Back to NIE

Today, went back to NIE with a few colleagues...yes, there was a big conference for math educators in S'pore throughout the day ...really good to have gone there.

Apart from meeting my former lecturers and friends ( Prof Ling, chee kean, jaron, marwin, chongjie, wendee, qinning, mat, augustine, robin, winnie, janet, jason, chin koon, alina, jm ... etc etc) and having good food to eat, i happened to see my new principal too. Small world, especially those helping out in the mathematics education.

Though a couple of speakers where quite boring (managed to solve most questions of SIMO then) the keynote speaker, Prof Jin Akiyama, was super interesting in the way he taught math. Really passionate and funny!

Anyway, he started off his speech with this 7 questions:

1. Do students enjoy your math lesson?
2. Do students realize the importance of math in daily life?
3. Are students getting better in your math classes?
4. Do students feel that they can solve problems if they think?
5. Has your math class made them more confident able their abilities?
6. Do students study math outside of class?
7. Do students like you?

Really interesting in the way he taught math, using lots of models. He even set up a math museum in Japan with more than 700 exhibits. He taught on national TV twice a week, commanding viewership of 15 million. Wow. Sad that I could not find any of his clips on youtube.

Anyway, hope that throughout my lessons in future, my students can say a resounding "YES!" to all 7 of the above mentioned questions.