Making Sense of the World through Mathematics

Racking your brains over when would be the perfect time to buy a car or a HDB flat? Are you wondering who might be the best person to ask?

Well, you could try asking one of Mr Christopher Chee’s students from Northlight School. In his Mathematics classes, graphs are not an indecipherable alphabet soup of Xs and Ys, but rooted in real-world examples.

For instance, Mr Chee guided his students as they pored over data of COE and HDB prices in order to examine the trend in prices. “My students really appreciated that lesson. Now they will always remember that January and February are the best months of the year to buy cars!” he says.

Bringing the outside world into the classroom

Formerly a foreign exchange trader, Mr Chee had spent countless hours constantly tracking the market prices. It’s now second nature for him to bring borderless real-world data into the classroom during his Mathematics lessons. He explains, “I put an emphasis on authentic learning, and I enjoy linking my experiences of working in the private sector to my lessons.”

This focus on authentic learning is also evident through the learning trails he organises, with one recently completed at Changi Airport’s new Terminal 3. “Leveraging on the use of real-world data and on things that are uniquely Singaporean will allow students to realise the importance and relevance of learning,” he believes. “It makes learning both fun and engaging for students.”

Fun is not the only key ingredient in Mr Chee’s lessons, he has serious messages to drive home as well. When he gave up analysing the trading board for the classroom whiteboard, Mr Chee gained the opportunity to impart a sense of values and his life experiences to young people through teaching.

Coming from an environment that is fluid and always changing, Mr Chee aims to inject the same dynamism in his teaching career. He feels that it is more urgent than ever for teachers to help students make sense of the changes in the world around them and empower students through greater knowledge.

The current financial crisis provides one opportunity to do exactly that. Through his lessons, he has simplified the complex issues regarding the financial crisis to help his students understand what it is about and its crippling effects on the financial world and the global economy. He also conducted a follow-up lesson on the government’s “Resilience Package” and highlighted the need to be prudent. Through his lessons, he aims to inculcate a greater sense of empathy among the students. “Having understood the severity of the problem,” he says, “I hope that students will now be less demanding on their families’ resources and prioritise the basic needs of their families first.”

Casting a wider net

While Mr Chee came into teaching with the aim of reaching out to young people, today his aspirations have grown wider. Given that some of his students come from low-income families, Mr Chee hopes that they will bring home the learning points from his lessons and share them with their parents.

In the current economic climate, he also hopes to equip his students with strategies on how they and their families can tide themselves over this period. “For instance, we have many low-income families who are ignorant of the fact that they can receive GST offset dividends,” he mentions. “So many families have missed out on this and deprived themselves of the assistance that had been targeted towards them in the first place.”

As much as he has brought real-world issues into the classroom, Mr Chee hopes that lessons he had imparted in his classroom will prove useful to students once they go out into the real world upon graduation. Northlight School caters to students who have not been able to progress through mainstream schools and are at risk of prematurely leaving school. “I hope that I have been able to communicate to them the need to complete their education, to eventually become contributing members of society.”