[My dd is finishing is up RS B in two weeks.]

I'd let her learn at her own speed and worry about what happens when she gets stuck--if and when that happens.

 

My son was read for algebra more or less in the fifth grade and he hasn't had particular difficulty with dealing with the abstraction of it now that we are into it in the sixth grade although he works much slower than an 8th or 9th grader would.

 

The biggest problem that I have with him working at an advanced levels is that he doesn't grasp the adult applications of the math. For example, if he had to calculate compound interest involving mortgages his hang up would be with, "what's a mortgage and why do people take loans out on houses to begin with?" rather than the compound interest itself.

 

I put more anxiety into "he's going to hit a wall" than I should have back when he was in the first and second grades. There are arithemetic supplements that can bridge the gap between arithmetic and algebra if it comes down to that.

 

My older son is aware of the fact that his younger brother is making better grades in second grade math than he did when he was in the second grade (we've have kept all his tests) and he dismisses that as, "That's because he likes it more." And that probably is the truth of the matter.

 

I have wondered why math is different from art or music. What happens to the ego if a younger sibling draws better, plays better, or can do more graceful cartwheels in gymnastics? It still gives me great pleasure to plunk my way through Moonlight Sonata although many piano students even at young ages can play this much more skillfully than I. That is a value that I wish to transmit to my children when it comes to pouting because brother does it better. If you like the activity then do it for that reason and don't worry about others. If you don't like the activity then it's no surprise that those who do like it spend more time on it, concentrate more, remember more, and gain more skill.

 

It probably is also helpful if the older child has activities which only he does in which the younger sibling does not participate.

[What Books are in your Google Library?]

I have no idea how to search specifically for children. Hmmm.

 

I came across general histories such as "Stories of the Maple Land"

And McIlWraith's Canada.

 

I do understand the "pejorative issue," there are very few 19th c history books for children that I've read that I haven't seen one thing or another that I wish they would have phrased a bit differently.

[Logic at the high school level? Computer logic, formal logic texts?]

 

What else is out there? How close to formal logic is computer logic? Is there a formal logic course out there that aligns with computer logic?

 

What can you recommend?

 

"First Course on Mathematical Logic" in the mail yesterday. I was expecting it to be all symbols and really hard, but it's not all symbols. It was written back in the 1960s and the preface says that it was field tested in various classrooms. The author claims it to be a course for high school students or first year college students but after having flipped (see, flipping is a very methodical and authoritive way in which to ascertain the contents and nature of a book ;-) I think my son will be ready for this next year.

 

Just to recap, I haven't used this book yet, I just got in the mail yesterday but if someone out there just can't wait to add another logic book to their collection for consideration for a future course, here's another title.

 

And Laura, I can't speak to how to coordinate Geometry and logic, but Suppes' book seems to be a very gentle lead-up to mathematical proofs. The proofs that he has at the very end of the book my son can already do.

 

Patrick Suppes Home Page

[This is an anti-thread...]

I don't belong here because I do belong here but since everyone else here doesn't belong here then I guess I don't after all.

 

Hey, remember the Monty Python Scene:

"You are all individuals!"

"I'm not!"

[What Books are in your Google Library?]

Wow!! What a wonderful site. I downloaded....

 

 

• the Famous Men of .... series from John H. Haaren.

• "A Teacher's Manual" a book on natural reading - Haaren

• "Ballads & Tales Fourth grade Reader" - Haaren

• New American Practical Navigator - Bowditch

• Elementary Lessons in Physics (rec from other poster, THANKS!)

and a few others, I'm still hunting through it.

 

Here's my library http://books.google.com/books?as_list=BDUeHDgYQx466sIDW5b_OARoURytsU2_VmRBMS-JbSle9prjGtjE

 

 

I had to take a look at Bowditch and it's far more technical that anything I'm ready for right now! Do you sail?

[What Books are in your Google Library?]

Wow! I didn't know anything about this. How can I search for children's books? Have you printed any out or do you both just read online?

 

I've been reading mine online, but it's quite comfortable doing so on a laptap. My daughter reads online too. The science reader that Jessica pointed out to me I downloaded as a PDF file. There is an option in the right column that allows this and I'm thinking about perhaps printing out select pages to use during school.

[What Books are in your Google Library?]

I liked the Chambers Science Readers and bookmarked those. I also added your "Seven Sisters" book to my library. I think my daughter would like both of these.

[which do you prefer?]

