Geometry

As a math teacher and tutor, I disagree with those who say this book is too hard. This book is exactly what a typical geometry textbook looked like in the 1980s and early 1990s. It clearly explains concepts with plenty of examples. It is well-organized. It has a comprehensive glossary, index, and list of theorems and postulates. It presents exercises in order of difficulty, beginning with the easiest. It offers many exercises per section (often 30 or even 50), rather than just 10 or 20. The answers to the odd problems are in the back. In short, it is exactly what any student ought to have in a geometry book.Clearly, there will always be some students who struggle and some who find geometry to be a challenging subject, in general. However, any average or above average student really ought to be able to read this book and learn geometry from it. The problem is that students simply haven't learned how to use a textbook! I constantly have to teach students how to use the table of contents, index, glossary, etc. Once a student learns these study skills, s/he ought to be able to take this book and run with it, assuming s/he has sufficient basic algebra skills to succeed in geometry.On the contrary, the Geometry book by Larson, Boswell, et al (also published by McDougal Littell) is simply horrendous. It is so replete with dazzling colors and uninformative pictures that I can hardly find the theorems. (It's like a "Where's Waldo?" of theorems and postulates.) By contrast, the Jurgensen book may look dry, but the authors conservatively reserve color to bring your attention to the most important information, such as theorems you should memorize. And it works! The most important memorization-worthy information jumps off the page. I can find theorems and corollaries in this book almost as quickly as if the book were tabbed.As a tutor, this book will always be my go-to geometry textbook. No matter what textbook they are using in school, I usually have my geometry clients purchase a used copy of the Jurgensen book to use as a reference. So far, all of them agree that it is much easier to use and better organized than any book they have used at school.

I purchased this book as a reference book for my technical library, but I am familiar with it through an earlier incantation back when I took honors Geometry more than 35 years ago. The Geometry book I used was part of the Houghton Mifflin Modern School Mathematics /Structure and Method series of texts used by my school district in the middle 1970's.Going through this book, I noted quite a few similarities between this version and the early 1970's edition I used in school. First and foremost this is a proof based book and a lot of time is spent presenting the axioms and building foundations for the student to be able to reason his/her way through two-column proofs. This is by no means an easy book, but it navigable by a diligent student who is willing to put forth the effort. Like the structure and Method series of texts, the exercises are good and tiered to the level of the student with A exercises for everybody, B exercises for your better students and C exercises students for top notch students looking for a challenge.I also found that time spent early on in getting the feel/mindset for the proof based approach of geometry paves the way as you work your way through the book. Once you get the feel, I found it was possible to read the book and work ahead of the class without terribly much effort.I have had the opportunity to see some of the texts that pass for Mathematics today. Unlike the watered-down texts that are foisted on us by bureaucratic decree. this book presents the subject matter of Geometry in a rigorous manner for the serious and gifted student considering a career in mathematics or physical sciences.

I have been teaching geometry for over thirty years. I've used this book or an earlier incarnation of it for most of that time. Although the book has it's weaknesses, it is overall thorough and systematic. Negative reviews of this textbook are based primarily on a comparison of this book to watered-down texts now more popular with schools. I also tutor and one of my students explained to me that his school uses a different text, because that text concentrates on material covered on the SAT. I've had students who transferred to another school come back and tell me I made geometry unnecessarily complicated. His new school had an easier text. As another reviewer noted, the textbook committees of many schools are primarily concerned with protecting the reputation of the school by passing students and NOT with the education of the student. They perpetuate mediocrity. Better schools in my area use this textbook, but most often it's only used for "honors" classes.This is a difficult text, not because it's a bad book, but because it presents a high quality, proof-based exposure to geometry. For years I've been hearing fellow educators tout how courses expose students to higher order thinking. The fact is, education in the United States, especially math education, does not expose students to higher order thinking, but substitutes mechanical processes for true understanding, and politically correct processes like projects and group work for rigor. Schools now use group tests and quizzes so students have a better chance of passing, not a better chance of learning. This begins back at the lowest levels of math education. Geometry is usually the first course of any sort where the student truly has to think. In algebra (not the way it should be taught, but the way it is taught), students memorize mechanical processes without understanding why the process works. If they remember the steps required for a particular type of problem, and get their arithmetic right, they get a correct answer. When a student creates a two-column proof in geometry, reasoning from limited information to a final conclusion, no teacher or text can teach a student to always get a right answer. Getting a right answer involves actual thought and may take time and repeated analysis.Geometry is a language intensive branch of mathematics. If students don't acquire the vocabulary of the study (definitions, postulates and theorems), they can't "think" about the problem. It's like trying to learn a foreign language without learning vocabulary. This book does a very good job of laying out this "vocabulary", with a few exceptions.The authors of the book have made the book weaker gradually over the last twenty years. I believe they have done so in an attempt to make the course easier. Unfortunately, they've merely muddied the water. Incongruities and inaccuracies have crept in over the years, but the text still remains the best available.I suspect the publishers will be dropping this textbook from it's catalog. It hasn't been updated since 1999, although this is unclear. When I last checked with the publisher, they had not made any plans to update it. It is actually beneficial if they don't update it, I suppose, since when they have in more recent years, the book has become of less quality.Finally, if you have a child taking geometry with this book, count your blessings. Help your child to be successful by having them memorize the vocabulary, postulates and theorems as a first step to understanding. Additionally, encourage them not to give up and keep thinking.