Thoughts about Alternatives to the "Royal Road" to Calculus

Continued from previous blog: Math Awareness month begins... what I would like to focus on is the third point NCTM made in the quote above: Technology as a tool should [..] influence what mathematics is taught. What mathematics should be taught in the 21st century? Should some of our sacred cows topics take a back seat? My take is that the math topics don't matter as much as long as they are embedded in interesting contexts that engage students in learning; mostly through well crafted projects. This will prepare students to effectively deal with the challenges of 21st century life. Can we collaboratively build towards this vision? cc blog 96

The NCTM president Michael Schaughnessy wrote this message to lead off this month's NCTM Summing Up newsletter:

Some Thoughts on Calculus and a Thank You!
Calculus is often viewed as the entry path to college mathematics. However, a high school calculus course should not be the be-all and end-all of mathematics, nor should it be the only transition path from high school to college mathematics. High school mathematics should prepare students not just for further, specialized study in mathematics but also for the variety of STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) careers and other professions that will be open to them in the future. Recently NCTM and the Mathematical Association of America (MAA) crafted a new joint position statement on the role of calculus in the transition from high school to postsecondary mathematics. 
[...]

Both NCTM and the MAA have found evidence that there are a number of strong mathematics students who successfully finish calculus before or in college and then happily announce that they “never have to take another math course!” As a result, we are losing large numbers of highly qualified mathematics students very early in their college careers. Many of these students are strong candidates for possible STEM careers—some of our best students, in fact. Also, we may be turning a number of potential mathematics students off by pushing them through years of a repetitive and overly narrow, algebra-focused mathematics curriculum, which doesn’t give students sufficient opportunities to broaden their horizons in other areas of mathematics, such as in various geometries, discrete mathematics, statistics, or linear algebra (February 2011 President’s Message, “Endless Algebra,” also discussed this pitfall). Read the entire message.

From "Endless Algebra" (Michael Schaughnessy, 2011):

[...]The Common Core State Standards provide us with an opportunity to rethink the sequence of school mathematics, as well as a challenge to provide exciting new pathways and transitions from high school to college mathematics. We need to offer students alternative pathways as they make their transition from secondary school and into colleges. The mathematics paths that we provide for our students need to prepare them for existing fields that are changing rapidly, as well as for emerging fields—and for fields that don’t yet exist. In my view, the current deadly sequence of ever-repetitive and out-of- touch experiences in algebra—the sequence intended to lead students to a single variable calculus course—will not accomplish this goal. It is time that we replace the eternal algebra transition from high school to college with some viable and exciting 21st century mathematics alternatives.[...] 

For me this change is long overdue. What are your thoughts?

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Celebrating Math Awareness Month - NCTM's technology themed annual conference

CLIME Connections continues to chronicle the road to the Final Four days of the 2011-2012 NCTM's Technology themed conferences culminating in Philadelphia this month. It all started last fall with the regional conference in Atlantic City where CLIME exhibited, followed by events in St. Louis and Albuquerque where attendees participated in a one day Learn/Reflect strand of technology themed sessions. Four guiding questions were posted and were used as talking points at a debriefing session held later that same afternoon. This will be repeated in Philadelphia on Thursday, April 26th starting at 9:30am with a kickoff presentation given by Thomas Dick and followed by 24 sessions from which you can choose to attend. Though it's only possible to participate in few of these sessions, collectively we hope to gain from the "wisdom of the crowd" as folks will meet up later in the day for the debriefing session at 3:30. I hope you attend and let us know how it went. (See list of all 26 sessions.) If you are one of the speakers (of any technology themed sessions) and would like to update the listing let me know and I'll update it immediately.

Dan Meyer heads up a list of highlighted speakers in Philadelphia
There are plenty of other technology related sessions. Some of them were highlighted by NCTM. Here's CLIME's list of technology Linchpins who will be speaking out about effective ways to use technology that are changing the teaching and learning of mathematics.

Recent talk

Dan Meyer shared with me that "it would be great to recruit bloggers to attend each of those talks, write a review, take a photo, grab supplemental resources, etc. Something that will add value after the conference." I hope you can help with this. Let me know if you will be blogging about the conference sessions in Philly.
For those of you who haven't seen Dan in action, here's a recent presentation. His NCTM talk #474 on Friday is "Why Students Hate Word Problems."

My biggest disappointment about the upcoming NCTM conference is that there are no sessions (including mine which I just corrected on the CLIME listing) on how math blogging is changing the landscape of math teacher's professional collaboration. I definitely will bring it up at my session. Mike Thayer (session 153) has posted his thoughts about the upcoming conference here.

Conference highlights rewind from previous blog entries

• See Conference online Program book. Unfortunately, the final physical program book won't be available until the conference starts. But you can get a listing of all the sessions from NCTM search page or if it's technology sessions you are interested in here's the full list. 
• Speakers can upload handouts on the NCTM speaker site. Instructions are here. As of today only 9 speakers have posted. I hope NCTM will contact the speakers again about this before the conference begins.
• What kind of technologies are showcased at the conference. Check out the stats at Blog 100.
• Technology theme discussion blog 96.

Here's the comment/reply I just posted at blog 96:

Math Awareness month begins... what I would like to focus on is the third point NCTM made: Technology as a tool should [..] influence what mathematics is taught. So what mathematics should be taught in the 21st century? Should some of our "sacred cow" topics take a back seat? My take is that the math topics don't matter as much as long as they are embedded in interesting contexts that engage students in learning; mostly through well crafted projects. This will prepare students to effectively deal with the challenges of 21st century living. Can we collaboratively build towards this vision? Other opinions? Please reply.

cc blog 104