Monster of mathematics tamed

LIGHTER TEXTBOOKS and a still lighter course ? mathematics will be fun for school students from the new academic session starting April.

Course load reduced, content made zippier

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LIGHTER TEXTBOOKS and a still lighter course — mathematics will be fun for school students from the new academic session starting April.

The Class XI maths course has been reduced by almost half and, for the first time, science and commerce students will follow the same course. “Under the previous maths curriculum, it was 19 chapters for science students and 21 for commerce. Now both streams will have only 16 chapters -- and common textbooks,” said Hukum Singh, professor of math at NCERT. “Both science and commerce students will benefit as far as curriculum load is concerned.” Earlier, the course was divided into three parts: science students followed math A and B, while commerce students followed math A and C. They will now have a single course.

While sections like 3-D geometry and vector, earlier taught in great detail, have been reduced to an introduction to the concepts, other chapters have either been dropped or divided into two parts, to be covered in classes XI and XII.

“Chapters on relation function and differential calculus have been divided into two parts to control the curriculum load at the higher secondary level. The earlier sections were simply too large to be tackled in one go,” Singh said.

Importance has been given to the application aspect. “If you are teaching conic section, the textbook lists the methodology of explaining the concept in the classroom with concrete examples instead of merely disseminating formulae, which can be learnt by rote and reproduced without understanding its application,” a senior NCERT official said.