Taiwan Today

Despite her 12 years of teaching experience and rather animated teaching techniques, math teacher Cui Yi-zhen of Cheng Kung Vocational School in Guishan Township often saw quite a few students in her classes daydreaming. Over a year ago, however, the song-loving Cui suddenly came up with the idea of combining mathematical formulas with popular songs when she was teaching a class whose students on average scored only 29 out of 100 on their mid-term exam. "If you have trouble remembering the formulas, what will you do? Teacher will sing it for you, so listen well!" Since then, Cui, nicknamed "Mother Cui" by students, breaks out in song and dance during class sometimes to try to get her point across. Her new methods unexpectedly became a success. She noticed that students also found it quite helpful in memorizing various formulas; they actually practiced the formula song on their own at self-study time the day after the new method was introduced. Cui was really surprised at this. The average score of the class rose to the 40s in the next mid-term exam. These days, she has come up with songs for formulas related to integrals, arithmetic progression, inner products, and coordinates from a point to a line. When students get tired of hearing the same song for these formulas, Cui must find another song as a replacement to boost students' interest. She says that two songs that were played during the closing credits of the hit movie "Cape No. 7" came in particularly useful in teaching students. She has also resorted to nursery rhymes. All these have made the class more interesting to students, as well as instilling a greater sense of accomplishment for Cui. Lin Pin-chen, a student in the school's information processing department, says that her math scores started out in only the single digits, but they soared to 70 on mid-term exams after Mother Cui came up with the math formula singing method. "It really is amazing how successful it has been," she said. Another student, Liu Yi-shan, says, "Who could have thought that Mother Cui would come up with this singing method?" Nowadays, those who used to daydream in Cui's class are excited by Cui's math formula songs and thus become more attentive. She says that even students from other schools think the method is really cool.