Elementary Geometry for College Students by Daniel C. Alexander

Elementary Geometry for College Students

Features

Cover Type: Hard Cover with 1 pages

Published by: Houghton Mifflin Company January 2007

Written in: English

ISBN 10 Number: 0618730680

Book Description

The Third Edition of Elementary Geometry for College Students covers the important principles and real-world applications of plane geometry with additional chapters on solid geometry, analytic geometry, and trigonometry. The text's largely visual approach, strongly influenced by both NCTM and AMATYC standards, begins with the presentation of a concept followed by the examination and development of a theory, verification of the theory through deduction, and finally, application of the principles to the real world. Designed with the appropriate pacing and appearance for college-level students, this text offers a welcome alternative for instructors who, in the past, have had to use secondary-level texts for this course.

Videotapes, professionally produced for this text and hosted by Dana Mosely, offer a valuable resource for further instruction and review.
Reminder marginal notes reinforce theorems or formulas from previous chapters to help students progress through the course.
Enhanced Chapter Openers introduce students to the principle notion of the chapter and provide real-world context.
Discovery features designed to reinforce the inductive approach of this text include activities that enable students to discover geometry concepts on their own and section tools that provide students with hands-on application of concepts.
Applications throughout text reinforce the connection of geometry to the real world. A Look Beyond chapter-ending sections provide engaging sketches, sometimes with historical background.
Summaries of constructions, postulates, and theorems are provided to reinforce learning. In addition, a numbering system for postulates and theorems presents a easy to use structure.

--This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Reader Reviews
This review is from: Elementary Geometry for College Students (Hardcover) Entering geometry for the first time ever can be an almost initimidating venture, especially for the first time geometry student. After conquering other mathematical courses successfully (like algebra and statistics), I presumed entering "Elementary Geometry for College Students," based on being given exceptional required texts from previous courses, would be a breeze. Oh how wrong I was! "Elementary Geometry for College Students," by Daniel C. Alexander (of Parkland College) and Geralyn M. Koeberlein (of Mahomet-Seymour High School), has taught me nothing more than NOT to trust a textbook written by a couple of hack authors from unknown schools with a blatant disregard for meticulously explaining important vital and "elementary" steps as to how to arrive to certain statements, reasoning, deducing, measurements, and so much more NEEDED in successfully acheving full reign over geometry. For example, the origins of postulates and proofing are never explored, but slammed in your face, convoluting both topics along with breaking down statements from deducing a particular shape, its angles and measurements. The book's attempts at explaining triangles, convex polygons, congruent triangles, and properties of parallelograms are all but slandered together (with steps in basic algebraic mathematical equations arrogantly skipped over and presumed upon to you) without any form of thorough reason or explained steps bothered in explaining. Important theorems are disarrayed throughout with quick-step problem examples without helpful or detailed reasoning as to how the answer was ever achieved. The authors have obviously assumed a college student has had some form of pre-geometry course prepping, and expect both instructor and student to know the advanced fundamentals without considering the beginner geometry student at all (just from judging by example and "solutions" given in each section). As a result, students will fail miserably, along with angering frustration, and discontent wonderment over what purpose geometry may ever serve toward a real-life career. Perhaps trying "Geometry for Dummies" by the infamous IDG publishing company would be a much suitable levelage to this otherwise detrimental book attempting to teach an important equation to the universe of mathematics. By far, this textbook is the worst and most horrible book in teaching the subject of geometry!! To professors searching a geometry book for your students: PLEASE avoid this book at all costs! You and your students don't need a textbook that presumes you know it all before diving into shapes, proofing, deducing, theorums, solids, and so forth. Most surely, there are much more superior books to this wretched and horrid title worthy of its decommissioning. Comment | | (Report this)

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Updated on 6-4-2008.