mile wide and foot thick?

[djs]

A common criticism of math education in the United States is that our curriculum is a mile wide and an inch thick.  It was my understanding that the Common Core would try to address this problem.  I teach high school math and I feel as if the Common Core has addressed the inch thick problem but not the mile wide issue.  It seems as if the number of topics/concepts we are being asked to teach has not been reduced but we are being asked to teach them at a much deeper level.   Don’t get me wrong, I’m all in favor of teaching at a much deeper level but I worry that with the number of topics that are still in the Common Core teachers will continue to simply “cover” math topics.  Of course, part of the problem is that due to cuts in funding schools seem to have fewer and fewer days on instruction.

I would be very interested in hearing your comments regarding the number of topics we are being asked to teach in high school math.   Do the writers of the common core standards believe that they reduced the number of topics that were previously being taught in most states?  If so, what high school topics do they believe they removed?  Are there some common core content standards that are less important than others?

 

[Bill McCallum]

It’s true that the number of topics is not much reduced in high school from what is traditional from what is traditional, although there was some reduction. But I would argue that a topic count does not quite capture the focus of the high school standards, because the emphasis on reasoning and seeing structure has the potential to unify what were previously seen by students as many different unconnected techniques. Whether this happens or not depends on textbooks and teachers, of course. But I would hope, for example, that rather than seeing the many different forms of an equation of a straight line as things to be memorized separately, students would see the unifying idea of slope as enabling them to come up with the form they need in a given situation.

[Anonymous]

In fact I am seeing that the number of topics are increasing, but every topic need t be fundamental in terms of learning and development for other can cope for it and that every stages of each topic is needed to determine in which every takers earn their stages of mistakes and correct them from it.

Regards.
Allen of http://www.digitekprinting.com/

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