This is for the student who really just does not “get” math at all. These students struggle to understand the bigger picture of what is going on. They typically cannot remember lessons they just learned (even just moments ago), and they easily get overwhelmed and melt down when multiple steps are required in a problem.

The course is written under the premise that the student easily forgets everything taught, tires quickly in a lesson, struggles with organization, struggles to understand a seemingly simple math lesson, and only has limited basic math skills.

This was designed for the student who not just struggles understanding math, but seems to have an extra level of challenge that a lot of other students don’t seem to deal with. It was written for students with either diagnosed or suspected dyscalculia, dyslexia, ADD/ADHD (where math is difficult to understand), other similar neurological challenges, or just high math anxiety. This is not designed for students with ADD/ADHD or neurological challenges that are gifted in math (though they could certainly take the course and excel in it).

This course would also be good for a student that may be fairly neurologically typical, but perhaps has had some very bad experiences with math and just needs a recovery year where math is not a struggle that allows progress to be made and confidence to be rebuilt.

Algebra 1 is a recommended prerequisite for this course. Algebra concepts are reviewed in the context of geometry but not specifically taught as they are in algebra 1.

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

After completing Success Geometry, students will be equipped to move on to the next high school math course, most often algebra 2.

Denison Algebra is creating a "Success Series" that includes Algebra 1, Geometry, Algebra 2 and Advanced Algebra & Trigonometry designed in the same fashion to support students who struggle with extra learning challenges. However, students will have the skills and habits in their math tool belts to be able to finish high school math with any curriculum.

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.

HS.