Learn the Goals for a Good High School Math Education

There are specific high school math education goals all students can gain by studying math. Whether your child is math-gifted, struggling through, or somewhere in between, you should know how and why they should proceed in their math education program.

What’s the point?
What is the goal of math in school anyway? Well, the immediate goal is simply to be successful. Your child’s job is to be a student. He or she should be mastering the material and getting good grades. Moreover, as a cumulative subject, he or she needs to be building up the skill base to succeed in subsequent school math classes.

If he or she is college-bound, the goal should be taking the highest practical courses and achieving the best grades we can in them to look good for college admissions.

Is that all? Well, really the overarching goal is your child’s mental development. Learning math has a unique role in your child’s mental development, due to its increasingly abstract nature. It demands systematic and logical thinking. The simple action of learning math is inherently valuable, whether or not your child puts the given skills into practice.

One might compare this too running or almost any other exercise. The action itself is beneficial, even if one runs a loop and ends up in the same place and so the run was not a practical transportation event.

So, we want to do it well!

Goals for college bound students
What else? If there’s any chance of your child pursuing math or math based courses in college (such as science classes, economics, or finance), the main point is not to get up to Calculus or some other specific level, but to know well what has been studied. There can be serious grade and self-confidence consequences for your child if he or she is over-accelerated in math.

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A student who has taken two years of Algebra and some trigonometry and really knows it is in a better position to proceed with college level math than one who has “taken” Advanced Placement Calculus, but hasn’t really mastered that course or any other. Such a student has not foundation to build on, no basis for going further. (This is one of the problems endemnic to today's American math education.)

This is the kind of student who falls on his face in his first college math class. Which tends to be the last one too!

Goals for the math-oriented student
I would add that another goal for any child of average intelligence or better should be to be sufficiently competent in math to be able to pursue a career involving quantitative and analytical skills such as business or accounting.

For this one would need a confident grasp of the following areas: arithmetic, fractions, Middle School math (decimals, percents, ratio and proportion, measurement), three years of High School math (Algebra I, Geometry, Algebra II).

High School math education goals for the non-math-oriented student
Another goal that I think is appropriate, and too often not realized:your child should be sufficiently competent in math to handle personal finances (e.g. taxes, mortgage, various types of insurance, retirement account), vote (e.g. taxation or budget issues), understand relevant news issues (e.g. social security or health insurance reform issues).

What is needed for this is arithmetic, fractions, Middle School math (decimals, percents, ratio and proportion, measurement), and Algebra I.

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Read about appropriate math course acceleration for gifted math students.