Fayad Wazim Ali, whose math teaching mastery has led to more than 1,000 of his students at Naparima Boys’ College winning scholarships.
Fayad Wazim Ali’s success as a Math teacher is all owed to his mother. “I would remember a lot about how my mother taught me. I remember my mother, Hanipher Hamid, taught for a while and was stopped because her grandparents told her parents she needs to get married. She was 16. She lived at New Grant (Princes Town). She ended up with three sisters who were principals. “My mother painted a part of a wall black, not with blackboard paint, but oil paint, so it was difficult to write with chalk. I remember wetting the chalk so it would show up. “I always said she was one who believed before Dr Eric Williams that the future of our country was in our schoolbags,” said Ali, in an interview at his Vistabella, San Fernando, home. Present at the interview was Shereen Khan, curriculum co-ordinator at the Ministry of Education, with whom Ali has worked to develop and launch the latest in the Barton Math books: This Must Be Barton; Just Like Barton; Walking With Barton; Stepping With Barton and Sounds Like Barton.
Who is Barton, you ask? Well, Barton is a boy through whom Ali and Khan create Math questions, but using realistic settings and circumstances. For instance, having learnt in Agricultural Science class about minding chickens, he wants to mind chicks at home, and when they begin to hatch eggs, he calculates how much money he saves. The name Barton was not picked out of thin air. Ali explained: “Names can be categorised as East Indian or African-oriented, especially if that character is born in Trinidad where we still have half and half, but 70 per cent of the Caribbean is of African ancestry.
“We did not want the typical Richard, Henry or John kind of thing. “I was looking for a West Indian-type name. I had a very close friend who studied with me at the University of the West Indies, a Bajan feller by the name of Barton Astor Clark.
“It was a Sunday when we were writing this and we came up with Barton. It’s odd, not a usual name. I felt that is what I wanted. It felt right.” The Barton name grew on them.
In high demand
Fayad Ali is unlike any of his math teaching contemporaries. Ali conducts classes at his Vistabella home daily. He can accommodate 65 students in his basement. Usually there are no empty seats. “Even if the class is not filled, at a certain stage, I take no new students because where I would have reached and where you are, it’s difficult to bridge the gap.”
Ali said if students beg to allow a friend or neighbour to join the class, he’d be sympathetic and enlist that student. “In all my classes, I leave room for poor children. “Quite a number of principals, even my own school, would tell me about people whose parents are not well-off and would send a note of who they would like to send. “I’d say I do that for about 50 students for the week. I also do this for Naparima boys who are on the football team or cricket team.
They miss a lot of classes because of training and playing. “A student comes one day a week, but I have 12 classes, so I teach approximately about 850 different students a week,” Ali said. Asked if it’s true there’s a waiting list of students wanting to be in his after-school classes, he replied, “It’s not as bad as that. They will wait a few months until I start a new class. My class isn’t the place to come to if you want to lime or make friends. “That’s secondary. The primary reason was because they wanted to excel in Math. In my class, first come, first served.” The numbers are revealing of Ali’s success. Hundreds of Ali’s students have won scholarships. “Without blowing my trumpet, I have been a reasonably successful maths teacher through the years. T&T used to have about 63 island scholarships. “Last year, I would have taught 16 of the island scholarship winners. That has been the norm for the last few years,” Ali said. “I could easily say that I have won over 1,000 scholarships spanning 36 years of teaching, four of which were spent at St Benedict’s College. “We were always getting approximately one-tenth of the available scholarships. This year there were 33 schols at Naparima Boys’ College, and 31 of them were maths students I taught.”
Understanding Math
To curriculum specialist Shereen Khan, poor Math results have to do with the instructions and decoding of language. “We saw a very close co-relation with students who can comprehend and understand language and those who can solve problems. “In other words, if you did not understand the language of the problem, you cannot decode it into mathematical symbols and operations. She said many of the mathematical problems presented to children had no bearing on their own world. Khan said the question, if a man has ten sheep and 20 goats, how old is the farmer? has been tested internationally. “In most cases, children do something with the numbers to get the answer without thinking about whether it makes sense. Most children see some words and they see some numbers.”
She said the results for Math for Secondary Entrance Assessment (SEA) show 25 per cent of students making below 30 per cent. It is even worse at Caribbean Examination Council (CDC). We have 60 per cent of students making lower than Grade III, which is the minimum. “In the national test, almost 50-plus per cent of children fall below the standard we set. In other words, the passing rate is lower than 50 per cent.” As Khan explained it, computation is but a small part of Math. More importantly, Math is a way of thinking, an approach, a strategy, to solve any kind of problem. For instance, buying a car involves a downpayment, perhaps a loan, interest rates, resale value, “Some people not fully understanding Mathematics get tricked by advertisement of loans, hire purchase offers promoting no downpayment. They don’t think that if they add up all the interest, and that if they spend some time and save some money, that they would save half the money.”
She said the book addresses that problem about Math.
She said in one of the books, Barton buys fertiliser to do gardening with his neighbour. In some of them, Barton tries to help a guy who lost his job because he has a broken leg, and has to think of a strategy. “This book is very powerful in values. We ask: What kind of child do we want in society? We want a child who will contribute to society in a positive way. So, what do we need to build in this child? We want to make this child a good citizen. “Barton is the child every teacher wants: he’s compassionate, he’s an activist. He takes his learning and carries it home,” Khan said.
