SCARY (for Parents) New 2010 College Entrance Requirements for High School Graduates

The new college entrance requirements are REALLY SCARY for parents…..

If I were just entering high school today, I think I might have trouble myself meeting the new college entrance requirements for 2010 (at least in my home state of Colorado)! I just found out about all this last week when doing some on-line research about current prices of universities. I have not yet had a chance to research if this is also a nationwide trend. Does anyone know?

Our family has just made the decision to move our daughter (with dual American/Middle Eastern nationality) out of an Arabic-French school into the American school here (that is, if she can pass the entrance test, and the school lets her in). She will take the entrance exam in late July. It was the search through university entrance criteria, together with her own desires, that have led our family to this decision.

The new requirements for ALL four-year schools in Colorado (even ones that aren’t universities, but are just four-year colleges) call for FOUR years of ADVANCED math (algebra, geometry, trigonometry, and calculus)(2008 requirements call for only three years of math); THREE years of natural science (TWO of which must be LAB courses, such as Biology, Chemistry or Physics); TWO years of the SAME foreign language; FOUR years of English (at least TWO of which must be COMPOSITION classes); and THREE years of Social Sciences, including a year of American History.

If I, myself, fell under the new entrance requirements, it would have been the MATH requirement which would have gotten me. I don’t think I would have been able to meet the MATH requirement, no matter how hard I worked.

After being a teacher for many years, I think many kids (and even adults) need a certain level of maturity before they are able to see things in a mathematical way (and I didn’t get that until I was in my early 40’s). If I had to take those advanced courses NOW, I’m sure I could do so and be successful; but I could never have been successful at calculus before that age (not that I’m anywhere close to that level now), because my BRAIN wasn’t READY!

I have found that math is a LOT like ART. People who know how to draw are able to SEE things differently than people who can’t draw. Once you are shown how to SEE properly (making the shift to right brain), your drawing ability improves dramatically in a matter of HOURS. It happened to me in my mid-20’s; I had a great art instructor; I KNOW now how the shift FEELS.

Math is just the SAME. I had an extreme case of math anxiety as a child, and struggled through Algebra II, just so I would never again have to take it in university. When I started teaching Grade Three years ago, it was my most disliked subject. Now it has become one of my FAVORITES. Why? Because I MADE THE SHIFT and SEE IT DIFFERENTLY. My biggest challenge is to try to help KIDS see it differently, too. It’s very hard. Some are ready, but most are NOT.

This is why I think moving calculus into high school as a MAINSTREAM math subject is a mistake. But this is a subject for another post.

Anyway, as a parent of a daughter who will graduate in 2012, I’m SCARED.

Eileen

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