This year I used both with my first and second grader. I found that there were not enough of lessons in MCP to cover the entire year and in the beginning they worked multiple lessons. They have now finished their grade level of MCP and I put the first grader in ETC 5 and the second grader in ETC 5 1/2.

 

The advantage of MCP is that it reviews previously learned phonics while the advantage of ETC is that it seems to offer more in depth practice. I will continue having them work through different levels of ETC until the fall and then I'll put them into their corresponding grade level of MCP.

 

At the K level I had them do ETC since I felt that levels 1 & 2 of ETC were much simpler for them and that MCP was too busy and had too many sight words.

[What Books are in your Google Library?]

For those not in the know, Harvard is taking all of the books in their library that have expired copyrights and putting them online. You go to the google page, then click on "More" to select books. Use the "full view" search feature and you'll start seeing results.

 

I've got some technical stuff that might not be interesting to anyone but me, but I also have,

1. Lewis Carol's Curiousa Matematica

2. A Beacon Introductory Second Reader: Animal Folk Tales By James Hiram Fassett which happens to be right at the reading level of my daughter and when she reads it she thinks she's doing something special online.

3. Florian Cajoris arithmetic for primary students up to 3/4th grade.and his grammar school book which goes up to pre-algebra. Cajori is in wiki and wrote a enough math texts to go from first grade to college level work. I'm not actually doing these with my kids; I just keep looking at them and thinking along the lines of possible supplement for extra problems and word problems.

 

I've seen several people have been recommending google books from time to time and I'm nosey. What's in your library?

[Kimber Re: Singapore Math]

I suppose it depends on what your goals in math are.

 

This is a repost of something that I said in another thread,

 

In general, I will say that my big enlightenment was that it is one thing to train a student to use math as a tool for his future vocation and for daily use--say engineering and accounting-- but it's an entirely different thing to study math as a subject.

 

Many parents imagine the study of music, art, or literature is done simply for the sake of those fields and not for any specific vocational or utilitarian needs. For example, when a kid studies biology, while there are utilitarian needs addressed in the curriculum, the curriculum includes a sampling of the major areas of biology that a professional biologist is involved in. The same is true for psychology, your psychology 101 class gives you a sampling of all the areas of psychology. History and philosophy give you overviews of those fields but the traditional math sequence of high school does not give the student a sampling of what math is as an academic field: topology, analysis, algebra (not elementary algebra), number theory, etc. nor the methodology used in those fields.

 

The interest in such a pursuit is really subjective, no one is going to fail the SAT because they didn't prove that the multiplicative inverse is unique, or because he didn't read Ovid in Latin, for example. In the context of a classical education we are interested in proof because it is the "justification" in Plato's defintion of knowledge as being justified true belief. It is true that cross multiplication works. But believing that it works because it always has so far, or because the book says so does not constitute valid justification and therefore, philosophically speaking, according to Plato's definition, the student doesn't have knowledge of this theorem even though he can skillfully apply it.

 

In one popular algebra text that I have sitting on my shelf the transitive property of inequalities is treated in the following manner, "...if x<y, and y<z, then it follows that x<z. It is easy to see with a number line why this is true. The inequalities x, y and y , z mean that x is to the left of y and y is to the left of z."

 

That is a lie. The graph does not show why it is true, it merely illustrates that it is true in a particular context. This can be detected by the use of circular reasoning in their graphical "proof/definition". How does the student know where to place the number on the numberline without evaluating beforehand which is greater? This perhaps doesn't seem like such a problem when working with integers, the student knows where to put five and three on a number line because he already knows which is greater, but how about determining the order of a/d and b/c if a>b and c>d?

 

Where they appear in an illustration isn't what determines their order. One counterexample for the child that thinks that greater than "means that" the number is on the right is to flip his graph with his numbers on it 180 degrees and he will see that now the greater number is on the left so that definition doesn't hold. How did we get fooled then?

 

It is true that 5 is greater than 3.

It is true that on a particular kind of number line 5 is to the right of 3.

It is not true that one of those statements follows from the other, (if p then q) yet in many textbooks the student is invited to jump to such a conclusion.

 

It's not so much that a rigorous program trains the mind, so much as that a non-rigorous program perhaps facilitates and encourages fallacious reasoning.

 

Here is a good, if not long, article written by a Princeton mathematician for a general non-specialist audience on the history of proof in math. He gets off to the typical start with the Greeks but his treatment of the 19th and 20th century is more interesting.

