Judicial Decisions and the Public Schools.
While the statute law governing B.C.'s public schools is familiar to a majority of its educators, there appears to be widespread uncertainty as to the content and relevance of judicial decisions, and also as to the ways in which the courts and various quasi-judicial bodies make the decisions. The major purpose of the research reported herein was to evaluate the extent and the significance of these decisions as they relate to public school operations in British Columbia. Scattered information concerning relevant decisions was gathered, organised and evaluated. In addition, a number of issues concerning the current and future impact of judicial decisions on school operations were brought into perspective. Major conclusions were: (1) judicial decisions do play a significant role in B.C. public school operations; (2) greater interest, knowledge and involvement on the part of educators is required.
The Bounded Politics of School Desegregation Litigation.
The courts, a dominant force in the creation of school desegregation policy, are commonly perceived as making decisions primarily legalistic in nature. In this article, David Kirp examines the evolution of Supreme Court doctrine since the Brown decision in 1954; the progression of specific desegregation cases through the trial courts; and the interchange between political institutions and the courts at the local level. His analysis reveals that the decision-making process in contemporary school desegregation cases is both a political and a constitutional event.
DIFFERENTIAL CALCULUS OF SEVERAL VARIABLES WITH MATHEMATICA OR MAPLE
The use of Computer Algebra Systems (CAS) in Mathematical Laboratories at Engineering Schools is increasing. Therefore, it has become necessary to undertake a new educational approach in the teaching of many mathematical topics. Obviously it is not possible to give the same lectures as in the 1950,s. The CAS allows us to experiment and teach in “a different way”. The students' mathematical knowledge at the beginning of their studies in the University is completely different. Moreover we have fewer credits assigned to Mathematical topics in engineering curriculum. The objective of he authors, professors of different Spanish Universities, is to try to demonstrate a new way to use the CAS, concretely Maple and Mathematica, as a support in the teaching of Differential Calculus of Several Variables. They take advantage of the computer's graphical capacities to sketch the graphs of surfaces defined in explicit, parametric or implicit form. They survey the general topics: limits, partial derivatives, differentiability, chain rule, implicit functions and extreme values. For each topic, they give a few basic instructions of the CAS used; afterwards they give several examples, in increasing order of difficulty, and finally the students must solve exercises and try to establish a general procedure for a quite general problem. In this paper we have included several examples used in this survey.