Customer Reviews

Geometry, Indiana Edition (Glencoe Mathematics)

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1 star:		(3)

 

 

Math books in Japan and Singapore are short, inexpensive, and to the point. Math books in American often look like this monstrocity: long, expensive and rambling. For example we learn about the history of jeans, we learn that Mae Jemison was the first African-American woman to go into space, and that in 1974, Beverly Johnson, the first black model on the cover of a major fashion magazine. In other words, this book tries very hard to hide the fact that is math book by introducing glossy photos, color pictures, and a litany facts TOTALLY UNRELATED TO MATH. Unfortunately, the students will eventually find out this is a math textbook, so introducing all of that fluff is a wasted effort.

In looking through this book, I would say about 65% of it can be jettisoned, leaving 35% of the book that actually deals with math in a direct and useful way. However, you really have to wade through a lot of nonsense to find that stuff.

Avoid this book. Period.

In my home state of Tennessee, this is the text that unsuspecting school kids must decipher. It should have been easy - it's structure (and I use the term loosely) broadly resembles MTV with its numerous subjects per page, chats about unrelated subjects, some of the worst use of the English language ever and a colorful, multi-font, in-your-face appearance. There's pictures and graphs and arrows and charts and big text and small text and cartoons...Yet it cannot be understood much less absorbed - at least by anyone looking for something rational.

Like others, I noticed that the "team" of writers (it's almost as if they took turns writing paragraphs) continually introduced material BEFORE it was studied. Then there were the "examples" - just pitiful. Proofs were confusing, redundancy is taken for granted and the number of sub-subjects - review, standardized tests, chapter study, real life example, etc all ran together in a mushy mixture of words and concepts. IF YOUR CHILD MUST USE THIS BOOK GET EITHER A TUTOR OR PURCHASE "Geometry the Easy Way" by Lawrence S. Leff. I picked it up for $2.99 from Amazon.
A one star is overly generous.

I was recently amazed when my daughter, who has been a strait A math student, showed me this textbook along with a poor grade in her first quarter taught with this book. I am an electrical engineer with math minor who greatly enjoys math applications in engineering.

I've read through many chapters of this book in utter confusion. There are so many applications and examples, it's hard to find the math concepts, particularly in the early introductory chapters. Chapter one of this book, used to teach 8th graders in our school district, reads like a textbook on vector calculus. The discussion changes between 1,2, and 3 space without any discussion or any definitions. Almost any 1960's geometry textbook would be far superior.

In reading later chapters, it seems to cover boolean logic, logic theory, matrices, then returns to geometry. The trigonometry sections are fairly good. Towards the end, a more standard approach is taken towards solid geometry. The homeworks are very confusing, and relate to materials not in the chapters.

This book has just too much confusing stuff for middleschoolers. I'm sure that it's well intended, but completely misses the mark. It fails to teach geometry. Chock full of applications, especially in the early part of the book, it's missing the fundamental ideas of geometry. It's also very weak on analytical geometry, the most important ideas in engineering.

This textbook was a poor choice in our school district. The latter chapters are almost college level in complexity. I'm sure that the egos of the authors were well massaged in coauthoring this. However, the students are left without a useful textbook that they can understand or learn math from. If making students thoroughly confused and feeling inadeqate is a new concept in education, then this book is great. No wonder students can't pass the Aims test.