Originally Posted by Val
Originally Posted by Washington Post via Bostonian
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.

I agree that many textbooks used in public schools have too many distractions and have noticed that textbooks purchased by parents (often homeschoolers), such as Singapore Math or Saxon or Art of Problem Solving have less fluff. A good set of math textbooks with challenging problems are those co-authored by Dolciani http://www.welltrainedmind.com/forums/showthread.php?p=1787181 . One "human interest" feature in Dolciani's books are 1-page descriptions of the life and work of great mathematicians. They cannot appear in modern textbooks, because almost all of them were white men.


"To see what is in front of one's nose needs a constant struggle." - George Orwell