The mission of the Frassati Catholic High School Math Department is to equip students with those essential skills and knowledge required for further study and also to help students mature into logical, clear thinkers. Not only will they learn to properly use mathematical thinking in everyday situations in their own lives, but also to recognize the inherent order of creation as part of God’s design.
The Frassati Catholic High School Math Curriculum will provide each student with the essential knowledge and thinking skills not only foundational for future math courses but also useful throughout life. The program provides a rigorous framework to gain understanding of concepts more deeply and more completely with every course. It allows opportunity to practice and apply these concepts to confirm understanding and as a springboard for even greater clarity. Integration between math and science courses played a key factor in the development of the curricula of each of these departments.
The reasoning required for mathematics is a higher level of abstraction in which the student must learn to leave behind all the concrete particulars of a situation and focus on quantity. The student must represent a situation symbolically, manipulate the symbols, and then relate the symbols back to the specific situation. This kind of thinking reveals the order inherent in creation as part of God’s design. It also opens the student up to consider those questions that are at the very core of being—about worth, purpose, cause, truth, beauty, goodness, and God.
The ability to reason logically and abstractly as developed in studying mathematics certainly crosses over to other coursework. In particular, the Ethics and Culture classes employ the same thinking skills. Moreover, they make explicit some of the philosophical explanations for how the human person thinks, especially about the abstract qualities mentioned above of worth, purpose, cause, truth, beauty, goodness, and God.