Expensive-Cheat Singapore Math Books

In recent years, a certain genre of mathematics titles had flooded the Singapore assessment (supplementary) market to meet the needs and wants of kiasu parents, who want to ensure that their children have a competitive edge over their peers.

One conspicuous series of such assessment titles in our local bookstores is published by Amazing Books. The Primary 1 - 3 titles (selling from $8.00 to $9.90) are written by a certain Newton Wong, while Primary 4 - 6 titles (selling from $11.00 to $12.50) are written by an Ernest Wong—it’s hard to confirm whether the writers are ghosts or not. These supplementary titles generally cost as much as a Ministry of Education (MOE)-approved primary textbook—however, they're value-for-money titles, if you're agnostic as to whether copyrights have been safeguarded or not.

Wallet-friendly titles that may meet the
mathematical needs and wants of kiasu parents

Indeed, there is much to be gained from writing these assessment titles, as compared to, say, authoring an MOE-approved textbook which goes through the tedious reviewing exercise by the Ministry of Education, the approving body of Singapore textbooks. 

Critics (mainly authors of traditional assessment books) arguably claim that these “cheat-expensive books” or "expensive-cheat books," as they’re called in local educational publishing, are nothing but a rehash of faintly modified past exam questions from the top or popular schools in Singapore.

High Price, Low Content

Another category of expensive-cheat titles involves those whose contents don't justify their selling prices—titles that over-promise and under-deliver. Come with quality paper, some look pretty good in form but shy of substance. 

Note however that the use of the word “cheat” doesn’t in any way suggest that the writers had plagiarized the contents, although it’s not uncommon for teachers and tutors to suspect that in some cases plagiarism could have inadvertently taken place. 

At best, these expensive-cheat titles provide information for readers new to the subject matter at a high price; at worst, these titles are copycats of pirated test papers or canned contents that have been put in a form that are readers-friendly.


Piracy Goes Online

Here is a typical ad spammed probably to tens of thousands of homes every few months:

Top Schools' Test Papers (Yr 20XX) on CD 

Hi Parents Give your child a head-start at school by Practice Doing Top Schools' Test Papers This will help your kids to Score !!! *Primary 1  -  Primary 6 ( SA1 & SA2 papers ) *Data is in scan-in PDF format *English, Maths, and Science *Answers also provided *Only $5 per subject !( Min order 3 subjects @$15 only ) **3-Year Series : P5 SA2 / P6 Prelim ( Yr 20XX - 20XX )     3 yrs x 3 subjects @$15 only ( total about 50 sets testpapers ) **Also available : Sec.1 - 4 SA2/Prelim  Maths :( Yr 20XX ) @ $10/subject Call Now !! XXXX XXXX * NB *  To unlist pls click < HERE > thank you. A kiosk outside a shopping mall, selling past exam papers from allegedly top schools. Plagiarism Begets More Plagiarism Grade 4 questions that mimic those set by teachers in "top schools"—these "model answers" are quasi-edited "solutions." It’s an irony that while many fly-by-night writers had modified questions from the top schools’ exam papers with cosmetic changes; yet, often times, some teachers from these same schools are equally guilty in lifting up large chunks of content from assessment titles, by photocopying and distributing entire chapters to their students and fellow colleagues. Plagiarism begets new levels of intellectual theft. Unscrupulous vendors know too well that the MOE would find it hard to crack down on these perpetrators of piracy. After all, few parents could detect the authenticity of these questions—whether or not they’re really set by teachers from allegedly top schools. Most questions look challenging to the clueless parents, who would buy anything which would help their children do well in the subject.  Two Wrongs Don't Make a Right If half-baked or poorly edited solutions isn't much of an issue, these tips-and-tricks titles may appeal to some students who can't afford private tuition. Lest their children lose out vis-à-vis their peers, most kiasu parents wouldn’t give a second thought to buying these pirated sets of exam papers. The rationalization is that since the MOE refuses to sell them, they’ve little or no choice but to procure them from illegal vendors. The means to laying their hands on these sought-after papers justifies the end—that these non-routine questions would prepare the child confidently for his or her school test or exam. With home delivery service of these syndicated or pirated papers at no extra costs, parents can now feel less guilty, as they could avoid being seen buying these illegal papers in public. And for IT-savvy consumers, they’d now order these papers online, at a cheaper price, if they want an electronic version of them. A Copycat of Top Schools’ Exam Papers A grades 7-8 supplementary title that may be suitable for drill-and-kill specialists—it's priced at S$24.95 in retails outlets. Unknown to many of these authors, the international mathematical community of mathematics educators often poke fun at the poor quality of our local assessment or supplementary mathematics titles. Many writers have probably not read what math educators out of Singapore are saying about their dear titles, especially when they're marketed overseas.  Leaving poor design and linguistic blunders aside, these expensive-cheat local titles are often an embarrassment to the image of Singapore mathematics publishing, as the nation strives to become an educational and publishing hub in Asia. In recent years, it's an open secret that questions from so-called top schools are actually the works of syndicates, which recruit Indian and mainland Chinese nationals, and cash-strapped undergraduates, to write math questions that mimic those posed by teachers from top schools. The Works of Syndicates No one is surprised that these expensive-cheat titles are a few folds pricier than the traditional assessment titles. These often ill-written supplementary titles, which make unverifiable claims to parents and teachers, will continue to thrive if the authorities don't get down to verifying the authenticity of the questions, and as long as the consumers continue to purchase them, pretending that they’re unaware that they're MOE-copyrighted materials. While the MOE authorities should take a share of the blame pie for not making schools' test papers available for sale, very often, it’s those teachers with an entrepreneurial spirit who are probably the source of these copyrights infringements. Who can have access to these exam papers if students and outsiders are not allowed to take them out of the school compound? The non-routine questions are suitable for grades 5-6 students, but the solution methods sometimes lack rigor, and a number of them are poorly presented and edited.  Although there is no formal investigation on these assessment titles claiming to contain contents that match the questions commonly set by Singapore's top schools, it doesn’t take a DNA scientist to figure out that most of these assessment papers were probably lifted up from test questions, which have undergone some cosmetic rewriting to avoid being caught (or sued) for blatant infringement of copyrights. The sale of most past exam papers from government schools is officially illegal; yet, every local knows how and where to buy them. The public knows that schools and the MOE don’t have the resources to sue the guilty parties. It wouldn't be surprising that some education officers are themselves part of the piracy syndicate. How would syndicates have had access to those past exam papers in the first place had they not been leaked out by teachers or school personnel themselves? Indecent Photocopying Over the years, I’ve personally heard from a number of assessment authors who had complained to the MOE that some top schools’ HODs had blatantly plagiarized their contents to be used in workshops and seminars, or that some teachers had made an indecent number of copies for an army of students. Of course, the standard answer from the MOE was that they’d look into the matter, and before you know it, the whole saga has faded away.  As long as we pay lip service to the intellectual rights of math writers and authors, and the infringement of  copyrights is condoned among teachers and students, the future of math publishing in Singapore doesn't look too bright. In fact, the quality of future Singapore math titles is likely to suffer further, as more and more non-math graduates are recruited as math editors in local publishing houses.  © Yan Kow Cheong, May 29,  2013.

