A little while ago a local Singaporean revealed to me and Johan how Singaporeans summarize the materialistic culture in which they live. We were speaking casually about our experiences here and she offered what she claims is a widely-known and concise explanation that allegedly sums up Singporeans’ material aspirations and offers a means to exhibit their wealth when they’ve *arrived.*  I’ve only been here a few months, so I can’t affirm or refute her appraisal. I also won’t assume that it’s different than the materialism that runs rampant in the US either. As a teacher, I don’t really run in the circles of the wealthy, those who aspire to that kind of blatant materialism. And, I certainly have not met any Singaporeans who have these same aspirations, at least from what I can tell.

Others have written about what the five C’s are and there are probably many more emerging and different definitions as times change. These are the five C’s as they were explained to me. I write about them without judgement; I offer them here as a context for my five C’s of teaching and learning, which follows below.

Cash/Credit: Our friend had lumped these together, though other sources list them as separate. It seems obvious that wealth is associated with both cash, or what one earns of it, and credit-worthiness. The more, the better.

Car: Not many Singaporeans own a car. It’s very expensive to buy a 10-year Certificate of Entitlement, which is required before purchasing a car, so most people rely on public transportation.

Carat: This seemed to be the C that isn’t always included on other lists, but she explained that *bling* is a big deal in Singapore. Walking through any mall here and noting the number of jewelry and watch stores certainly vouches for this. I don’t think I’ve ever seen more than a few jewelry stores in a single mall in the States. Here, it seems like there a several per level of a 3 – or 4-story mall.

Condo: About 80% of Singaporeans live in HDB’s – both slang and an acronym for government housing, developed by the Housing and Development Board. The flats are not free, but the price of a new development is subsidized by the Singapore government. Private condominiums are not subsidized and, therefore, are more expensive since land is so scarce here. Only Singapore citizens and permanent residents can buy HDB’s, but foreigners and locals can buy private condos.

Club: Many ex-pats and locals belong to country clubs here. There’s the American Club for US and Canadian ex-pats. There are the British Club, Dutch Club, Raffles Town Club, the Singapore Island Country Club, just to name a few. I recently found out there’s even a Civil Service Club, for people who work in civil service, including teachers. I’ve interacted minimally with the country club culture, but I can still understand how membership in one serves as a status symbol.

After reflecting on these five C’s, I decided to assemble my five C’s of teaching and learning, using a convenient combination again to really squeeze in six.

Collaboration/Cooperation: This is a big one for me. In my classroom, group work is the default. I think about learning activities that gets students talking and requires them to rely on each other. If students are working in isolation, then I’ve failed as a teacher. I prioritize collaboration/cooperation over competition (one of the ugly C’s, in my opinion). When students value winning over collaborating, all students end up losing – losing out on rich conversations, on deeper conceptual understanding, and on a collective sense of accomplishment that comes from real collaboration.

Creativity: I choose creativity at the expense of correctness. It’s impossible to be creative when one is always worried about being correct. Ask any artist if you don’t believe me. It might be blasphemous for me to write this as a math teacher because most people associate mathematics as being right or wrong. As much as I can, I want students to do the creating while in math class. Creating might be in the form of determining a formula that fits data. It might be in the form of a question worth investigating or a problem posed to another student. It might be in the form of a beautifully rendered graph in Desmos (yes, I mentioned Desmos, again!). I believe that all people have a desire to be creative and I don’t think we should squelch that in math class.

Cognitive Demand: Students need to be doing the thinking and sense-making in the classroom. It’s up to teachers to transfer as much of the cognitive demand to students as possible. If teachers are doing most of the talking, then they are doing most of the thinking. The more students are talking (to each other and to the teacher), the more they are thinking. This cognitive demand also refers to the kinds of tasks that math teachers ask of students. If students don’t have much figuring out to do, then there is little cognitive demand. Reading through examples – or following along a teacher’s example – and then parroting that example is not sense-making. That’s more like learning through coercion or compliance (two more ugly C-words) and has very little cognitive demand.

Connections: It’s important for students to see the relevance of mathematics to their lives and to other disciplines.  Fortunately for us teaching and learning in 2017, it’s easier to make those connections than it’s ever been. It’s much easier to gather and analyze data, and *big data* is growing bigger every day. If students only see mathematics as a class to pass in secondary school and they don’t connect it to analyzing information, seeking patterns, and making decisions, then we are doing them a disservice.

Collegiality: This last one is more about teachers than it is about students, but I still find it to be very important to a school culture and, subsequently, enhanced learning. Just like when students collaborate, teachers benefit when they work with other teachers in a collegial way. And, again, I choose collegiality among teachers over competition among teachers. Luckily for me, I work with very collaborative and collegial teachers at Northside, as I wrote about previously. We are constantly sharing material – lesson plans, created activities and resources, technology tips – without expectations of reciprocity or assumptions of rewards. I’d like to think that this would continue even if we were competing for annual bonuses from a limited fund, but there’s no guarantee that it would. I also like to assume that the motivation to share and collaborate comes from our own intrinsic motivation to help all students be more successful, not just our own. I believe that an outside reward to enhance that motivation would only end up diminishing the creativity and cooperation of the process itself. Would we be collaborating because there’s a reward involved – merely going through the motions – or would we do it because we really want to? I hope I don’t have to find out.

I’ll stop at five C’s, knowing that I really did sneak in a sixth in each context. Probably because I’m not Singaporean, I have no aspirations for the first five C’s offered above (no offense!). I’ll stick with my five C’s of teaching and learning. Better yet, I’ll Continually Commit (get it?) to those five C’s because attaining them just once does not mean that I’ve *arrived* at being a good teacher. It just means that I have more (cooperative, collaborative, creative) work to do.