ABSTRACT
In the 1990s, I taught mathematics to students who were 17 and 18 years old. These were very bright students, placed generally at the top band of their cohort in national examinations. One day, as I was teaching the topic of differentiation, I asked my students, “What do you get when you differentiate a function?” My students responded, “We get the answer!” In fact, my students were rather incredulous that their teacher would ask such a question. But the response refl ected a very pragmatic dimension in the learning psyche of a typical Singaporean student. He or she may be very good at getting the right answer but may not appreciate or even care about the rationale behind the answers.
