Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums General Discussion Common Core

I honestly never saw the point of geometry, to tell you the truth.

I don't think I even know what a geometric proof *is* or any "why" to go along with geometry.

I was tutored in it so that I could get to Calculus, which I suppose I understand a little better, meaning that i can auto-generate the answer pretty well in a very short period of time. Well, I used to be able to do that.

I think that is my point and Val's, though, Jon.

That without that emphasis on applied deductive reasoning, it is just sort of a jumble of memorized formulae having to do with areas and distances of plane figures.

That isn't what geometry should be teaching.

I'm guessing that you first saw the subject some time after 1990? That seems to be when this shift first occurred.

WITH that part of things, geometry becomes a marvelous puzzle game-- rather like those logic puzzles that the LSAT contains. It's terrific fun. Well, okay-- it's hard. But hard in a really GOOD way for GT students.

This is a large part of the reason why I regard initiatives like "Common Core" with a certain amount of disdain to begin with. I feel that they are enormously misguided at their very foundations. Not everyone probably can pass a good Geometry course. Even among those who can, not everyone will find it an epiphany.

Neither is a reason to make it unavailable to those who can and should be engaging with that material. Unfortunately, that is precisely what happens with initiatives like this. Under the twin guises of "pragmatism" and "standardization" various courses are watered down until anyone everyone can master the material.

:sigh:

No, I think I had the applied deductive reasoning thingy with proofs. I just didn't see the point of proofs generally or the applied deductive reasoning.

Geometry seemed quite boring me, which is why I just wanted to get through it and move on.

My general approach to math was as something that I could absorb and do faster than other people to beat them in math competitions.

Which was kind of my approach to school in general.

My purpose wasn't to learn, rather it was to win.

Yes, well, that certainly seems to be what my DD got out of geometry the way it is taught with Common Core (and similar initiatives) in mind.

At least a few people back in the day got more than that out of it, though-- and that's now virtually impossible since there is no longer any... THERE, there.

Yes, exactly. We water down the courses and then water them down some more and everyone smiles and pretends that our students are "learning geometry." They aren't. They're memorizing factoids so that they can pass simplistic multiple choice tests. And then everyone wonders why so many students end up in remedial math classes when they go to college. Please don't tell me that the colleges should have told the kids to study first: someone two or three months out of four years of solid high school math should be able to manage a bare scraping pass on a basic placement test, regardless of whether or not he spent some time the week before studying. Seriously.


And all the while, the effects of this dumbing down are creating or exacerbating terrible problems in our society (e.g. two years of student loans paying for remedial coursework; the needs of bright and gifted students being sidelined) while people put the same hackneyed solutions in a shiny new box and label it "Rigor (tm)!"

I can't recall a single time that I used anything that I recalled from geometry class, itself in the engineering undergrad.

Trigonometry, sure.

Geometry, no.

What's funny is that I just looked up trigonometry on wikipedia and learned that it dealt with triangles and the relationship between their sides.

It's amazing how many degrees you can get without learning basic things like what the word "trigonometry" means.

I just threw it into that box of "things with sines and cosines".

It's amazing how much completely disconnected and jumbled things I have learned over the years for no apparent purpose.

College math placement tests are pretty "simplistic" too, and they do not require students to write proofs. Students who get high enough scores on the math sections of the SAT or ACT place out of remedial math, and those exams have short answer and multiple choice questions.

I really don't understand the way math is structured in the US.

I studied geometry (and algebra) as part of the standard math curriculum starting in 6th grade in my home country. And in the math/science strand we certainly covered calculus in 12th grade (possibly starting in 11th grade) -- we needed those concepts for physics! But there was still geometry involved in 12th grade (and trigonometry).

And where does the idea that proofs are limited to geometry come from?!?

Math and multiple choice questions. How... sad.

Geometric proofs were my favorite part of math. (I'm not great at math. Really. I worked hard for a B+ in trig, the hardest class I ever took.) They were definitely NOT taught as fill in the blank when I took geometry as a 9th grader in 1988.