 

Here is a tirade by a mathematician about "proof by picture" and other picky pedantic gripes about how Calculus is taught.

[Kimber Re: Singapore Math]

Some time ago I was following the blog of a graduate student in math who was from Singapore. He had a post up about the deficits of Singapore math as he percieved them and here are some of the more relevant points and quotes from others who commented on his blog:

 

"I don’t think we have any idea how to create formulas in the first place."

 

"a lot of people trying out Singapore Math want to implement it wholesale for K-12. Then they get upset at how Maths Syllabus ‘D’ (E Maths) is missing all sorts of things…

 

"I don’t think the Sg math syllabus lets us understand how the principles work at all. It’s all a matter of telling us the formulas and teaching us how to use them;"

 

"I think our curriculum is awesome for the elementary school. After that it kind of loses steam as it gears up toward pre-specified ‘O’ and ‘A’ level syllabuses which may or may not reflect the skills needed in modern jobs."

 

"I also agree about the benefits of proof-based mathematics for logical reasoning. I grade the homeworks for a lower-level calculus course at my university and the number of elementary logical fallacies students commit is astounding."

 

It is very difficult finding open discussion about the flaws of Singapore math. It seems that it's illegal to speak out against the government or its programs there in any way, and in fact, this particular blogger was later sued by the Spore government for libel (but not for this particular post but of another that was critical of an entirely different topic)

 

H Wu also has publically said that there are flaws in Singapore math that deal with content but he did not elaborate on what that might be.

 

It is difficult for me to judge the merit of the above criticisms because when a mathematician or math major refers to "how the principles work" they usually mean something on an entirely different level than the rest of us do. Furthermore, I wonder if the same things can't be said about any American math program. (I've seen the same sorts of things said about Saxon, for example.) So there is what I found related to content for what it's worth.

 

While we eeventually did find an old out of print proof-based algebra curriculum the difficulty of the mechanical calculations that are in the exercises isn't anything like what NEM offers.

[Smaller and purer, or bigger and broader: where are the classical homeschoolers?]

What I'm hearing on the boards more often is not so much that someone's child can not, but that he dislikes some particular subject and wishes not to do it, so the parent is opting for some easier option. There is a huge difference here.

 

It is the spirit of rigor, and not the particulars of rigor, that I miss.

 

I think that reflects the general trend of the philosophy of education in the public schools, in that context one hears more about getting the children to "like" a subject rather than actual achievement. At the risk of overgeneralization the ed school message is that the only way that children can learn is if they are "engaged."

 

In the extreme this is catering to instant gratification. If the kid doesn't find it interesting or relevant (oh, and that's a whole ball of wax for those us interested in a dead language, is it not?) they steer clear of it. And I don't suppose I entirely fault someone for avoiding programs which require a lot of ungratifying work since many students really have been exposed to relentless, mindless, and purposeless busy work and why should it be any different this time?

 

I think there must be some small subset of parents that really did shlog through a year or two of work, perhaps as undergraduates or perhaps in graduate school, that had no immediate reward but did finally enjoy the fruits of their labor at the end and it's just easier for us to trust this kind of an approach.

 

One of the more helpful suggestions in Well-Trained Mind is to keep a portfolio or record of work accomplished in a binder and then the child can reflect back and see how far he has come. This has been useful for me when it comes to encourage my son to keep on and not get discouraged.

 

If the kid goes on to college, no one will care about how much they "like" Spanish and much fun they think it is to talk to the carpet installer-- their test paper is just another one of hundreds and they'll be counted off for incorrect mood on their verbs along with the kids that don't particular like Spanish but do it because it's required.

 

 

I never liked my major, I just realized that I was better at it than almost anyone else and got a degree in it. The one class that I really hated and found difficult turned out to have a surpise ending when I was finished with it and worth it when I was done.

 

I smile everytime I think of GH Hardy saying that as a boy he never liked math but he was just competitive and did better than the other boys.

 

Because of my experience I'm not terrified of giving my kids work that they don't particularly like.

[Smaller and purer, or bigger and broader: where are the classical homeschoolers?]

"

My son did Vergil in his sophomore year (Caesar in 9th) and is now doing Catullus/Horace. He'll study Medieval Latin next year. I do lament that he has not taken Greek! He wishes he had begun that earlier, as well, and he has a friend who is in the same online Latin class with him who is also reading Homer this year in Greek.

