Transforming geometry

I never wanted to teach geometry. It bored me in high school, and I could never get myself particularly excited about the side splitter theorems or, well, anything about it. Ick.

So naturally, geometry was and is one of my main course assignments as part of my first teaching position.

Goal: make geometry interesting to teach and learn. Or, at least suck less.

There are two reasons that this might actually happen - The Common Core State Standards and computational thinking.

Common Core

 The first one is that the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) changed the focus of high school quite significantly by giving transformations a central role. Our department made the decision to embrace this direction and go with it. This summer we've been taking the suggested sequencing from Appendix A, and then interpreting and translating this into a curriculum that we feel we can teach. If you want to a gander/copy/steal, our work is here (and still changing):

• Unit 1: Congruence, proof, & constructions
• Unit 2: Similarity, proof, & trigonometry
• Unit 3: Extending to three dimensions
• Unit 4: Coordinate geometry
• Unit 5: Circles
• Unit 6: Applications of probability

Now these alone aren't going to make geometry awesome, but I think that they do provide an improved sequencing and emphasis than a traditional geometry course. I'm also just getting a start on writing some assessments which is highlighting how different the approach is. I'll post more about that later.

Computational thinking

This one has me much more excited. I already wrote a post about what it is and why I've decided to use it. At a high level, think of computational thinking as combining critical thinking with the power of computing, an incredibly relevant approach.

Now that may not sound like it has much to do with high school geometry. High school geometry is traditionally a very abstract course where students are first introduced to mathematical rigor and proof. Unfortunately, we can fall into teaching geometry as a means to end (teaching proof), and we lose some of the utility and concreteness of geometry. After all, geometry is shapes!

So with that motivation, I want to consistently incorporate computational thinking practices into geometry. I want to make geometry a more hands-on and practical course. I'll still teach proof & rigor, but I want students to associate geometry with geometry rather than proof.