My condolences.
Er-- I mean, uh, we've witnessed what Pearson's acquisition has done to curricular quality as a whole with Connections Academy-- it's NOT pretty.
Pearson supports whatever drives to all-digital delivery, btw. The reason is that annual licensing for use (limited time DRM) is far more profitable than textbook sales. Besides, if you control the DRM, there's no way for the school to
not buy from you next year if they decide that they'd rather just re-use the same text.
Oh, and they can "bundle" a lot of other slick but pedagogically untested/unsound fluff in there, too, and charge extra for the "innovation."
I
have seen and examined (albeit not closely) the Course 3 text from the enVision sequence. It's weak to the point of needing a brain transplant, and that is putting it mildly. It's such a mashup of different disciplines that it's a hopeless cause, IMO.
Inside the cover, even... there's a nifty PLAY! button-- which exhorts students to go to
PearsonSchool.com/DimensionM to "download the Mission" and "choose {their} avatar" and finally to "game on!!"
NOT ONE of the fifteen listed textbook reviewers is actually a
mathematician, nor, apparently, even an educator in the subject at the post-secondary level. It's difficult to tell, but it seems that none of the three authors who hold PhD's (of the seven) has one
in the discipline-- but in "math education" instead.
There are a number of "content consultants" listed, too-- at a quick Google, however, none of THEM have advanced degrees in mathematics, either, and some of them are apparently marketing specialists, or at least have no math specialty whatsoever, though this seems to not be most of them (most apparently are high school teachers, many with a background in test prepping).
With that promising beginning, moving on to the table of contents...
Which, in brief, look like this:
Ch 1. Algebra Integers and Algebraic Expressions
Ch 2. Rational Numbers
Ch 3. Real Numbers and the Coordinate Plane
Ch 4. Applications of Proportions
Ch 5. Applications of Percent
Ch 6. Algebra: Equations and Inequalities
Ch 7. Geometry
Ch 8. Measurement
Ch 9. Using Graphs to Analyze Data
Ch 10. Probability
Ch 11. Algebra: Functions
Ch 12. Algebra: Polynomials and Properties of Exponents.
Ohh, heyyyy-- it's a test-preparation book. Kind of. Well, that explains those consultant names, anyway.
If you're skeptically looking down that list for this (pre-algebra preparation) textbook, and thinking that "wow, this seems a little, um, diconnected and scattered" you'd be
right, incidentally. EVERY chapter has almost no connection to the one that precedes it, and not only are there large gaps in concept coverage, there are also wild assumptions about what students are supposed to have learned when entering this course, from what my DD tells me.
Until they adopted this textbook, the number one class that students wanted help with was geometry. Not anymore. THIS stinker is king.
It
is a good tool for doing surrealist performance art, though, according to my DD. Because that's certainly what it feels like to students trying to use the textbook to master the material. Like visiting Cirque du Soleil and attempting to learn modern dance.
Basically, if anything has changed since
this time, it's been in a direction that has made things exponentially WORSE than before, though the mind boggles, frankly.
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We've used the older (not Common Core) version of the Literature text, too. It was annoying in that it mostly gave watered down excerpted "readings" from larger works that most GT students would already be familiar with. Or should be, anyway. The supporting materials in that textbook were all over the place and all over the map in terms of quality, too-- it was a bit like a scavenger hunt to locate in-reading questions. On the bright side, those books used to be quite hefty, so no need for strength training if your child is lugging one of those around.
