Excellent.

I've got to pick up Christopher, but I'm definitely going to start a page for this (I think I'll log it in the User Page).

-- CatherineJohnson - 27 Jul 2005

I would also add two things:

The ability to look at an answer and know that it is not correct and something went wrong in the calculation.

The ability to carry out several different steps of a problem with accuracy.

-- AnneDwyer - 27 Jul 2005

2 math ed blogs

Stephanie just sent me a link to a fascinating list of prerequisites for college math, which includes a terrific Comments thread, at Tall Dark and Mysterious, a blog written by "Twentysomething curmudgeon seeking employment teaching college math in BC."

And btw, these are not prerequisites for a serious college math course:

A year ago, I would have posted that list under a heading more along the lines of “Things Students Should Know By Grade Nine”, but alas, experience as extinguished such optimism on my part.

Based on my experiences, students graduating from high school should, in order to succeed in even the most basic college math classes:

1.Be able to add, subtract, multiply, and divide fractions. Moreover, they should understand that the horizontal bar in a fraction denotes division. (Seem obvious? I thought so, too, until I had a student tell me that she couldn’t give me a decimal approximation of (3/5)^8, because “my calculator doesn’t have a fraction button”.)

2.Have the times tables (single digit numbers) memorized. At minimum, they should understand what the basic operations mean. For instance, know that “times” means “groups of”, which will enable them to multiply, for instance, any number by 1 or 0 without a calculator, and without putting much thought into the matter. This would also enable those students who have not memorized their times tables to figure out what 3 times 8 was if they didn’t know it by heart.

3.Understand how to solve a linear (or reduces-to-linear) equation in a single variable. Recognize that the goal is to isolate the unknown quantity, and that doing so requires “undoing” the equation by reversing the order of operations. Know that that the equals sign means that both sides of the equation are the same, and that one can’t change the value of one side without changing the value of the other. (Aside: shortcuts such as “cross-multiplication” should be stricken from the high school algebra curriculum entirely - or at least until students understand where they come from. If I had a dollar for every student I ever tutored who was familiar with that phantom operation, and if I had to pay ten bucks for every student who actually got that cross-multiplication was just shorthand for multiplying both sides of an equation by the two denominators - I’d still be in the black.)

4.Be able to set up an equation, or set of equations, from a few sentences of text. (For instance, students should be able to translate simple geometric statements about perimeter and area into equations. ) Students should understand that (all together now!) an equation is a relationship among quantities, and that the goal in solving a word problem is to find the numerical value for one or more unknown quantities; and that the method for doing so involves analyzing how the given quantities are related. In order to measure whether students understand this, students must be presented, in a test setting, with word problems that differ more than superficially from the ones presented in class or in the textbook; requiring them only to parrot solutions to questions they have encountered exactly before, measures only their memorization skills.

5.Be able to interpret graphs, and to make transitions between algebraic and geometric presentations of data. For instance, students should know what an x- [y-]intercept means both geometrically (”the place where the graph crosses the x- [y-]axis”) and algebraically (”the value of x (y) when y [x] is set to zero in the function”).

6.Understand basic logic, such as the meaning of the “if…then” syllogism. They should know that if given a definition or rule of the form “if A, then B”, they need to check that the conditions of A are satisfied before they apply B. (Sound like a no-brainer? It should be. This is one of those things I completely took for granted when I started teaching at the college level. My illusions were shattered when I found that a simple statement such as “if A and B are disjoint sets, then the number of elements in (A union B) equals the number of elements in A plus the number of elements in B” caused confusion of epic proportions among a majority of my students. Many wouldn’t even check if A and B were disjoint before finding the cardinality of their union; others seemed to understand that they needed to see if A and B were disjoint, and they needed to find their cardinality - but they didn’t know how those things fit together. (They’d see that A and B were not disjoint, claim as much, and then apply the formula anyway.) It is a testament to the ridiculous extent to which mathematics is divorced from reality in students’ minds that three year olds can understand the implications of “If it’s raining, then you need an umbrella”, but that students graduating from high school are bewildered when the most elementary of mathematical concepts are juxtaposed in such a manner.)

7.More generally: students should know the basics of what it means to justify something mathematically. They should know that it is not enough to plug in a few values for x; you need to show that an identity, for instance, is true for all x. Conversely, they should understand that a single counterexample suffices to show that a claim is false. (Despite the affinity on the part of the high school text I am working for true/false questions, the students I am working with do not understand this.) Among the educational devices to be expunged from the classroom: textbooks that suggest that eyeballing the output of a graphing calculator is a legitimate method of showing, for instance, that a function has three zeroes or two asymptotes or what have you.


also added to the list by commenters:

I would add estimation and verification to that list. Students should know the difference between a sensible and nonsense answer.