 

When did you start Latin? What texts did you use? In retrospect, when would have been a good time to have started Greek?

[Smaller and purer, or bigger and broader: where are the classical homeschoolers?]

"FWIW, no, I haven't rated my own post. -nt- "

 

I did.:D

 

I tried just giving you a positive rep privately for simply bringing up a neat discussion topic but a message came up and said I had to give points to someone else so I guess I must have already repped you earlier and so I just repped the whole thread instead.

 

From Tracy Lee Simmons pgs 14-15,

 

Thus nowadays may classical education refer to something not linked to the classical word at all--never mind the langauges--and get equated with what what might have once been called simply traditional or orthodox education. This is school based on "the classics," on the books of the Great Tradition, an education that serves to inform us of the best works of our civilization and to provide us with models for spotting ethical and aesthetic norms. These two functions the valuable "Great Books" programs try to perform. Used in this way, classical education describes the quest for what has also been called a "liberal education" or, more particularly, an education in the "humanities." And now legions of well-intending home schoolers rush to put dibs on the term and bask in the light of the glory they believe it to exude. To many home schoolers, "classical education" simply means the opposite of whatever is going on in those dreaded public schools. We can sympathize with them. I will only say to all these good people that extending "classical" to mark an approach or course of study without reference to Greek and Latin seems an unnecessarily promiscuous usage. But I am afraid we're stuck with it.

 

And although it is not apparent from that quote and Simmons makes this clear in the rest of the book, that while the study of Latin and Greek is necessary, it is not sufficient to making an education a classical education. For example, the local public high schools where I live all offer Latin to high school students but it's not a "classical education." For example, the following lists the classical course of study in a Boston high school about mid 19th century,

 

 

Anyone here doing Caesar the sophomore year and Virgil and Xenophon the junior? I'd love to read through some threads on how that's going.

 

We dropped Latin this year but will definitely pick it back up again next. I downloaded Xenophon from textkit.com with the best of intentions of making that my goal in high school. For right now I've been getting my classical education fix from reading the blogs of classicists and high school Latin teachers.

 

Carry on.

[Will dd not be prepared for her chosen major?]

 

Anyone have encouraging stories of their dc or someone they know that was just average in math and still reached their science degree dreams? Is it still ok to be average?

I am sure there are anecdotes of individuals making it through any program that's ever been marketed since there are always kids that succeed, but statistically speaking

the average

high school student does not even get a college degree, much less a degree in math and science.

 

Here's what I mean. In the state in which I live half of the students do not graduate high school. Out of the students that do graduate about half go on to attend college, and about half of those graduate. Out of the students that graduate the majority of them are education and liberal arts majors.

 

I have seen statistics online that say that if a student places directly into Calculus in their freshman year that they have a much, much greater chance of finishing their math/science degree than a student who placed back into algebra, and the chances are indeed very slim for a student who can't even place into algebra. While textbooks may be labeled, "college" algebra, there really is no such thing. Algebra is not a college level course, it is a high school level course. If it were "college" level you'd see AP exams in which students could earn college credits toward algebra. Similarly, calculus really is a college level course even though it's offered in high schools. Most math and science degree programs that I have seen do not count algebra as a credit and consider it remedial work.

 

The moral is that it really doesn't matter what your textbook author says about the quality of the high school math program that they themselves created, what matters is how the university evaluates your students' preparation. Can you contact the math department to find out what their expectations are? Can you find out what placement test they use? Can you find samples to practice? By the end of high school can your student do the problems they give their students in the textbook they use for their course? Does the department have released copies of finals from their algebra course? What exactly are the math requirements in the major that your student wishes to pursue?

[Sequential Spelling Question]

, but I'm wondering if it works better if I show them the word. Do I need to dig out my white board for best results?

 

I'm speculating, but this program was invented for dyslexics, was it not? (Do I remember this correctly) I have used it with my dyslexic son specifically because he was weak in his ability to visually recognize when two words matched and when they didn't. When doing an exercise with him I made sure to write the word rather than spell it out orally. So, that required him to very carefully and methodically examine letter by letter what the problem might be. (He is eleven and still reverses b/d, by the way). I think that it helped to develop a habit that he was able to apply in other situations. For example, say when he's writing an answer in science, he's more likely to carefully recheck the word that he's writing against wherever it is that he's copying it from than he was before.

 

I never used a white board, I just wrote it out on a sheet of paper like he was doing.

