[Fhsst-authors] Re: [Fhsst-admin-priv] Re: Free High School Science Texts

[Sam Halliday]

Peter Hutnick wrote:
> I have strong opinions about the way Algebra is taught.  Specifically,
> I think that vocabulary (and by extension notation) are given the
> short shrift.  I like to focus on the relationship between concepts. 
> (I make a big deal that "there's no such thing as subtraction. 
> There's no such thing as division.  Exponentiation is just a special
> case of multiplication.  The distance formula is just the Pythagorean
> formula (which, in Trig, is revealed to be a degenerate case of the
> law of sines and the law of cosines).)    I think that is is valuable
> to avoid intimidating the student.  I think that showing these
> connections helps the student feel less adrift.

good... we want stuff to be make simple and accesible to the everyone.
we all do this for fun... so we want to convey this in our book. please
remember we are still pre-alpha, and a lot of proof reading has to be
done, and especially maths will change very much in the next while

> The upshot is that I start with the rudiments of addition and work
> from there.  I group concepts in a way that I think is more logical
> than the traditional way.  Why study logs /weeks/ after studying
> exponents?  Why study radicals /at all/, when fractional exponents are
> so much more sensible?

i'm afraid we don;t write the syllabus, so we are kinda stuck with what
the SA governemnt thinks kids should learn. we can of course, rearrange
it!

ok.. now i really am off, please email any more questions to this list,
and im sure someone will asnwer them

cheers,
Sam
-- 
Free High School Science Texts
  http://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/fhsst
Sam's Homepages
  http://fommil.homeunix.org/~samuel
  http://www.ma.hw.ac.uk/~samuel

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