It's come to my attention that my non-honors students don't understand some of the fundamental mathematics procedures. It's these "math basics", and not the geometry, that are holding my students back from becoming the best math students that they can be. The basics that I'm talking about are adding, subtracting, multiplying, and dividing negative numbers; adding, subtracting, multiplying, and dividing fractions; taking percents; and quick math tricks (like multiplying by 10 means just moving the decimal point or you know you can divide by 2 when a number is even).
My own educational philosophy is that there are three purposes of teaching mathematics in high school. One of those purposes is to prepare students for the mathematics that they will need in everyday life. Certainly, these basics of mathematics listed above are the mathematics that all my students will need in their everyday lives. Thus, by allowing my students to leave my classroom without understanding these basic mathematical procedures, I feel that I am failing them and failing myself. So many educational gurus have said that we shouldn't teach the child what we want, we should teach them what they need. So, while my main goal for the semester is to teach my students about geometry, they need information about fractions and percents. I should be helping them with this information.
With this in mind, I believe I'm going to institute a new policy for next semester where my students will need to learn these basics of mathematics. I'm thinking they'll need to take individual competencies/skills tests on each topic. And, although I fear parents will balk at me, I'm thinking I'll require them to score 100% on the test or they'll need to retake it with me after school until they achieve that 100%.
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