Elements of Mathematics / IMACS unique, hyper-accelerated, New Math, pure math curriculum for grades 5-9

[Anonymous]

Posting this for general discussion. Maybe you’ve used EMF/IMACS or are curious about it.

https://www.elementsofmathematics.com/ (the first 30 day lesson module is free.)

It’s a special and semi-controversial curriculum that focuses on 1970s-style “New Math”, a college/professional pure math approach to the K-12 curriculum, and skips a lot of the easy/boring/applied material and the material that K-12 teaches but isn’t needed for college and grad school, and skips the hard puzzle problems that AMC/AIME+AOPS emphasize.

Then they tack on a quick Supplement to cover the Common Core standards in a few days at the end of K-12 equivalent year.

It starts with “prealgebra” in summer after 5th grade and finishes “precalculus” end of 8th grade, feeding into 9th grade calculus. (You can start wheney you want, and it's self-paced.) But the real value prop is that the students are already speaking the language of upper level undergrad pure math, and covers the basics of college Pure Math 101/102 topics like number theory, set theory, formal logic, basic group/field theory.

The material is presented in order of Prealgebra+Algebra+Algebra2, then Geometry+Precalculus

It achieves that extreme acceleration by starting early, and focusing on the formal theory and intuition, in a kid-friendly presentation format, and skipping "mathematically unimportant" side topics like, um, trigonometry apparently, and doing sophisticated topics at an easier level of problem complexity than something like AOPS does.

AOPS does less formal math but much harder problems, for competition-prep (but a lot of AOPS students don’t actuall do the hard problems in AOPS class.). Doing both of these styles of enrichment would be quite intense but immensely rewarding for an interested student, and probably would be worth spreading out over more years.

Once you start the free module 1, you can see a full detailed table of contents at https://www.elementsofmathematics.com/eimacs/tocemf
The mebsite also has a pretty detailed listing of topics too.

If you want to do this at home or in a special independent study at school, you can buy the $900 4.25 year subscription to the online curriculum. You can pay a little more for a pay as you go, quit when you want, ($60 per module, 17 modules after free 1.) (You can’t buy just the upper half if your kid is already skilled in Prealgebra, algebra, geometry basics. And there are no paper books).



I did this program as a student in school with live teachers, many years ago, before AOPS existed. It was 10x more fun and interesting than regular school math. It was a bit different then; It was spread out over an extra year then, and included a formal mathematical computer science component (in Scheme/LISP),and it had two concurrent tracks for intuitive background and rigorous formal symbolic logic proofs of the theory.
At the time, they didn’t have the Common Core supplements. so I had to fill in or just skip the missing pieces on my own. When I switched back to regular school in 9th, I self-studied during the summer, and took a placement test to pass geometry and algebra 2, to place into precalculus.

[Anonymous]

Correction, the detailed kcontents domin fact include trigonometry

https://www.elementsofmathematics.com/eimacs/tocemf

Spreadsheet copy for non logged in people:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/13Qwt8UAyXAJS-3NvJx5i853Qp7jb8Xh9lrtN81cWAdA/edit

[Anonymous]

Fun fact: David Patrick, The CFO and author of an AOPS textbook, did an earlier version of this EMF program in middle school.

[Anonymous]

Sounds interesting, but also sounds like you work for them. I can see from their marketing materials they are trying to compete with AOPS by portraying AOPS as just for contest problems. But that isn't even true. AOPS also offers regular middle school and high school math courses, including calculus. EMF/Imacs doesn't offer calc.

Unfortunately, EMF/Imacs hs no printed materials to purchase (e.g. a textbook to be used as a reference) and nothing from the course can be downloaded to work offline. All in all, I don't see why parents who are satisfied with AOPS, RSM, or their current school should switch to this.

[Anonymous]

OP.

I don't work for them, as should be clear from my balanced critique.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Sounds interesting, but also sounds like you work for them. I can see from their marketing materials they are trying to compete with AOPS by portraying AOPS as just for contest problems. But that isn't even true. AOPS also offers regular middle school and high school math courses, including calculus. EMF/Imacs doesn't offer calc.

Unfortunately, EMF/Imacs hs no printed materials to purchase (e.g. a textbook to be used as a reference) and nothing from the course can be downloaded to work offline. All in all, I don't see why parents who are satisfied with AOPS, RSM, or their current school should switch to this.

The main reason to switch, or do both, would be to focus more on the formal/abstract math theory and less on problem-solving.
AoPS approach is, by their own documentarion, more informal, preferring "common sense" arguments to axiomatic presentation and formal logic proofs.

Also, at least at the into level, EMF has a more "fun and games" approach to presenting the material (clock math, secret codes, string game, math machines, magic peanuts for negative numbers), instead of raw algebra/geometry problems and solutions.

I have Rosen's classic 1000 page Discrete Math book that covers a lot of this, and my kid has browsed it, but it's pretty dry presentation for a tween.

[Anonymous]

Thanks for posting - will check this out

[Anonymous]

I'm curious as to what kind of school you attended, OP, that had you using this unusual curriculum in middle school?

[Anonymous]

I'm curious, as the parent of some mathy kids, although mine are probably too old. What do you see as the benefits of "pure math" over applications and problem solving?

[Anonymous]

We did the free EMF course during covid for my child who was younger at time. We went through the problems together. It was fabulous. Finally a way to work the brain and engage mathematically minded children in a more abstract less route memorization type way. One of the problems dealt with ciphers and coding which sparked further interest in how ciphers were used during wars. Just made math more challenging, but in a more enjoyable “less work” more escape room type of mindset.

[Anonymous]

So this is 3 years of individual computer learning? In place of math class? With no teacher or student interaction. That sounds so boring.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I'm curious as to what kind of school you attended, OP, that had you using this unusual curriculum in middle school?

It was an experimental magnet program at a county lab school. One of the founders of IMACS lived there and made a deal with the county.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I'm curious, as the parent of some mathy kids, although mine are probably too old. What do you see as the benefits of "pure math" over applications and problem solving?

I was just a kid. It was interesting and cool compared to normal school.
I didn't have AoPS or RSM or any modern Internet stuff like 3B1B and Mathologer compare to. One benefit was that when I read books from the county academic library, and when I got to college and did a pure math major, the language was familiar. The math was still hard.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:So this is 3 years of individual computer learning? In place of math class? With no teacher or student interaction. That sounds so boring.

When I was a kid we had a teacher and class and that was great.
But for the current incarnation, yeah there's no teacher. That's why it's priced at the cost of books, not the price of a class.
Student interaction depends on if you have a local cohort. And I think the website has a forum for student comments?

There's also some "live" version with online teachers and presumably higher price.

[Anonymous]

I haven't heard of this, but I just want to put it out there that there is a reason "new math" was controversial. All that "boring" stuff (boring in quotes because it's not boring if it's taught well) is important and trying to skip out on it is one of the reasons the US has done so poorly on it compared to other countries, particularly when it comes to numeracy. The "new math" generation is the lost generation of mathematics. This sort of reminds me of Lucy Calkins.

Of course, if a kid is super-mathy then I'm sure it's fine and it definitely sounds fun.