Talk Back to Scholar Here... Civil discourse required, but we value clarity over agreement.
According to Jonathan Kallay, integrated math requires a lot more work from the students and requires a teacher with much rarer (and difficult) group skills. The justification is that integrated math is more “organic” and not the traditional "...banal detail of sequence arragement [sic]." So not only is integrated math harder from both the teachers' and students' perspective, we still have the question as to whether integrated math prepares the high school student for college math.
In the last math course I took for an undergrad second major, Topology II, there was a lot of interconnection between the various "branches" of mathematics. From my experience, I'd have to say that if I saw more of that in HS rather than being taught "silos" like algebra, geometry, calculus, logic and such I might have been better prepared for the courses I took in college.
Many thanks to the Scholar for the positive and constructive response to my rebuttal.
I would like to emphasize that teaching ANY reformed curriculum is difficult specifically because of what it is trying to do, not because of an incidental structural issue such as the way it is sequenced. Reformed math education is about providing every student with a good math education, out of economic necessity. Conversely, the features of traditional math education that make it 'easy' to teach also cause it to only produce a tiny number of mathematically able students.
What I am suggesting is that one is barking up the wrong tree when criticizing 'reformed' or 'integrated' math, because these are only general and vague ideas. The devil is in the details. We should be asking "how well are our teachers preparing our students." That is where the rubber meets the road.
Commenting by HaloScan
