From the time I started teaching English in school, I’ve been hearing complaints from science teachers and also a few mathematics teachers that their students got poor grades in the final exams because of their students’ limited knowledge of English. I usually don’t take such complaints seriously. I take them as convenient excuses, the normal human tendency to pass the blame on to somebody else for one’s own inefficiency. In the first place, my students score excellent grades in English which means their knowledge of English is good enough as far as the Education Board’s standards are concerned. Secondly, I started my career as a maths and science teacher and got brilliant results from my students whose knowledge of English was not particularly great. Those who know mathematics well will also know that mathematics is a language by itself, a language that has almost nothing to do with the normal human languages like English or Chinese or whatever. Mathematics is the language of ab
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