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1970s UK: we had the Schools Maths Project (SMP) GCE A level syllabus and textbooks available for teachers to choose which used sets, mappings, very simple grou
by keithpeter 11y ago
1970s UK: we had the Schools Maths Project (SMP) GCE A level syllabus and textbooks available for teachers to choose which used sets, mappings, very simple group theory and the notion of an inverse and an identity for operations and which included computational approaches (pseudocode!) and a lot of emphasis on reasoning and proving. There were plenty of more 'traditional' syllabuses (syllabi?) available as well.
My secondary school went for SMP maths (I suspect because the deputy principal was part of the project). I'm very glad they did. It helped later.
A longitudinal survey of the destinations of those who did A level Maths in the 1970s tracking who did the SMP syllabus and who did a traditional syllabus might be interesting...
- james1071 11y agoI am not so convinced of the merits of SMP, having done it myself. It included some interesting things, but left out a lot of traditional pure and applied maths (especially mechanics).
- analog31 11y agoWhat happened in the US during my generation, was that every student with an interest in math, also took physics. And physics was very much taught as applied math.
- keithpeter 11y agoHave you ever missed the mechanics? The group theory stuff made things a lot easier for me later. I imagine this is all fairly random.