The Lighter Side of Singapore Math (Part 3)

Is the Singapore model method a plus or minus?

Skeptics or critics: "The model method is pre-algebra in disguise."
Proof: Use of a bar instead of a variable x.

Agnostics: "I've faith in Back to basics!"
Proof: I never use x, y, z nor any models in everyday life.

Believers: "The model method is visual algebra in elementary math."
Proof: Singapore's top rankings in TIMSS.

The Aftermath of TIMSS

One by-product of Singapore's top TIMSS ranking: Low fertility rate of 1.16 of its population—way below the replacement level of 2.1 At the current rate, Singapore might cease to exist!

Outsource your math to Singapore, not to Bengalore.
Bengalore the tedious and monotonous, Singapore the creative and innovative.

The red dot in South East Asia [Singapore] had leaked into the sea of math education, forcing [American] states to reassess both curriculums and pedagogies. 

Half-baked Papers from School of Education researchers: 

"How to wean the elementary student from models to algebra"

"Beyond the Singapore Model Method"

"Should SINGAPORE MATH be ©opyrighted?" 

"Could Korea Math be the next mathematical fad?" 

Six Top Oft-quoted Factors for Singapore's Success in TIMSS

1. Excellent textbooks

2. Good teachers

3. High pay for teachers

4. Society's high regard of teachers 

5. Good career path for math teachers

6. Teachers mostly math majors or minors

Six Key Factors of Singapore's Success in TIMSS

1. Nation-wide private tuitions (individual or group) to make up for poor teaching in schools.

2. Parental involvement—many parents taking leave to coach their kids closer to exam time.

3. Practice of drill-and-kill assessment [supplementary] questions assigned by kiasu parents, tutors, and teachers.

4. Self-help groups such as CDAC, MENDAKI, SINDA to help the weaker—and economically challenged—students.

5. Remedial math lessons disguised as "enrichment math" programs.

6. Community clubs (CC's) tuitions for average or below-average income earners.

In the Pipeline...

New citizens- and permanent-residents-to-be may soon have to know how to solve one or two word problems, using the model method, as they sit for the literacy-numeracy test for those who don't have a formal education. Indeed, a stressful time for new immigrants!

Line Method vs. Bar Method

The line method is to the bar method what the soroban is to the Chinese abacus. http://tinyurl.com/4rxdky3

A Dozen Tweets from @MathPlus

The Light Bulb: How many Singapore math educators does it take to change a light bulb? It depends on the type of model they draw.

A numerologist is a "make-believe" number theorist trying to fool the innumerates that numbers have powers to rule their lives.

How many US politicians does it take to adopt Singapore #math? Three: To prove Singapore's existence, location & its relation to election.

Singapore #math authors may be the least credited in the world, as their first names are often mistakenly referenced for their surnames.

Beyond Singapore math textbooks & workbooks, here are some enrichment & creative math titles to tickle the brain: http://tinyurl.com/3lfuzsf

Anything cat-size or smaller tastes like chicken. Creatures roughly dog-size taste like pork; anything larger tastes like beef.