 

I would be very interested in what the author of this program has to say about this.

[Is there a way to classify a math program as classical?]

Yes, there are two defining criteria (or just one and the other's wrong, but let's not go there, please) --

 

1) Neoclassical and/or WTM hs'ers would say that if a math program focuses on the facts (grammar) in the early years, the relationships (logic) in the middle years, and communicating with or application of math (rhetoric) in the later years, then it's a classical program. I think Logos School publishes a grammar of math program.

 

2)Traditional classical hs'ers would say that if a math program is grounded upon, if not strictly limited to, the wisdom and learning of the ancient Greeks and Romans and their languages. A year spent with Euclid or Pythagoras would be a classical math program. Wildridge publishes two middle school software programs which teach math via music theory and astronomy, just like the ancients did.

 

Let me throw this idea out there as another possible interpretation. :) Perhaps the trivium was not about math and historically the mathematical sciences were part of the quadrivium, not the trivium. Although if you want to apply the trivium as "stages" rather than as content areas then it might go something like this:

 

Grammar stage - Basic mastery of the algorithms of arithmetic.

 

Logic stage- Learning why those algorithms work and learning mathematical justification. For example, rather than only applying "invert and multiply" to solve a problem about pies or plumbing, the student in the logic stage studies why this algorithm works the way that it does and can derive it from first principles.

 

Rhetoric stage would build on the student's knowledge of first principles and the student would make original mathematical arguments in support of the truth of a propositions about mathematical objects.

 

The culmination of this in a classical education was in fact synthetic geometry and not anything like Calculus. At the time when classical education and Latin grammar schools were popular the foundations of algebra and calculus had not been discovered (they still relied on Euclidean axioms of equality for justification) and entire fields of math, such as topology, didn't even exist.

 

When mathematicians say that students learn math "heuristically" they mean that the student is not learning the proper mathematical justification for what they are doing. When they use the word "rigor" or "rigorous" to describe a math book they mean that the student is learning the proper mathematical justification that motivates an algorithm. When the rest of us use the word "rigorous" we mean that the program has lots of hard problems.

[Talk, talk, talk. Literature, history, why not math?]

"The i's have it".

 

"If I've told you once, I've told you k + 1 times."

[Talk, talk, talk. Literature, history, why not math?]

 

that we ask regarding literature and history: why would you need to do that, does this always work, can you see a different way of setting this up, I don't understand the graph you drew, you didn't draw a picture??? You get my drift.

Anyway, I wonder if some things like geometric proofs or chapter five or whatever it is in Lial's that bogs many kids down which just get a bit easier if the material were discussed. I'm not suggesting that parents lecture on the math, but ask the same kinds of questions

 

Jane the Fearless Homeschooler (at least at the moment!)

 

Jane, it sounds like you might be talking about taking a "philosophical" approach to math. From what I have seen this is in fact how mathematicians conduct class at the higher levels and whenever I've had questions about something it's how people interact with me as well.

 

Are you familiar with "The Moore Method" by the way? It was the teaching style of RL Moore.

[What math is needed to begin physics?]

Hi Rhonda,

 

An absolutely fabulous resource for anyone planning on majoring in physics is www.physicsforums.com

 

It's exactly the same board system as this one and has extremely active posters from a broad background--applied mathematicians, physics majors, as well as high school students--all discussing what has worked and what hasn't.

[Math Scope and Sequence]

 

I'd like general advice about what resources you might have used to decide how to approach math as a subject, and of course any specific advice about curriculum to consider is also welcome.

 

The best resource on how to approach math as a subject is a content expert--a research mathematician.

 

Before I found any "support" groups online, before I came across Well-Trained Mind, I was emailing unversity mathematicians and asking questions.

 

In general, I will say that my big enlightenment was that it is one thing to train a student to use math as a tool for his future vocation and for daily use--say engineering and accounting-- but it's an entirely different thing to study math as a subject.

 

Many parents imagine the study of music, art, or literature is done simply for the sake of those fields and not for any specific vocational or utilitarian needs. For example, when a kid studies biology, while there are utilitarian needs addressed in the curriculum, the curriculum includes a sampling of the major areas of biology that a professional biologist is involved in. The same is true for psychology, your psychology 101 class gives you a sampling of all the areas of psychology. History and philosophy give you overviews of those fields but the traditional math sequence of high school does not give the student a sampling of what the subject area of math is: topology, analysis, algebra, number theory, etc. nor the methodology used in those fields.

