Denison Geometry is designed specifically to help students who dislike, struggle with, stress out about, have low confidence in, or simply don’t care for math. If your student typically dreads math, but has completed an algebra 1 course and needs to move to geometry, Denison Geometry is right for you.

If your student has completed a standard algebra 1 course, he or she is ready to take geometry. It is not necessary to have every algebra 1 skill mastered to take Denison Geometry because basic algebra skills are reviewed and used throughout the course.

Algebra 1 is a necessary prerequisite to geometry because the skills learned in algebra are needed throughout the course. Denison Geometry has been written with the math resistant student in mind, so even though students need to have experience with algebra 1, they do not need to have every skill mastered. Denison Geometry will remind students of algebra concepts throughout the course so they can confidently enter Algebra 2 after completing it.

Yes. This course is designed to take a math resistant student through an entire geometry course without the need for a tutor or additional instructor.

There are many differing views in the math teaching world about this, ranging from "proofs are a waste of time" to "proofs are absolutely essential," and everything in between.

While proofs have their value and are used in the professional math world, students do not write formal proofs in my course. Throughout the course, I teach students to use logic and the rules, definitions, theorems, and postulates of geometry to work problems, but we do not write formal traditional proofs. There are several reasons for this.

 1) When writing a proof, there is no "one answer" for the proof. If a proof differs from the answer key, it needs to be closely examined. Often, I find students will take a different, unexpected, or less direct route to a correctly written proof, but rarely discover this by just comparing to an answer key. This can be very discouraging for students, causing them to hate geometry or to unnecessarily lose self confidence in their math ability.  

 2) Formal proof writing is never used anywhere in any math courses going forward, nor is it tested on standardized tests. This was not my main reason for excluding formal proof writing, but it did play a part in my decision.  

Having said all of this, I am not anti-proof, and it does have value. But for a typical homeschool geometry student (the audience for this course), I have found proof-writing to be very counter-productive.

In 20+ years of teaching math (11 of them in public school), I did not see any positive difference in student performance in the years I taught heavy proof writing vs. the years I taught little to no proof writing (I experimented both ways). In fact, proof writing actually tended to have negative effects on the students (they pretty much universally hate writing proofs, which makes them hate geometry and sometimes math altogether).

There are excellent teachers on every point along the traditional geometry proof spectrum, but this is the reasoning behind excluding them from my courses.