Benjamin Vitale: "Russian Math is hard work, Singapore Math is smart work." Famous Russian mat'cians aplenty proves they're doing sth right!

Her double masters didn't help her math⎯she lost $100,300 in casino. http://bit.ly/hWnVms She's faith in the "Lore of Averages"!

Singapore math on its own cannot magically turn a bad teacher into a good one, but it can make a good one better.

A Postmodern Equation: Life - Love = Autumn + Spring + Winter

Since 1991, Lee Kuan Yew gave some $13 million to #charity⎯earnings from his memoirs, speaking engagements, and being on advisory boards.

With perfect equality at zero, Singapore's Gini score (a measure of income inequality) is World's No. 2 at 0.42, behind Hong Kong's 0.43.

Zero Tweets from @Zero_Math

Join the ZERO-MATH Fan Club, by following K. C. Yan as @Zero_Math and share your zero tweets with the Zero-Math brethren! Here's a sample of them:

A #Math Quickie: The temperature is forecast to be twice as cold as today. If today is zero degrees, what will tomorrow's temperature be?

Zero is inarguably a Hindu invention, but textbooks still attribute its origin to both Hindus and Muslims. Political or racial correctness?

How to Lie with Zero: 0% Bank Loan, 0% Interest, Zero Down-payment, ... #zero #interest #marketing

A Dangerously Zero Thought: "It's the thoughtlessness that counts!"#zero

© Yan Kow Cheong, May 1, 2011

Math is "Nowhere"

MATH IS “NOWHERE”

To the average math teacher with twenty years of experience (not uncommon with one year teaching experience repeated twenty times), mathematics is probably nowhere other than the four walls of the classroom or within the few hundred pages of the textbook – MATH IS NOWHERE! Not so for the professional mathematician working in the ivory tower, who makes a living out of mathematics – MATH IS NOW HERE!

Like philosophy, mathematics requires hardly any equipment other than pen and paper. You practically need no expensive instruments and laboratories to gain entry or to contribute to the growth of mathematics – except your brain. Indeed, mathematics’s start-up costs are as low as they come.

Suffering from Information Anxiety

Even in an age of easy access to the Internet, math teachers are flooded with an overload of quasi-useless information – the challenge is to filter the relevant and the useful from the mass of plagiarized content input by ego-centric Wikipedians.

In price- and pages-controlled textbooks by the Ministry of Education, Singapore, both publishers and writers have to focus on either context or concept – one can’t have both given a fixed number of pages and the unit price per page that the publisher must abide by. Publishing houses aren’t charitable organizations, nor are writers, volunteers in the business of mathematics education.

Even if the MOE were to relax the rules on the extent and pricing of local textbooks (as is the case in Hong Kong) where publishers and writers would then have the freedom to dictate the price and control the content, there is no guarantee that the new textbooks would be contexts-based. Scapegoating the MOE for numerous restrictions provides an easy way for publishers not to innovate their products, blaming time and price for not producing decent titles.

On the other hand, few would exonerate the MOE, because if they themselves couldn’t produce a decent textbook even with a team of a dozen full-time teachers and consultants, how could these mathematics specialists expect the private sector to better them with a fraction of their resources?

Conceptual Math vs. Contextual Math

For too long, MOE-approved textbooks authors see the teaching of notions and notations more important than revealing the beauty and utility of mathematical concepts. Formulas and worked examples and practice questions are the staple of a local textbook, paying lip service to the recreational or humanizing aspect of the subject. 

Putting mathematics in a context, although desired, is still an option for many authors who find that linking concepts to contexts is hard and time-consuming – you can’t always rely on Wikipedia or on-line free resources to contextualize or humanize your teaching.

What Are They for, Teachers?

Not that there is a dearth of relevant applications to traditional or common topics taught in school mathematics, the problem seems to be a reluctance or indifference or apathy on the parts of Singapore writers and editors to make the most disliked subject in school more interesting.

For example, we'd expect our local textbooks to mention these, but they’re inexistent:

Quadratic equations are depicted on a MacDonald’s logo.

The remainder theorem is applied to electrical circuits.

Matrices are used to store or retrieve large chunks of data.

As math educators (teachers, writers, editors, tutors, …) we haven’t done a good job in promoting mathematics as a discipline that permeates our everyday living – from gizmos to the internet to security to GPS to barcodes. Whether it is on-line booking and sms- or mms-ing, mathematics is everywhere; yet, many of us seem to be unaware or indifferent to how the applications of mathematics affect or inflict our lives.

Many years ago, at an NCTM conference in St. Louis, Missouri, I bought a T-shirt with the words, “MATH IS NOWHERE” printed on it. It reminded me of a booklet I read many moons ago asking the reader to read, “GOD IS NOWHERE”.

Like God, mathematics often seems to have little bearing on the lives of most people – both God and mathematics seem invisible to them. Be in math or religion, our attitude towards it determines whether it is nowhere or now here!

NOWHERE IS MATH? MATH IS NOW HERE!

© Yan Kow Cheong, March 4, 2010