 

It has been of great interest to me to see that PhD mathematicians do want their kids to have a math education that has nothing to do with future vocational training and everything to do with studying the subject for its own sake--no surprise there really. So, I have noted that people like Mark Solomonovich wrote a book specifically for teaching his daughter, that Alexander Givental did a marvelous translation of Kielev's Geometry, that Robert Talbert is considering an old 1960s text that he thinks gives a broad overview of math to liberal arts majors rather than keeping them plugging away on the path to engineering calculus, I watched videos of university mathematicians involved in the direct education of high school students and paid attention to what content they were emphasizing.

 

Having a husband with an advanced degree in math and a father in law who is a retired mathematician has made getting opinions of curricula a bit easier for me. Their first and foremost concern is that a book be correct and lead the student further down the path towards the study of math for its own sake. They really do not care at all if the presentation is in and of itself entertaining and are occassionaly privately derisive about claims that, "the students love math now since we changed to XYZ program" responding with, "the kids don't like the math, they like the video, the personality, the cartoon characters," etc and it is their most earnestly held belief that the way to get a kid like math is to give him interesting problems to work on. In fact, they will not infrequently propose a problem for the kids (and even to me!) to think about and it's all done orally while driving down the road with no video game, no worksheet, no time limit, just the kid turning over an idea in his head.

[EUCLID 13 Books of The Elements, what is this?]

...a curriculum to learn Geometry or not?:confused:

 

What is it? How do you use it?

 

Tina, I saw the link, read the info, open the files and I still wonder how do you use these books (or even the all in one book)?:(

 

 

In the 1800s the teacher would begin by having the students memorize word by word all the definitions and axioms at the beginning of each book. They would then proceed on to the proofs and the kids would have to prove the question at hand. In other words, they would try to, on their own, come up with all the steps. If they couldn't do it they would ultimately memorize the steps and move on to the next proof. Your first problem would be, "to describe an equilateral triangle upon a given finite straight line." You will have to come up with a way of doing this as well as come up with a proof, or a chain of syllogisms, using the things that you "know" (given axioms and definitions) and show how your conclusion follows from those first principles.

 

 

If anyone is interested in how math was taught in the US during the 1800s, there is a very good book online that you can read by Florian Cajori in which he gives anecdotes of students in college courses and summarizes what was happening mathwise and how it was taught. Anyone looking fondly back on some Golden Age of Math education will not find it here! (I did just a blog entry on this).

 

If you are interested in what texts were used in high schools, especially classical education tracks, check out The Rise of the High School in Massachusetts. Some of the texts which they list out are found in Google Books.

 

The advantages of teaching geometry are that it allows the student to work within an axiomatic system and acquire knowledge through justification of their reasoning. The key piece to this training of the mind lies in the parsimonious set of axioms that are used which are slowly built up into proving quite sophisticated propositions. Today there are many modern geometry books, some do not teach proof at all and some claim to teach proofs, but give you an "infinitude of axioms" to work with which some might argue can create difficulties for the student.

[Explain this math term to me]

What if the lattice points on a graph are not orthogonal? Would we refer to the area of a figure as being "parallelogrammed"?

 

[History of Science]

Roy Gallant has some great history of science books out and in my opinion, they are much better than Joy Hakim's. He does a good job carefully tracing the history of an idea in a way that I don't think Hakim does. To me her first volume seems more of a series of snap shots of various science topics in history rather than the development of an idea. And I dont' mean to say that Hakim isn't an entertaining or interesting read, I just don't think she connects all the dots the way I expect them to be connected in a history book. Gallant does a very good explaining (i.e. charitable treatment) the context in which the scientists were coming up with their theories so that the reader isn't rolling their eyes at how silly the theories are.

 

Some of Gallant's books are out of print but most of them can still be found used and via interlibrary loan. A title to start with is "The Ever Changing Atom" which is about the history of how people percieved matter starting with the ancients until modern nuclear physics, this one is written for middle school students. He has another book out on the history of the idea of evolution written for high school students.

 

I'm looking here on Alibris at used books and he has just a ton of them on all sorts of topics.

[Calculus Curriculum advice needed]

My biggest fear is that if he takes it at the CC and doesn't do well in it, we will blow his highschool transcript. I'm afraid it could hurt him in applying for admissions and scholarships....any thoughts on this side of the issue?

 

:eek:

 

 

Will they let him audit the course instead of taking it for credit?