A Teacher, a Text and a Culture: June 2014

Wednesday, June 11, 2014

Common Core Geometry 2.0

I've nearly come to the end of a complete revision of my geometry course. Take a look.

Why "A Teacher, a Text and a Culture"?

One of the very best elementary geometry texts is Kiselev's Geometry. Alexander Givental has given us a superb English translation. In his introduction, Givental says this:

Elementary geometry occupies a singular place in secondary education. The acquiring of superb reasoning skills is one of those benefits from studying geometry whose role reaches far beyond mathematics education per se. Another one is the unlimited opportunity for nurturing creative thinking (thanks to the astonishingly broad difficulty range of elementary geometry problems that have been accumulated over the decades). Fine learning habits of those who dared to face the challenge remain always at work for them. A lack thereof in those who missed it becomes hard to compensate by studying anything else. Above all, elementary geometry conveys the essence of power of the theoretical method in its purest, yet intuitively and aesthetically appealing, form. Such high expectations seem to depend however on the appropriate framework: a teacher, a text, a culture.

How can the power of this little paragraph be denied? One would have to be dead to reason and beauty

both . . .