Dear Professor Teh,

Thank you so much for the math presentation held on last Sunday afternoon. What I appreciate most is your passion and unselfishness to share. Though it had been four days past, your 1234567 song still keep ringing in my ear and I could feel that even though you are living in Canada, you are still very much attached to Singapore. Thank you for not forgetting about us.

Remember me? I was one of the audiences who posed the following question in Mandarin: what do you think that had gone wrong with our math education. Nowadays, it seems that parents are anxious over their kids’ results and some even re-learn the subject in order to teach their kids for achieving better result.

I was a Math graduate from NUS in 1986. I was Chinese educated until Sec 3 where there is a major switch of most of the subjects from Chinese to English. Looking back, being educated both in Chinese & later in English, I still treasure my mother tongue most of her great virtual, moral values. In fact, I was looking forward to your Chinese story but it is a pity that you didn’t tell us much. I shall look forward to the next opportunity. Education has a great and profound impact on each and every one. Your talk gives us another insight of Math education and I fully agree with you that: revolution of math education is needed, riding on & explore the technology is one of the many ways; we should make teaching and leaning creative and enjoyable; the ultimate goal of education is not to sit for emanation, but to unlock individual’s potential and stimulate interest.

In Singapore, sad to say that there are too much emphasis on examination and resulted: our Kids are bored by excessive assessment books for scoring good marks, kids attempt to commit suicide after losing interest in study and have a phobia about school; instead of giving every one an equal opportunity, our education system eliminate those who score poor result (e.g. streaming at the early age of Primary 4).

Your talk has led us to a New Hope. Like Confucian, he has his disciple to advocate his philosophy widely to benefit more people. Several of us from different professions are always on the look out to promote and distribute creative and interest teaching methods to the children / youngster here.

We admire your proficiency in Math and your courage towards revolutionary ways of teaching. We wish to learn more from you and hope to introduce your idea to pre-school, primary, secondary and even tertiary students. In Singapore, we have some well-established western branded pre-school, why can’t we create something creative, interesting and yet closed to our culture, something like ‘Prof Teh’s method’?

Professor Teh, since you have already taken a very courageous step to publish your idea, the next step is to let your idea continue flowing. For that, we wonder if there is any chance for us, who are very much willing to learn from you to put your idea into action. We sincerely seek for your advice. Any of your suggestions will be very much valuable to us.

Thank you and Best regards