--- mcintosh@servidor.unam.mx wrote:
Quoting Richard Petti <rjpetti@alum.mit.edu>:
O The feds introduced "the new math" into the schools in the 1960s to optimize the education of the more math-able students from whom the nation's technical manpower comes.
Well, Bourbaki math was kind of nice, but the whole thing was pretty well dumped upon a surprised, unprepared and unsuspecting teaching cadre. As I recall, the results were rather chaotic. Some well established and excellent programs were uprooted and discarded (I think of Baltimore here, but I wonder how the Bronx High School of Science fared?)
At Bronx Science we did sets, groups, rings, fields, analytic geometry, matrices, linear programming before the term "new math" came into being. Senior year was calculus out Thomas. We all enjoyed it.
But anyway you ought to prepare the teachers before going after the students, neither of which seem to have been done.
But then we need to prepare the teacher trainers, and so on, so it's all a waste of time and money. The talent is available now, but it has no interest in working under public school conditions. What is needed to to do away with the obstacles to free choice. __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Exclusive Video Premiere - Britney Spears http://launch.yahoo.com/promos/britneyspears/