Fresh off the boat from China, I finally made my way into mainstream American society as a California credentialed public-school teacher with a master’s degree in education.
One day, a group of us went classroom shopping at the school supplies store on Fillmore Street. We were all newly hired teachers at 21st Century Elementary School in San Francisco’s Bayview Hunters’ Point neighborhood.
“How much is it if I buy 12 packs of markers at $5 each?” I overheard one young female teacher asked another at the counter. We all had to watch our allotted budge.
“Uhm, I don’t have a calculator with me. Let’s see …”
“It’s $60!” I tossed my answer over across the room, happy to be helpful.
“Who asked you?” Both women whipped their heads over and yelled at me in chorus, half-jokingly. I felt embarrassed being yelled at. This was one of many moments of cultural shock I experienced.
“Nancy,” I turned to the preschool teacher, to avoid the smirks of the other two women, “look at these math booklets. They’d be good for your class.”
“Nah, that’s pencil and paper,” Nancy turned away.
“Oh? What’s wrong with pencil and paper?” I was baffled. How else could reading and math be taught to young kids? Paper and pencil were the only way I knew how to teach during more than a dozen years of teaching at Taiyuan city’s top elite high school in China.
“Nothing,” Nancy ended the conversation.
It was 1993. I had no idea I was embarking on a 20-year ordeal in America’s chaotic inner-city public-schools, which had strayed from the traditional American way of teaching basics. My brain was still firmly imprinted with the knowledge from China that America had the world’s best public-school system. Half a century ago, under its pencil and paper system, America sent the first man to the moon!
One day I saw Teacher Nancy leading her dozen preschoolers slowly walking up the ramp hallway, all paired up, hand in hand. They were entering the computer lab! I couldn’t help but feel pity. What on earth were these tiny four-year-olds going to learn on the computer? Could they even read the keyboard? Even so, what about the written instructions on the flickering screen? What could Teacher Nancy write in her lesson plan to justify her preschoolers’ learning objectives for the day. I wondered.
One year later, I went to teach a public high school at the Mission Delores of the City, and later, at a “better” high school in a quiet neighborhood. I discovered that basic math illiteracy was the norm! From many students to the counselor, and yes, to the principal, too. They all seemed to lack basic arithmetic counting skills.
“Ms. Li,” Vincent, an 11th grader, asked me. “Can I borrow your calculator?”
“What for, Vincent? This is Mandarin Chinese language class.”
“I just want to figure out my GPA.” He needed a calculator for one-digit math!
Once a livid mother, an ABC (American-Born-Chinese) gave me an earful: “Don’t think you can just bring your rigid Chinese way of teaching into progressive American classrooms!” She was angry because I’d tried to discourage her teenage daughter from counting her fingers, as I was teaching my students how to count in Mandarin Chinese. I couldn’t believe it: an American high schooler still counted like a preschooler?
Like a typical new immigrant, I was intimidated, and humiliated, but had to swallow the insult to toe the school district line: students and their parents were our customers, who were to be pleased. As an accomplished outstanding teacher from China, I’d never been challenged and treated so rudely by a student’s parent who had no professional teaching knowledge.
As life went on, I was to find out, mostly from teaching my American-Born-Chinese high school students, that they grew up conflicted, sandwiched in between their “easy” American teachers at school and their “hard” Chinese immigrant parents at home. And I was also to experience first-hand that ABC women generally are high-nosed and sharp-tongued toward the freshly-off-the-boaters. And the ones who were married to non-Chinese-heritage American men seemed to feel especially entitled.
Back in China, ironically a Communist totalitarian regime, I was honored and respected for teaching the most motivated and disciplined students at a top notch elite high school, with the environment of nothing-but-academic-excellence. Here, in the beacon of the world, my professional fulfillment fell as a dud in America’s inner-city public schools’ chaotic environment of anything-but-academic-excellence.
It was comically sad during teachers’ faculty meetings watching the counselor and the principal giggle, without a shred of embarrassment, claiming “I’m not good at math …” Both women helplessly fumbled with a few copies of handouts. Neither apparently had the basic arithmetic skills of counting by simple 2’s or 5’s to figure out how to quickly hand out the papers.
It was always frustrating when, at the beginning semester of each new school year, the principal came to disrupt my teaching to head count my students. It was for the important purpose of receiving the Federal funding. And, yes, the worse a public school ran, the more money it would receive from the American government. (I no longer wonder why discipline has been a rampant problem in public schools.)
Her plump face flustered, the heavyset middle-aged principal kept yelling for the roomful of teenage students to sit still and be quiet. My daily five classes were solidly packed from wall to wall. Instead of counting easily by 3’s for each column, then quickly multiplying the number of rows, the career-politician-turned-layman principal clumsily counted one at a time, her index finger busily jabbing the air. The simplest counting task should’ve taken less than a minute, but the principal needed forever! And the saddest? We teachers were not trusted for the counting job, the task must be for the top leader role model of the school, namely the principal.
Every year, for decades, American elementary school kids have been consistently scoring much lower on basic math and reading tests than their international counterparts. Kids are the future of this greatest nation on earth. The brain is a terrible thing to waste. A classroom teacher by heart, I’d like to help my new home country America.
The basic arithmetic mental math I learned by age ten back in China (before Mao’s Cultural Revolution shut down schools, burned books, beat and murdered many teachers), has enabled me to do my own American Federal and State taxes in pencil and paper, keep my checkbooks balanced, and my mind alert on price-comparing for my everyday shopping.
I took my enthusiastic idea to my 5-page critique writers’ group.
“We Americans don’t like to have an outsider come in and tell us our house is dirty and we need to clean it up.” Stephen was blunt.
Kim and Dorothy piped up at his heel, sitting at the other end of the table: “Your mental math skills are no use because I hardly carry any cash with me, like most people.”
“But that doesn’t mean you don’t need to keep track of your spending,” Richard came to my rescue. I felt so grateful and thanked him quietly with my eyes. “Cash or not, you still have to know how much you’re paying, right? You want to make sure the cashier doesn’t punch in a bigger number to cheat you.”
I couldn’t have said it better myself.
Ignoring the naysayers, I went on to complete writing my 400-page Basic Arithmetic Mental Math for Kids, aiming to teach America’s young kids to do math in their head and calculate their everyday money without using an electronic calculator.
But in order to master the basic mental math skills with +, −, ×, ÷, kids need first to be taught a set of simple but important counting skills to make their adult life easier when it comes to keeping their finances healthy.
It takes a skilled teacher to start young kids right. If not, they will likely develop a lifelong fear of math, as many adults unnecessarily do. A good teacher shows kids that playing with numbers is actually fun!
* Here is a set of self-helping, fun and easy counting skills to explore with your young kids. It is an essential stepping-stone to arithmetic mental math:
Within 10 – Count forward, backward, by even numbers, and by odd numbers.
Within 100 – Count forward, by 2’s, by 3’s, by 5’s, and by 10’s.
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