Reasonable Texts
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-------------------- Dictionary --------------------
Rea•son•a•ble. |ˈrēz(ə)nəbəl|
adjective
1 (of a person) having sound judgement; fair and sensible : no reasonable person could have objected.
- based on good sense : it seems a reasonable enough request | the guilt of a person on trial must be proved beyond reasonable doubt.
- archaic (of a person or animal) able to think, understand, or form judgements by a logical process : man is by nature reasonable.
2 as much as is appropriate or fair; moderate : a police officer may use reasonable force to gain entry.
- fairly good; average : the carpet is in reasonable condition.
- (of a price or product) not too expensive : a restaurant serving excellent food at reasonable prices | they are lovely shoes and very reasonable.
DERIVATIVES
rea-son-a-ble-ness noun
ORIGIN Middle English : from Old French raisonable, suggested by Latin rationabilis ‘rational,’ from ratio (see REASON ).
-------------------- Thesaurus --------------------
reasonable
adjective
1 a reasonable man | a reasonable explanation
SENSIBLE, rational, logical, fair, fair-minded, just, equitable;
intelligent, wise, levelheaded, practical, realistic; sound, reasoned,
well-reasoned, valid, commonsensical; tenable, plausible, credible,
believable.
2 you must take all reasonable precautions WITHIN REASON, practicable, sensible; appropriate, suitable.
3 cars in reasonable condition FAIRLY GOOD, acceptable, satisfactory, average, adequate, fair, all right, tolerable, passable; informal OK.
4 reasonable prices INEXPENSIVE, moderate, low, cheap, budget, bargain, downmarket; competitive.
Oxford American Dictionaries
The above says it all and the following is merely to indulge my taste for expounding the obvious.
The reason I ended up writing this package stems from four common observations:
- The rather low level in mathematics of most students from the lower
elementary grades up to and including the first two years of college as
recorded, for instance, by PISA and witnessed by the high number of two-year colleges
students in “Remedial Mathematics” courses of whom few pass it and even fewer pass any college mathematics
course thereafter.
- The fact that this has
been going on for some forty years, the bewildering number and variety
of the “approaches” that were tried notwithstanding.
- The belief in most of those involved,
students as well as faculty, that this somehow is the result of the
students’ inadequacy. A case of “blaming the victims” if you wish.
- The fact that for anyone with a genuine interest in learning
mathematics and minimal intellectual honesty, current textbooks at any level, elementary,
secondary, and first two years undergraduate from “remedial” to
calculus, are impossible to read without getting a case of screaming
meemies and, moreoever, the situation has steadily deteriorated.
Some awareness of the real cause of the disaster, namely the lack
of a Coherent View of Mathematics (CVM) in those teaching mathematics and, consequently, their failure to impart a Profound Understanding of
Fundamental Mathematics (PUFM) to their students, might be
beginning to appear. For my part, essentially, I
take CVM to refer to a conception of the contents that permits a
presentation whose logical flow makes sense to the students and from
which they will be able to derive a PUFM. Minimal conditions are: (1) a
story line to organize the development of the contents, (2) a
terminology that helps the students figure out, by themselves, how to
operate and, (3) proofs as a means to convince the students, much in
the way that attorneys make their cases to juries in courts of law.
I would argue that,
precisely because of our by now total reliance on senseless “show and
tell and drill”, what we don’t know about learning hardly matters and
that the root cause of the much-lamented state of mathematics education is that
students have been relentlessly driven to the absolute identification
of learning with memorizing and thus to complete stupefaction. The
much-invoked Math Anxiety is merely the anxiety that derives
universally from being forced to operate without understanding what one
is doing. In other words, Math Anxiety has nothing to do with
mathematics but is merley a by-product of the way we teach it, an
ironical result of Educology’s “it isn’t what you teach, it is how you
teach it”.
FreeMathTexts RBA Text In Preparation A2DC Development About Acknowlegments CopyLeft LaTeX Page Updated January 23, 2008