Crossing the River with Dogs: Problem Solving for College Students

Ken Johnson, Sierra College
Ted Herr, Roseville High School
Judy Kysh, San Francisco State University

Softcover | ©2004 | 490 pages | ISBN 1-931914-14-1

The original Problem Solving Strategies: Crossing the River with Dogs has been popular in high school mathematics classrooms for many years. Recently, it has also made its way into higher education, primarily showing up in developmental mathematics and mathematics education courses.

New author Judy Kysh, of San Francisco State University, has joined Ken Johnson and Ted Herr in the revision of this text to make it more appropriate for this older, more mature audience. Her background in mathematics education as well as Johnson and Herr’s experiences teaching problem solving to diverse audiences makes this new book the perfect supplement for many higher education mathematics courses.

To achieve their goal of writing a textbook specifically for the college market, the authors made the prose both concise and precise and streamlined the examples and exercise sets. The result is a book that is truly appropriate for students in higher education. Examples now focus on issues relevant to college students such as organizing an intramural basketball team, finding one’s way around a college campus, and writing research papers.

Classic problem solving strategies, such as those found in George Polya’s How to Solve It, as well as more contemporary strategies are presented through the acclaimed approach of fictitious student dialogs. Presenting the strategies in this way allows students to “learn” from students and to realize that there is often more than one way to solve a problem. In fact, some problems reoccur throughout the text to demonstrate that more than one strategy can be used to arrive at the solution.

Dog icons appear regularly in the text at key points. A thinking dog indicates the start of a new example problem. The confused dog highlights ideas that may be confusing and that students should read closely to fully understand. Finally, the barking dog brings attention to main ideas that relate to a particular strategy.

Your students will quickly start applying the problem solving strategies outside of class and will take with them skills to last a lifetime.

Instructor resources are available to qualifying instructors. In addition to a printed manual that includes teaching suggestions, solutions to all problem sets, and alternative problem sets with solutions, instructors will receive a CD-ROM with Power Point presentations correlated to each chapter of the book. Each presentation walks the class through the example problems and their solutions.