Several parents have asked us why we left out these chapters from our syllabus, so we decided to post our reasons here. Hopefully you will find them useful as you look for the right Geometry course for your family.
When we were putting together our Geometry course, we did so while evaluating the other courses being taken before and after Geometry as well as what would be “the norm” among comparative courses. What we found was that while the concepts covered in those chapters are covered in some other Geometry courses, they are not used in later courses—such as Algebra II with Trig, Calculus 1 or beyond. They are not touched on again in the ACT or SAT, and you don’t even see them at all unless the student goes to college specifically to get a mathematics degree. For this reason, if your student is planning to be a math major, they might consider going over those chapters—in which case we will support you in that decision (including Homework Help–also, the solutions manual that comes in our course kit covers those chapters). However, it is our opinion that those chapters are not essential to a solid education in Geometry, therefore we have omitted them from our syllabus.
Really even a math major is going to be re-taught the materials of these chapters in college. The university will re-teach it as if it is the first time students are seeing the material, so there isn’t even a prerequisite for these chapters. In very real sense, these concepts are simply busy work for a high school math course.