Replies

Saxon Math is what we used to home school the kids with.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saxon_math

In some reviews, such as ones performed by the prominent nonprofit curriculum rating site EdReports.org[5], Saxon Math is ranked poorly because it is not aligned with the Common Core State Standards Initiative. That initiative, which has been adopted by most U.S. states, is an important factor in determining which curricula are used in public schools in those states. However, Saxon Math continues to be popular among private schools and homeschoolers, many of whom favor its more traditional approach to teaching math.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Saxon_(educator)

Saxon was born in Georgia to parents John Harold and Zollie McArthur Saxon. He graduated from Athens High School in 1941 in Athens, Georgia, and later attended the University of Georgia.[1]

He earned a bachelor's degree in engineering from the United States Military Academy at West Point in 1949 and his master's degree in electrical engineering in 1961. He became an officer in the United States Army Air Forces, commanding a B-17 Flying Fortress in World War II.[2] He later joined United States Air Force, flying 55 missions in a B-26 Invader on Night Intruder missions during the Korean War and reaching the rank of lieutenant colonel.[2] In 1953, he survived a crash when a B-25 Mitchell engine failed on takeoff.[2] That year, he also received a bachelor's degree in aeronautical engineering from the Air Force Institute of Technology at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio.[1] Saxon also taught engineering at the United States Air Force Academy[2] for five years.

After his retirement from the Air Force in the 1970,[2] he settled in Norman, Oklahoma. He taught algebra part-time at Rose State College in Midwest City, Oklahoma.[3][4]

Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, John Saxon spoke out against mathematics education reform efforts that he believed would lead to a disaster in math and science education. He wrote or co-wrote a series of nine mathematics textbooks for kindergarten through high school which use an incremental teaching method often called "Saxon math". According to Saxon in media interviews in the 1980s and early 1990s and documentation coming with the high-school level textbooks, the inclusion of specialised and/or somewhat uncommon words such as "sciolist" in the story problems is intended as a vocabulary builder in preparation for the verbal section of the SAT and similar tests.[5]

The basic philosophy of his approach was incremental development and continuous review. Incremental development meant that larger concepts were broken down into smaller, more easily understood pieces that were introduced over time; continuous review refers to the practice of concepts in cumulative problem sets once they were introduced. As a student completed a new concept, a brief review of the previous chapters and concepts were also tested.

I was one of the lucky math teachers who saw George Polya at the math conference held at Asilomar. (1971)?

He did a problem that emphasized how sometimes looking at a problem in three dimensions simplifies a two dimensional problem so that the solution is obvious.

Loved it.

Agree that common core is a bad way to teach math, as was “the New Math” in its time. However the clear way to teach math well is to have teachers who understand the math they are teaching well. Also they need to be able to understand student questions and be able to “see” where the student has something fundamental that they do not understand.