[Cascade]

I have a student whose parents are on sabatical leave in New Zealand. The New Zealand curriculum is designed differently than the US system so she is learning some things that she has already done while missing out on other things.

Does anyone know where I can find the US High School curriculum for things like Geometry Honours, Pre-Calculus etc

[jdonn]

Cascade, on Feb 8 2009, 03:05 AM, said:

I have a student whose parents are on sabatical leave in New Zealand. The New Zealand curriculum is designed differently than the US system so she is learning some things that she has already done while missing out on other things.

Does anyone know where I can find the US High School curriculum for things like Geometry Honours, Pre-Calculus etc

What state are they from? Unfortunately I don't think it would be consistent from state to state, you will get (at least) 50 different curriculum-s.

[Cascade]

jdonn, on Feb 8 2009, 09:23 PM, said:

Cascade, on Feb 8 2009, 03:05 AM, said:

I have a student whose parents are on sabatical leave in New Zealand.  The New Zealand curriculum is designed differently than the US system so she is learning some things that she has already done while missing out on other things.

Does anyone know where I can find the US High School curriculum for things like Geometry Honours, Pre-Calculus etc

What state are they from? Unfortunately I don't think it would be consistent from state to state, you will get (at least) 50 different curriculum-s.

Florida

The plural of curriculum is curricula.

Edit

When i checked one source gave curriculums as an alternative.

[matmat]

I don't even think the curricula are consistent from school to school, but i could be wrong here.


My suggestion would be to contact whatever school this student would be at if they stayed in the US and find out the courses that way.

[TimG]

Cascade, on Feb 8 2009, 03:05 AM, said:

I have a student whose parents are on sabatical leave in New Zealand. The New Zealand curriculum is designed differently than the US system so she is learning some things that she has already done while missing out on other things.

Does anyone know where I can find the US High School curriculum for things like Geometry Honours, Pre-Calculus etc

In Maine, these things are not even consistent from school district to school district. You are not going to find a "US High School curriculum" and probably won't even find a standard curriculum for most (if not all) states.

[kenberg]

The circumstance (Honors Geometry, Precalculus, parent(s) on sabbatical) suggest we are dealing with reasonably high level expectations. This is far more determining than anything else. To describe the US school system as chaotic would be to engage in understatement. But good school districts actually know what they are doing. With this in mind I would espect something like:

In her geometry course she learned how to carefully write a proof. She would probably have been expected to at least know and possibly to write a proof for assertions such as the concurrence of the perpendicular bisectors of the sides of a triangle. I would not expect much knowledge of three dimensional geometry other than vocabulary.

From pre-calculus, I would expect a decent knowledge of exponential and logarithmic functions, the ability to identify the graphs of quadratic expressions both when y is a quadratic expression in x and when a quadratic expression in x, y is set equal to zero. She should know about asymptotes of hyperbolas and such. She should be adept at using a graphing calculator. I would expect her to have seen things such as the sine law.


How much of the above she actually knows depends partly on her. But it is likely that she has seen all such things and that her teacher expected it to be learned. My granddaughter is in high school, currently taking calculus. She is not particularly interested in mathematics (to put it mildly) but she does it anyway and I am pretty sure she at least was exposed to all of the items I have mentioned.

If you mention a few topics, I could ask her. The good schools in the US probably are fairly similar. Most of the rest are uniformly disastrous.

[Winstonm]

Quote

Florida

In that case you will have to look in the Old Testament.

[Elianna]

Most schools have to follow the state standards. You can look through here:

http://www.floridastandards.org/Standards/...dardSearch.aspx

Unfortunately, it seems that you have to look standard by standard. It's extremely annoying. (You want to look at grades 9-12, btw.) I would expect an Honors class to have covered all of the standards in it's category.

If that gets too annoying to look standard by standard, I would guess that the California and Florida ones are not too different (in math at least). The California ones are found at http://www.cde.ca.go...athstandard.pdf

Good luck!

[barmar]

I think the general rule is that the state sets a minimum level of competency students are expected to achieve at each grade level, and individual school districts design their curricula to achieve this.

[kenberg]

barmar, on Feb 9 2009, 05:04 PM, said:

I think the general rule is that the state sets a minimum level of competency students are expected to achieve at each grade level, and individual school districts design their curricula to achieve this.

The state sets standards for hs graduation. In Maryland they require that you be breathing. If you cannot pass that criterion then you must do a project. If you cannot do a project you can ask for a waiver. Beyond graduation requirements, I am not so sure there is any state standard for what constitutes a precalculus course. If there is, I can assure you that it is grossly violated. For example, in DC they will be requiring Algebra II for hs graduation. Their students on average are less accomplished than Maryland students. Here we require Algebra I and we have gone through extreme contortions to enable us to say that the students have satisfied this requirement. It would be very contentious to ask what exactly is meant in DC when they say that a student has learned Algebra II. I think it gives a new meaning to shovel ready.

[barmar]

Didn't "No Child Left Behind" require states to set more stringent standards than that? I know it didn't really produced all the claimed improvements in education (it's probably resulted in more teaching the material on the tests), but I thought it did require them to at least set meaningful standards.