The tasks serve as examples of where today's world can provide good contexts for good mathematics. They never were intended to represent, or even suggest, a full menu of high school mathematics. They provide possibilities for teaching. They exemplify central mathematical ideas and simultaneously convey the explanatory power of mathematics to help us make sense of the world around us. But High School Mathematics at Work is not only about relevance and utility.
Mathematics can be beautiful, powerful, and useful.
We hope you will discover all three of these virtues in some of the examples. Rather, it suggests that tasks like these can provide meaningful contexts for important mathematics we already teach, including both well-established topics such as exponential growth and proportional reasoning, as well as more recent additions to the curriculum, such as data analysis and statistics. Collectively, these essays and tasks explore how mathematics supports careers that are both high in stature and widely in demand. For parents, this book can give a sense of how mathematics can be powerful, useful, beautiful, meaningful, and relevant for students. And for those who influence educational policy, this book might motivate a search for curricula with these virtues.