Paper 2: The Mathematical Preparation of Secondary School Teachers

In the summer of 2007, a group of doctoral students at the University of Georgia gathered to discuss the mathematical preparation of secondary teachers. The group used Mathematics for High School Teachers: An Advanced Perspective by Usiskin, Peressini, Marchisotto, and Stanley (2003) as the catalyst for the discussion. Participants agreed that future teachers need opportunities to examine high school and college mathematics differently from the way they had as students, with specific emphasis on connections, representations, and history. Features of this text that were highlighted in the discussions were the attention topics with commonly held misconceptions, the historical rationales and development of mathematical topics, and the role of mathematical definitions. Group members felt that, depending on one’s purpose for using the text and the backgrounds of the prospective teachers, this text could be used, in conjunction with supplemental materials, in a variety of capacities: for a capstone course, a connections course, or a set of replacement mathematics courses