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?) But anyway you ought to prepare the teachers before going after the students, neither of which seem to have been done. Another point; how many years before those newly oriented students become engineers and start designing space vehicles of their own? I have heard nice things about the educational system of those good people who put the Sputnik in orbit, but I don't think the design was done by their bright young new-mathed students either. I heard they inherited some leftover hardware from somewhere ... . Turning to an earlier posting on this topic, I am surprised that nobody caught the "ELIZA" based origin of the end-of-the-chapter question. Surely a triumph of artificial intelligence! You underline a phrase or two at random and a copy-editor makes up your exam exam quextions for you. As a final comment: I always wondered why my mother's high-school algebra book (which she had kept) was so vastly superior to mine. But we still used Wentworth for geometry; which was gone by war's end and it became the turn of younger brothers who were merely given Pythagorean triples to verify. - hvm ------------------------------------------------- Obtén tu correo en www.correo.unam.mx UNAMonos Comunicándonos