Originally Posted by madeinuk
Originally Posted by NotSoGifted
Guess I never heard it called high school geometry, but middle kid took geometry in middle school. Always at least a couple dozen who do this in our district. You can only take it in middle school if you are on the highest track or accelerated in math.

I remember doing Euclidian Geometry including theorems and their proofs up to the 4th postulate and the definition, at least, of parallelism at junior school before I was 11 in England back in the early Seventies. It followed right on from Arithmetic and after that we started with basic Algebra (simple linear equations).

I have never understood, given the sheer parsimony of it, why US schools wait so long to cover it.

It was cool and we got to learn to use compasses to draw and explore the properties of circles, chords, sectors, tangents, triangles, create perpendicular lines and bisect lines etc long before we learned how to use a protractor. Maybe people are afraid of injuries and lawsuits now given how discipline in schools has all but disappeared in many schools.

Actually, your assumptions are not true and have not been true for at least a decade in my children's district and many other districts (in different states) of which I am aware. There is even the term "elementary geometry" sometimes used to describe the geometry routinely covered in the elementary curriculum. Circumference, area, volume, parallel/perpendicular lines ,translating/rotating/flipping figures, and compass/protractor use are just some of the topics routinely covered in elementary school. In our district's pre-algebra curriculum, easily a third of the curriculum would be more properly classified as pre-geometry and further extends coverage of geometry-type topics. "High school" geometry, which my DS will study in 6th grade will be routinely taken in 8th grade by "GT" students(maybe about a quarter of students as the label becomes more inclusive in middle school). That "high school" geometry course will require the ability to write proofs.