Talk Back to Scholar Here... Civil discourse required, but we value clarity over agreement.
Clarity over agreement? Sounds like a Dennis Prager fan...
Good article, found via Fraters. It sounds like Phonics vs Whole Language.
As someone who took the full Geometry-Algebra-Trigonometry sequence in high school, plus 3 years of calculus at the U, I am still wondering just what pre-calculus is.
Frankly, I think a lot of these concepts are there to please gullible parents, not educate their children.
"My Jennie (she's gifted you know) is taking pre-Calculus..."
Looks like I've found a good addition to my blogroll.
Good article, Matt, and congratulations on getting it published. I have seen the integrated approach in my fifth-grader's textbook last year, where I think it was probably a good idea. My question is, why was this adopted? What was the reason for abandoning trad math?
King:
In October 1999, the U.S. Department of Education recommended to the nation's 15,000 school districts a list of math books, including several that had been sharply criticized by mathematicians and parents of school children across the country for much of the preceding decade. Within a month of that release, 200 university mathematicians added their names to an open letter to Secretary Riley calling upon his department to withdraw those recommendations. The list of signatories included seven Nobel laureates and winners of the Fields Medal, the highest international award in mathematics, as well as math department chairs of many of the top universities in the country, and several state and national education leaders.
--from "A Brief History of American K-12 Mathematics Education" by Prof. David Klein, California State University Northridge, Department of Mathematics.
URL: http://www.csun.edu/~vcmth00m/AH...m/
AHistory.html
Pre-calculus is also known as analytic geometry. Typically, this is a study of conic sections and other concepts, with a lead up to geometry in three dimensions, all of which are fairly central to the study of calculus.
I am from Akron. We piloted Core-Plus in our high schools 10 years ago. It is a DISASTER.
I have a review of Core-Plus at amazon.com.
Robert Hill has done a study of the impact of Core-Plus on students in Michigan.
http://www.math.msu.edu/~hill/
Hi...HillParker5.pdf
Charles: Thank you for forwarding your paper. I will study it carefully. Thanks for stopping by and leaving your comments!
I took integrated math at my high school and I have to admit that they did NOT prepare me for calculus in college at ALL. I finished the entire 3 year integrated series and took AP calculus during my senior year. My AP calculus teacher told me that I was lacking in my trig and alegebra and told me that I NEEDED to know pre-calculus before I took that class. I got a D+ in that class and I was dropped into pre-calculus. I first had a D- in pre calc but eventually brought it up to a C. I honestly learned more in my one quarter in pre-calc than I did in unified. That one quarter of pre-calculus taught me the necessary alegrbra and trig that are VERY essential in calculus.
Right now I'm taking Calculus B/C in college and I'm still having some problems because of my weak math base. Honestly, I feel as though integrated was a big mistake and i feel very angry that I was tricked into taking that class and ruining my math experience in college.
I graduated from Wayzata in 2002, after transferring from a school in Michigan where I was finally earning A's in algebra after several years of private tutoring.
Integrated math was horrible for me. Not everyone works well in groups, and there were no examples I could look at in the textbook while I was doing homework. I lost all the ground I gained though tutoring. It was supposed to be using "real life" math, but to this day I can barely calculate a tip, much less do algebra. I have almost no grasp of basic, day to day math skills. I satisfied my college math requirement by taking logic rather than a mathmatics course, because I had no doubt that I would have failed it.
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