Re: question for math teachers
From: Daniel McLaury (daniel_mcl_at_hotmail.com)
Date: 11/22/04
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Date: 21 Nov 2004 17:03:12 -0800
>>From what I've heard (I'm not a math teacher yet), originally two years
of algebra were taught during the freshman and sophomore years of
highschool. However, at the time most schools required only 2 years of
mathematics to graduate, and it was thought that everyone should see
axiomatic mathematics if they were to graduate from high school. At
the time a geometry class meant a firm grounding in the theory and
application of logic; the class would help students not only in
mathematics but whenever they needed to make logical assesments about
the world around them.
As things stand now, rigorous geometry classes based on Euclid have
become a thing of the past, and college-prep-for-everyone curricula
have upped the math requirement, so the old reasons don't apply so much
any more. On the other hand, if your daughters have a whole lot of
trouble with algebra after one year away, rearranging the schedule so
that they have two years away and then jump right into their calculus
classes would probably be even more painful, because introductory
calculus depends much more on algebra than on synthetic geometry.
(Most schools actually have a class called "analytic geometry," which
is an introduction to Cartesian geometry and serves both a refresher in
algebra, geometry, and trigonometry and as a demonstration of how they
can be integrated. This class is generally taken immediately before
the first calculus class an in fact is generally a more advanced class
than the calculus series.)
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