Time to ponder over mathematics teaching

By Hendra Gunawan

CANBERRA (JP): The year 2000 has been proclaimed by the International Mathematical Union as the World Mathematical Year (WMY2000) and many countries throughout the world are celebrating it through various activities such as conferences, poster exhibitions and special stamp editions.

Indonesia, in this case, seems to be missing the party.

There are a host of reasons for Indonesia's absence, the foremost being of course the fact that our mathematician community is small.

Although our country has 210 or so millions of people, we have less than 100 PhD holders in mathematics and only a few of them are "active" mathematicians. By "active" I mean actively doing research and writing papers for international scientific journals.

Our situation in mathematics is worse than that of other areas of science such as physics or biology. This is indicated, for instance, by the number of publications by Indonesian mathematicians.

If we look through Mathematical Review, which records all publications in mathematics, we will not find many Indonesian authors. For sure, we do not have a person like Johannes Surya who has put Indonesia on the global map of physics.

While many other countries have long realized the importance of mathematics, not just as a tool to keep up with the development in technology but also in response to other demands, we might still be unaware of how our mathematical sciences have been performing in the past five decades.

If in the 1970s we helped Malaysian universities by sending our best mathematicians there, now perhaps the reverse is the case.

This is truly a sad fact. For mathematical sciences have now reached far beyond the physical sciences and engineering, and into medicine, commerce, industry, the life sciences, the social sciences and every other application that needs quantitative analysis. We should ask ourselves how can we compete in the globalization era if our mathematical sciences are in the above condition.

Comparing their situation to Japan and Singapore, currently Australian mathematicians are anxious about their mathematical sciences because of the alarming brain drain from their universities. In our case, perhaps we need not worry about such a situation because we do not have so many "brains" anyway.

This is a joke, of course, but not too far from reality.

Enough complaining. There is a good signal from the present government--in the new curriculum to be introduced in the next academic year, mathematics will remain one of the core subjects.

At least this indicates that the government is aware of the importance of mathematics for our children and we can hope that the teaching of mathematics in primary schools, as well as in high schools and eventually in universities, will be improved.

However, one problem remains and that is the shortage of qualified mathematics teachers. As former minister of education and culture Fuad Hassan argued: "Teachers of elementary schools, who are teaching the basics, should first be improved".

The same should also apply to high school teachers or even university lecturers.

As quoted by expert Jan Thomas: "Subtraction, with or without regrouping is a very elementary topic anyway. Is a deep understanding of mathematics necessary to teach it? Does such a simple topic even involve a deep understanding of mathematics? Would a teachers' subject matter knowledge make any difference in his or her teaching and eventually contribute to the students' learning?

"There is only one answer to all these questions: Yes. Even with such an elementary mathematical topic, the teachers displayed a wide range of subject matter knowledge, which suggests their students had a corresponding range of learning opportunities."

While existing teachers must be retrained, teachers' education in general should also be improved and, at the same time, the teaching profession should be made more attractive. This will be the case if, for instance, teachers' salaries are substantially increased so that good students will be interested in becoming teachers after they graduate.

May be there isn't enough money in our hands at the moment. We only hope that the government will use the available funds wisely and think not only on short-term but long-term goals.

In the spirit of WMY2000, this is a good time for us, mathematicians around the country, to ponder about our existence and how we can contribute to our nation in mathematical sciences, which include teaching, learning and research activities.

The writer is an Australia-Indonesia Merdeka Fellow from the Department of Mathematics, Bandung Institute of Technology, currently studying at the School of Mathematics, University of New South Wales, Sydney.