Our local school district has unfortunately adopted a math curriculum called "CPM" which is supposed to stand for "College Preparatory Mathematics" - an oxymoron if there ever was one. My wife is a licensed secondary-level math teacher, and does tutoring locally although she wouldn't be able to ethically work in the district if she was forced to use this horrible curriculum that amounts to educational malpractice.
Because the government education establishment in many places has given up on any attempt to maintain the tried-and-true approach to math education that has been employed in the past - building skills step-by-step in such a way that the student's "toolkit" grows in a logical fashion through the different skills, now they are left with a very fuzzy approach that doesn't really build anything on anything, and mostly is concerned with keeping busy doing something that they can pretend is math and pretend that some sort of progress is being made.
The most tragic part of it is that the kids who would have been the real math enthusiasts under traditional teaching methods never get the chance to see the order and beauty of math, because curricula like this completely hide it.
For more info on this, see the Web site mathematicallycorrect.com .
Because the poor government "education" establishment is failing to really teach math, of course they have to put a happy face on the situation by dumbing down the tests too.
In 1996, we took a tour of the birthplace of our Chevy Suburban, which was in Janesville, Wisconsin. I don't know whether that plant is still in operation to that scale though. You might do a little investigating on the Web and figure out a good one to visit that happens to be close to whatever route you decide on.
Slashdot Mirror
Our local school district has unfortunately adopted a math curriculum called "CPM" which is supposed to stand for "College Preparatory Mathematics" - an oxymoron if there ever was one. My wife is a licensed secondary-level math teacher, and does tutoring locally although she wouldn't be able to ethically work in the district if she was forced to use this horrible curriculum that amounts to educational malpractice.
Because the government education establishment in many places has given up on any attempt to maintain the tried-and-true approach to math education that has been employed in the past - building skills step-by-step in such a way that the student's "toolkit" grows in a logical fashion through the different skills, now they are left with a very fuzzy approach that doesn't really build anything on anything, and mostly is concerned with keeping busy doing something that they can pretend is math and pretend that some sort of progress is being made.
The most tragic part of it is that the kids who would have been the real math enthusiasts under traditional teaching methods never get the chance to see the order and beauty of math, because curricula like this completely hide it.
For more info on this, see the Web site mathematicallycorrect.com .
Because the poor government "education" establishment is failing to really teach math, of course they have to put a happy face on the situation by dumbing down the tests too.
In 1996, we took a tour of the birthplace of our Chevy Suburban, which was in Janesville, Wisconsin. I don't know whether that plant is still in operation to that scale though. You might do a little investigating on the Web and figure out a good one to visit that happens to be close to whatever route you decide on.