Friday 12 April 2013

Why should I learn Modern Mathematics and Additional Mathematics concurrently for SPM?


I have been reading Robert’s thesis on adult learners who choose to re-learn Math.
This actually touches the wound that I have been hiding deep in my heart—I used to fail Add-Math during my high school study. Until now, despite having a PhD in Education, I still cannot accept the arrangement which force students learning both Modern Mathematics and Additional Mathematics concurrently. To me, this is cognitively misaligned. I loved Math since I was in primary school, and I even won the first prize in school annual Math contest at the age of 9. All were fine until I reached the age of 17, when I had to learn Modern Math and Add Math concurrently, taught by two different teachers. I always scored in Modern Math, but I hardly score higher than 50 over 100 in Add Math. Looking back this painful experience of getting demotivating results, I believe it was the misalignment that caused the problem. Why not just speed up the teaching of Modern Math and then continue it with Add Math? Please do not tell me that both subjects are different. Come on, they are both Mathematics. I agree that they are different—in the sense of difficulty level. So it should be taught sequentially instead of concurrently.