I believe that in a true college prep program where in order to get into Geometry a student had to have a grade of B or higher in Alg 1, then a traditional axiomatic geometry would work and a teacher could teach two-column proofs and survive.
When students are in geometry with F's made up in summer school to D's then just about any class is going to be rough. In Discovering Geometry, it was still hard to get the students to draw the conclusions even with all the examples and activities. And since the entire class, up to the end is done with "inductive" reasoning, the presentation of deductive reasoning is very different and evident. But as I have said before, using that book is not easy. And be ready, if it fails, the teachers will be blamed for not implementing it correctly with all the group/cooperative learning gunk.
Good Luck!
I agree with the author on many points. When the kids are rowdy, they will not cooperate and the types of activities they are being made to do require more than an adult's patience. The administrator's pov is great let's get rid of them. But I think as teachers we owe it to ourselves to educate all kids and traditional textbooks are by far the easiest avenue in terms of keeping kids on track for graduation.
ReplyDeleteAs for academic excellence, Singapore remains hands down the best possible curriculum for English-speakers.
Look up Stanislas Dehaene - France is adopting curriculum that is patterned after Asian textbooks. Its going to make a huge difference for them.