Word: abstractable
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...expense of practice and are usually written in baffling jargon. Emphasis is placed on rapid exposure to many "topics," or procedures. Before students can master one topic, explains Saxon, they must move on to a new one. The great sin, he insists, is that the books teach abstract theory first and skills second-the reverse of the order in which children normally learn...
They are often expected to memorize a good deal of difficult abstract theory about the basic properties of real numbers such as "associative," "distributive" and "commutative." The last term means simply that three and four always make seven in whatever order they happen to be added. Saxon, by contrast, uses diagrams and examples to make the same point clear and only afterward says...
Criticism of Saxon tends to divide along the same lines as the debate about the future of American mathematics teaching. There are those who advocate a return to basics through practice and drill, and those who insist that practice without abstract theory is ultimately limiting. Both sides are in a sense right. Yet Saxon's main point contradicts neither. He simply affirms that Algebra I is not the place for obscure theory, which can be introduced later, when students know how to use algebra well enough to profit from it. "Algebra is the basic language of all mathematics beyond...
...cowboys, Indians, bucking horses and stampeding cattle. The casual eye is reminded of the work of Frederic Remington; the more discerning see the energy and muscular humanism of the Renaissance statues. In Harry Jackson (Abrams; 308 pages; $125) Author-Editors Larry Pointer and Donald Goddard sample Jackson's abstract work and offer a generous selection of his realism along with a biography of one of the mavericks of American...
Painter Tom Wesselmann, like de Kooning before him, has refused to choose sides in the controversy between abstract expressionism and the new realism. Instead, his female nudes, often in monumental proportions, inhabit both schools. The results of his energetic production are collected in the 200 pictures-100 in high-intensity color-in Tom Wesselmann (Abbeville; 321 pages; $75). The artist's huge women are usually blank idealizations adrift in mundane rooms, like the fantasies of adolescent boys. Others display explicit but deadpan eroticism among billboard-style oranges and ashtrays. Always provocative, usually amusing and sometimes shocking, Wesselmann...