Description
Our Making Math Meaningful™ workbooks are specifically designed to lead the students along a path of discovery. The teacher needs to carefully guide the students along this path. The problems contained in these workbooks are NOT randomly ordered or selected. They are chosen to promote the development of mathematical thinking in a very conscious way. As teachers of math, our most important task is to develop mathematical thinking in our students. This thinking needs to be flexible and creative.
Who can use this workbook? Most of the author’s teaching experience is within the Waldorf school system. Yet this workbook can be effectively used by any teacher or homeschooling parent who wishes to teach meaningful, age-appropriate math.
Blind procedures vs. discovery and mathematical experiences
As we mention in our HS Source Book, we feel that all too often the standard approach to teaching math is based on “blind procedures”; students simply follow procedures without any understanding of what they are doing. In contrast, we have tried to put together our high school workbooks so that, whenever possible, the students are led on a path of discovery.
We also feel that mainstream mathematics emphasizes procedural skills too much. Often, 90% of classroom time (or more) is spent having the students slog through countless “problems”, all in the name of checking off topics on the LIST, and ensuring ourselves that our students have good “skills” (at solving meaningless problems). In contrast, we believe it is important to have a healthy balance between procedural skills and real “mathematical experiences”.
We encourage you to read more about all of this in our HS Source Book.
The units covered in this workbook are:
- Pre-Algebra
- Algebra Basics
- Exponents and Polynomials
- Factoring
- Word Problems
- Midyear Review (incl. eighth grade material)
- Fractions & Square Roots
- The Quadratic Formula
- Logarithms, Part I
- Possibility & Probability, Part I
- Cartesian Geometry, Part I
