both in Malaysia, my school converted the bicycle sheds into classrooms. They were no walls, not air-conditioned. It was very hot under the corrugated tin sheet roof. During a rainy day with strong wind, the students had to put on ponchos in order not to get wet from the raindrops carried in the wind. The noise of the falling rain on the roof was very loud, much louder than when it was during a normal day.

Despite all these, my class was the top performing class in the school, and my school was one of the top schools in the country.

Like what Winston Churchill once said, “give us the tools and we will finish the job”, and that I urge our education authority to revamp our system and provide funding to teach the teachers with new teaching techniques. It is all about the techniques, and NOT the name of the school, or whether it has a big field and modern laboratories.

Thank you for reading.

First version not published. The following 2nd version is submitted.

Australian education system has been chopping and changing to the detriment of the students at the receiving end. It seems the system pendulum swings from one extreme to another, but nothing in between the both.

Pouring money into building facilities and training more teachers with the current ways of delivery is unlikely to solve the problems. There are alternatives to achieve outcome with far less outlay. Simply, the system is to teach / coach / train children from young, even from the early learning childhood days the techniques of learning, memorisation and application. Besides all these, the learners must learn and practise discipline and respect.

While this may sound complex, it is far from it. Let’s talk through this logically, since according to some research, 90% of the population have their Logic mind, or left side of thinking brain, turned on.

Learning how to learn enable one adds layers of knowledge in one's brain more easily and quickly, just like how to make a big snowball by rolling a small snowball in the snow. However, this acquired knowledge must be stored, or else it be like a dementia sufferer who can recall long term memories but not the current ones. Without the stored knowledge, it is unlikely that you can do anything constructively with the minimum time, or even complete it all.

Before promoting the modern learning techniques, such as meaningful learning, associative learning, and active learning, would like to see that rote learning be introduced as a precedence and foundation building prerequisite.

Thank you for reading.

No difference between public and private schools after accounting for socio-economics

Experts say a lack of qualified teachers is turning students off maths

Posted to Facebook on 11/10/2019 at 7:40 AM
Post to The Age (10/10/2019) on 11/10/2019)
Commenting on “Experts say a lack of qualified teachers is turning students off maths”
https://www.theage.com.au/national/victoria/experts-say-a-lack-of-qualified-teachers-is-turning-students-off-maths-20191010-p52zl0.html

The experts study should go beyond or rather before Year 7 in order to find out the root cause of the problem.

During mid-2018, I requested and was granted the opportunity to volunteer in a primary school, and unexpectedly assigned to help students from Prep to Year 5 in maths. I can confirm that the problems lie in the lack of strict discipline in overall class activities, insufficient time dedicated to the subject, largely not due to the fault of teachers but the system.

Maths is more complex than English as a subject, and it is a myth to believe that it easy to learn and teach. In a way maths is a language - it has syntax, semantics, rules, exceptions and variations. Maths includes more than simple arithmetic operations, but also logic of shapes, quantity, and arrangement, using numeral and symbolic representation, in single or multi dimensions.

In general basic maths is logical, but it can get too abstract for many young mind and even adults, too. Given that premise, rote learning should not be considered as outdated method of learning, discouraged or even abolished at schools.

At very young tender school age, students need to accept and memorise certain axioms, assumptions and basic formulae so that these form the foundation for students to leap frog to learning more difficult branches of maths like algebra, geometry, statistics and calculus.

Most students learnt English since the day they learnt to speak, and they continue to use it daily. Unfortunately, the time spent in learning and using maths is far too little in class and afternoon hours.

A music student or an athlete learn or practise a lot more hours daily outside class contact. Unfortunately, the abolishment of homework, including maths, seems totally illogical and debatable, if students are expected to perform well or excel In non-music and sport subjects.

The prolific growth in private tuition schools especially in maths is the result of market demand and symptomatic about the failure of how maths is taught or delivered at school. Many of these tuition schools require students to do maths exercises of specific topics repeatedly so that the students can gain skill and speed.

How can a teacher help students having large competency gap all mixed in a same class? Abolishment of streaming makes life extremely difficult for teachers to give extra attention to students who need more help. If a teacher is to offer more assistance to these students, those more competent students are being “compromised” and they tend to lose interest, resulting in mediocre performance.

A teacher good in maths may not be good in passing on his/her knowledge to the students. A teacher with higher degree in maths cannot be guaranteed to arouse the interest of a student in Prep or Year 11. In the first place, the students are not required to understand, pure maths, higher algebra, imaginary roots or complex series learnt in higher degree.

If good foundation is built in primary school, and students are interested in maths in the early years, quality of maths teachers in secondary school may not be as big a issue as it seems. It is important to recognise that the tallest building in the world has to start from ground up.

Thank you for reading.

This post and many other similar ones can be found in my Facebook group SFC Education, Teaching, Learning.

Experts say a lack of qualified teachers is turning students off maths