Among these: States must explain how they are going to move more students into �challenging� courses. The effect will be yet another push to dilute high-level classes.
Along those lines, has anyone who's 30-ish or older looked at high school math books recently? The current trend is to fill them with colorful, distracting graphics and countless examples of
Why We Use Math! and
Fun Facts! and suchlike. The geometry text that my son's school uses is so full of the extraneous stuff (2-3 distractions per page), it's difficult to focus on the math. Plus, the challenging problems that used to make up the last 20-25% of exercises in a given section are gone. It's as though no one is allowed to be good at math. Almost all of the questions are superficial and simplistic. DS studies independently, and we use an old book.
This trend is a sorry example of how algebra and geometry have been diluted in the name of "accessibility." I don't understand why schools can't just teach basic geometry and honors geometry or something like that. But I guess it wouldn't be fair or something.
