GRADE NINE: the required elements

Theory: The archetypal idea for the whole year of Grade Nine is movement and our focus is on the emergence of the new Galilean Dynamical mathematical-literary mentality that articulates a new narrative for the nature of things in which motion generates value. The motion of money through time produces interest; the motion of sailing vessels produces a new world; the motion of cannon balls destroys feudal fortifications and produces new strategic power; the motion of the blood in circulation from the heart (and not the liver) sustains the life of of the body; the motion of the heavenly bodies produces new scientific laws; and the motion of the individual out of his class produces a new identity of self in the formative picaresque story of a movement from rags to riches. All of these epiphanies of movement constitute the cultural shift from medievalism to modernism in the emergence of the new mathematics of motion in calculus and the mapping of a new world space in a world economy.

Practice: An integrated studies approach in which the scholarly narratives concerned with the Renaissance, the voyages of discovery, and the rise of European science are brought together in an understanding that these separate descriptions are all partial perceptions of a single cultural transformation.

Integrated Studies Project: The Art and Science of Perspective and the close examination of nature.

Math Units:

• Topics:
  • Perspective
  • Conics
  • Trigonometry
  • Logic
• Suggested Integrative Projects (one required):
  • Conics from Apollonius to Durer
  • Galileo and the pendulum clock
  • Vicenzo, equal temperament, the 12th root of 2
  • Marin Mersenne and musical arithmetic
  • Newton: will Halley's Comet destroy us?
  • Cartography, Mercator, etc.
  • John Dee, the Sidney circle, the Royal Society
  • Double entry bookeeping, John Recorde, logarithms
  • Cartesian coordinates and the notations of algebra
  • Kepler's Mysterium Cosmographicum and the Platonic Solids