Disclaimer

Although eMathInstruction makes every attempt to cover the majority of the New York state performance indicators for its e-texts, it does not guarantee that a school district that uses only these lessons will have success as measured by pass rates on New York state Regents Exams. We believe that it is up to individual school districts and teachers to decide where and how to use the approximately 40% of the school days that are not taken up by our e-text lessons and homeworks. These additional days should be devoted to extra practice, reinforcing activities and explorations, and high quality assessments.

Although we cover most of the performance indicators as specified by the New York State Regents, we do omit some based on philosophical objections to stuffing more material into courses that were already too full to begin with. At eMathInstruction we simply refuse to sacrifice depth for breadth, especially when it comes to material of questionable worth to future courses or topics too poorly defined by the state standard. For example, we do not provide coverage in our Algebra 2 with Trigonometry e-text of the half-angle identities. As teachers of Advanced Placement Calculus, we have never seen the utility in these identities and would rather spend our time on more important topics. A full discussion of the state standards for Algebra 2 with Trigonometry will be posted soon to this site with a full accounting for what standards were omitted.

An example of a state standard that we object to would be the teaching of "phase shift" in the context of trigonometric graphing. The phase shift is an interesting and engaging topic, especially to physicists. It measures how in phase or out of phase two trigonometric phenomena are with one another (think three-phase power). But, the state standard equates the phase shift of a trigonometric function with its horizontal shift. At eMathInstruction we fundamentally believe that those two topics are not one in the same. They are certainly related, but it is commonly agreed upon that the phase shift is the horizontal shift multiplied by the frequency of the wave. The phase shift and horizontal shift are truly only the same when the frequency of the curve is one. Thus we will not include incorrect or not universally agreed upon information in our e-text.