At top level,we believe that every course or academic experience in high school
should be used as an opportunity to help students develop what we have come
to call good general habits of mind. These general habits of mind are not the
sole province of mathematics – the research historian,the house-builder,and the
mechanic who correctly diagnoses what ails your car all use them. Nor are they
guaranteed byproducts of learning mathematics – it is the major lament of the
reform efforts that it has been shown possible for students to learn the facts and
techniques that mathematicians (historians,auto diagnosticians...) have developed
without ever understanding how mathematicians (or these others) think.
Good thinking must apparently be relearned in a variety of domains; our further
remarks will be specific to the domain of mathematics. So,at top level,we’d
like students to think about mathematics the way mathematicians do,and our
experience tells us that they can. Of course,that doesn’t mean that high school
students should be able to understand the topics that mathematicians worry about,
but it does mean that high school graduates should be accustomed to using real
mathematical methods. They should be able to use the research techniques that
have been so productive in modern mathematics,and they should be able to develop
conjectures and provide supporting evidence for them. When asked to describe
mathematics,they should say something like “it’s about ways for solving problems”
instead of “it’s about triangles” or “solving equations” or “doing percent.” The
danger of wishing for this is that it’s all too easy to turn “it’s about ways for
solving problems” into a curriculum that drills students in The Five Steps For
Solving A Problem. That’s not what we’re after; we are after mental habits that
allow students to develop a repertoire of general heuristics and approaches that can
be applied in many different situations.
In the next pages,you’ll see the word “should” a lot. Take it with a grain of salt.
When we say students should do this or think like that,we mean that it would be
wonderful if they did those things or thought in those ways,and that high school
curricula should strive to develop these habits. We also realize full well that most
students don’t have these habits now,and that not everything we say they should be
able to do is appropriate for every situation. We’re looking to develop a repertoire
of useful habits; the most important of these is the understanding of when to use
what