Applied Math Colloquium Talk - Dr. Peter Taylor

Title: The High School Math Curriculum: why I think it’s broke and what is my favorite fix.

Abstract: Over the past few years I have been putting increasingly more of my research time into mathematics curriculum development in grades 9-12.  Lately I have even tried to begin doing serious research in mathematics education and I find it a sea change from theoretical biology.
I take mathematics to be (by definition) the abstract study of structure.  Thus the problems (or activities) I construct for my students are structurally rich and everything they do is aimed at exploring and understanding the structure.  This task has both a logical and an aesthetic dimension and as we all know, those two worlds interact in powerful ways. 
This Fall I have a number of teachers in different cities working in their classrooms with some of the problems on my website www.math9-12.ca and my objective is to gather feedback from their experience.  I will talk about the ideas that inform my research approach.