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Famous Lucy Crehan Quotes

“I learnt that in teaching young children the concept of number, you should start with the concrete, then move to the pictorial, before finally representing numbers in the abstract. I learnt that children should be encouraged to articulate their processes, and feed back to each other on whether they are right or wrong, and why. And I learnt that this is so children understand number concepts, not just procedures, because (though not only because) the PSLE tests understanding, not just memorisation. As I was chatting to the professor in the car as she gave me a lift to the station, she also expounded on the importance of teacher-student relationships – 'you can't touch their brain until you have touched their heart'.”

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Book:Cleverlands: The secrets behind the success of the world's education superpowers
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“Associate Professor Irene Ng from the Department of Social Work at the National University of Singapore (NUS) explains that 'As you put students into finer and finer categories, their social circle becomes more and more isolated... Even if they have good intentions to do so, their social circle is just so limited they will have limited empathy and understanding to help effectively people who are different to themselves.”

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Book:Cleverlands: The secrets behind the success of the world's education superpowers
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“People develop at different paces at different life stages. Many of us are late bloomers. Bill Gates? Steve Jobs? Ray Kroc? Sim Wong Hoo? These are famous personalities who have made it big in life despite not having a university degree. They made many mistakes but they did not give up. They worked hard. They persevered. Each and every one of us are born with unique strengths and talents. When someone is not good in academic studies, it does not mean that he is also not good in other areas. And so, in my opinion, academic grades are just one way of measuring a person's ability or knowledgeability.”

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Book:Cleverlands: The secrets behind the success of the world's education superpowers
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“Other studies have shown that not only do East Asians persist longer in the face of challenge, they are also more likely to see it out. Not only that, they are actually spurred on to work harder in the face of failure – the opposite reaction to typical Western students.”

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Book:Cleverlands: The secrets behind the success of the world's education superpowers
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“If a Western country were to introduce streaming or school selection at such a young age, for example, they may not find that it incentivised all children to work harder and raise their game, as it seems to in Singapore. This is because more people in Western countries believe intelligence is fixed, and would therefore be more likely to assume that failure in tests and allocation to bottom sets was something they had little control over, rather than something they could change through putting in more effort.”

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Book:Cleverlands: The secrets behind the success of the world's education superpowers
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“Stevenson and Stigler – psychologists who studied Japanese and Chinese education in the early 1990s – recount an experiment they attempted to carry out on persistence in Japanese and American children. Their intention was to give students from each country a maths problem that was unsolvable in order to see how long they would keep attempting it for. However, Stevenson and Stigler weren't able to complete their study, because the Japanese teachers convinced them to drop it after trying it out with a few children. They'd found that the children refused to give up, and had carried on attempting to solve the problem for far longer than it was fair to let them try for.”

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Book:Cleverlands: The secrets behind the success of the world's education superpowers
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