38 - From The Bottom Up

Summary

In 1989 the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM) published a rather remarkable document, known to all now as the NCTM Standards. The Standards recognized and announced that we have done a rather poor job of teaching mathematics at the K–12 level. It set out a rather bold agenda for new curricula and pedagogy built around a number of principles focused upon improving the mathematics education of all students. To a surprising extent this document went relatively unnoticed at the undergraduate level. That state of affairs changed rather dramatically in 1997–8, when new curricula built to embody the Standards' philosophy began appearing in published form.

It is important to note and underscore the fact that the NCTM Standards used the words mathematics education to mean the education of our nation's students in mathematics—not the education of mathematicians. This distinction underlies much of the later criticism, which has become akin to a religious dispute, played out in a variety of political arenas. Needless to say, COMAP embraced the Standards mission as our own.

In fact, we received one of the National Science Foundation grants to produce a comprehensive fouryear secondary school mathematics curriculum, published under the title Mathematics:Modeling Our World (M:MOW). This project took six years to complete and the texts began appearing in 1998.

But we were struck by the fact that much of the material in these books was a significant part of the college algebra and precalculus syllabi.