The Thirty-seventh Day: 28 April 2020

The Thirty-seventh Day: 28 April 2020 (161,145 confirmed infected, 25,302 died, in total)

"The world is not ready for competitive football… can only be possible if contacts are possible again." – Michel D’Hooghe

The FIFA medical chief Michel D’Hooghe warned against an early return of football games. People around were talking about reopening the football leagues and tournaments. It is true in England that if two unfamiliar persons meet, they will most likely start their conversation from commenting the weather; but, if more particular, two unfamiliar men meet, then they may more likely get to talk by discussing recent football matches. Football is too important to be absent from people’s life for months. But it is really awful to let tens of thousands of spectators, some with coronavirus while some without, walk into a stadium to watch a match, shoulder to shoulder, shouting and cheering.

Get back to talk about teaching. One key knowledge point being taught to Year 2 pupils in the UK is the times tables. I could remember that many years ago I used to read a piece of news in China saying UK teachers visited Chinese primary schools and were astonished by the Chinese times table.

Times table, academically called multiplication table, is a mathematical tool for calculating multiplications of numbers. Ancient Babylonian and Chinese people both developed their times table thousands of years ago, and the Chinese one is still being used in Chinese schools and our daily life, without even a character changed.

The Chinese times table has a unique advantage: poem-like rhythm. Each multiplication in the times table consists of four or five Chinese characters – so that four or five syllables, as one Chinese character maps to only one syllable only. One of the most popular form of Chinese poems is “five-character-in-a-line”. So, the whole times table just reads like such a poem! Even a pre-school young child can recite it without too much efforts. In English or other languages, a similar rhythm is difficult to find.

Now UK has its own 12x12 times tables, taught from 2, 5 and 10 times tables, gradually to other numbers’. By the end of Year 4, a national test will be held on these times tables, with which the teachers and other parents seem quite uneasy. We are teaching Dan both the vintage Chinese way and the English one, but Dan automatically adopt the Chinese way. Maybe that is because the mother language of Dan is Chinese (although his English is not necessarily weaker than his English peers now), he is able to take that unique rhythm advantage.

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