Some days there would be classes that I would have to “babysit” – i.e. the actual teacher is unavailable, or half
the students are somewhere else and I can’t really move on with the syllabus.
These are times that make me very restless, because the kid inside me wants
them to have fun and do whatever they want, but the teacher inside me knows
that if they make too much noise, everyone loses. So every now and then I come
up with number challenges just to kill time.
Yes, number challenges. Mostly because I am comfortable with
numbers (even though I teach history). The other is because sequential number questions are pretty easy to
set. For example: 1, 2, 3, x, 5. What is x?
I would randomly set questions, and always found it amusing
to see students struggle to figure out the missing numbers. But these were also
times where I would see the students that teachers normally consider “lousy”
shine. There were students that could only speak Mandarin, but because they
were taught by a non-Mandarin speaking teacher, they were never afforded the
chance to shine. I would eavesdrop on their conversations with their friends,
or spy on their calculations, and always end up amazed at the creativity they
have in solving the problem. Sometimes I would get them to come up and explain
it to their class, and then you see a student that is normally disinterested in
class, wouldn’t answer a single question, doesn’t do homework and all the usual
“bad student” syndrome, come alive and take charge.
There were a few times where I was just messing around,
making them count straightforward but large numbers, and get under their nerves
by showing them that I can do it without a calculator within ten seconds. Stuff
like what’s two to the power of ten, or what’s 1+2+3+4+…+100 and the like.
Once I tried it out in the Peralihan (remove) class. I asked
them what’s 1+2+3+…+10. And they did it. Then I went to 20. Then 30. 40. 100. You
could see students starting to give up because the calculator was too tedious,
or they would lose track of their calculations. But I realized there was this
one student (one who normally sits at the back of the class and doesn't say much) that was on fire, commanding his classmates to
be quiet, and seemed like he was mentally calculating everything. And as the
numbers got bigger, I noticed that he stumbled upon something. And so I got him
to come up to the front and explain what was going on in his head. And lo and
behold, he created his own mathematical formula to compute the series.
Yes, it wasn’t the most efficient way of computing series – he used 1+2+…+10 = 55, and then added multiples of 10s to 55 in order
to get the final answer, e.g. 1+2+... +20 = 55 + (10x10). The fastest way I know is [(a + l) x
(n/2)].
But here was a kid in Peralihan, a class where teachers
normally write the students off before they even step in to teach. Here was a kid who could
only speak Mandarin to voice his thoughts, and the school would probably never
realize his math potential due to the language barrier. Here was a kid, who
like many other kids, didn’t fit in the system, whose talents and potential
would remain buried forever.
It pains my heart that so many talents fall through the
system; not because they weren’t good enough, but because the system failed them.
