[Edu-sig] Switching gears...

[Kirby Urner]

It's rather complicated in the US.  The National Council of
Teachers of Mathematics publishes standards which private 
text book companies advertise they follow.  Then you have 
some states like California which have published their own
standards, and lots of raging debates, so-called "math wars"
over what is an appropriate approach.

So questions like yours tend to prompt a lot of opinions 
about various text books, which one is the best or worst, 
each with its champions.  Not so long ago, I did a web 
search on "fuzzy math" (one of the criticisms of the so-
called "new new math" is that it's "fuzzy") and collected
some example links.  You can find them here:

http://www.mathforum.com/epigone/math-teach/quaxswinfrou

If you really want to know more, I can send you some more
URLs.  In any case, it's not a simple picture.

Kirby

PS:  none of the K-12 text books do anything with Python
that I'm aware of.  I think teachers should be responsible
for developing curriculum and sharing it over the web 
within their professional peer group (many teachers are
doing this already).  The mass publishing approach has 
too much inertia, is too slow to adapt.  A few schools 
with a future-oriented mindset are using the web to 
compensate for the short-comings of these obsolete text 
book offerings.  Most are stuck in a rut, which is sad
for the students.

At 09:27 PM 02/28/2001 +0100, Emmanuel Viennet wrote:
>
> Hi,
>
>I follow with interest your discussion about math 
>teaching in the US. The situation in France may
>be similar... 
>Just for my curiosity, where can we get on the web
>the details of the math program for the K12
>curriculum ?
>
>Thanks
>Emmanuel