1512 Post #4: Geometric Repeats

"With American students fully prepared for the future, our communities will be best positioned to compete successfully in the global economy" . This is a quote from the Common Core State Standards website and it addresses a hope that most teachers have for their students. I found it interesting that this was addressed in my math class during the same week as geometry. As you may have guessed by now, I was a bit hard to convince of the real world applications of math when I was in high school. Geometry was the first section of math that I found myself questioning the usefulness of.


When it came down to it, what I have realized is that I was never given a definite answer of where I would use this information in my real life outside of school walls. I was also led to believe that geometry was a new concept when I reached the Sophomore grade level in high school. All along I had been learning about geometric concepts and how they tie in with other mathematical ideas since early elementary school. Perhaps by calling a spade a spade, they could have alleviated any fear that I had about geometry by the time we really reached the meat of the topic when I was in high school.

Perimeter, translation, rotation, and dimension were all ideas that were introduced in earlier classes even if we were not given the proper names for them at that time. Perhaps that is a mistake that was being made in the school district that I was a product of at that time. Perhaps it is a mistake that is being made still today all across the country. We need to ensure that we are giving our students the information out right and in terms that will be useful to the in their future instead of trying to simplify it for the time being. By doing this, we would be able to continue to use a spiral curriculum and introduce increasingly complex ideas that might allow for a greater understanding of how geometry will truly be used in their adult lives in the workplace. Continuing to push the education of our students will ensure that they are in a position to compete globally with those countries that approach education in that same way.