Math 54: An Incremental Development

I have noticed a general theme here. The people who enjoy Saxon Math products seem to be highly educated themselves and tend to value a traditional mathematics education as the foundation for success in life, especially if they rely heavily upon mathematics in their professional lives. The people who don't like it seem to have arguments like, "it's boring" or "it's not fair." You can't put on a clown suit every day and make everything fun all the time. Like or not, there is much repetition and memorization of facts in order to do well in math. The only way to succeed in high school or college math is to get the facts down really well at the elementary level. It's that simple. Saxon Math is great at taking each concept, introducing it in depth, and then compounding on it throughout the book so it isn't forgotten. I assure you, there's no distortion of facts. This is not "fuzzy math!" I work with my daughter every day on the assignments. I don't give her the book to work alone; therefore, I am able to work quickly through it with her and skip problem sets that she has mastered well. For the person who thought five minutes is not enough time to do 100 problems, well, you are right. In the beginning, it is quite challenging for a child to do even 40 in five minutes. The beauty of it is that by doing it day after day, the repetition and memorization will make it easier. My daughter could only do 42 division problems in five minutes two months ago, but today she got 98 correct. It was a victory! These worksheets are meant to challenge the child, not to defeat them. Children who get frustrated by them just need to keep working through it. The frustration comes because they don't have their facts memorized yet! So teach them, and keep teaching them. If you make excuses for your child and say "it's too hard" or "it's not fair" then you are making them believe they cannot accomplish the task, and that's not fair! To keep things interesting or fun, play math games, do math crossword puzzles, play Suduko, paint your geometric shapes, bake something fun when learning measurements, do fun math programs on the computer, or count jelly beans and eat them! You can always supplement a good solid course like Saxon Math with these things and have a well-rounded program that teaches all of the fundamentals.

I'm an engineer with 2 college degrees and a professional engineering license, so I knew what my kid needed to learn. When I went through my education, we learned the great names in math, like Pythagoras, Newton, and Euler, who had made great discoveries contributing to the field. I noted that my kid's name was not among them, so I decided that it was probably best to leave the discoveries to those people, while my kid simply took advantage of the discoveries and had the material taught to him. I knew that it wouldn't be a lot of "fun", but I wasn't particularly interested in trying to make math fun - I have enough common sense to know that kids are learning little, if anything, if they are having a lot of fun. Other than Singapore Math, Saxon is the only method left in the United States that still uses the "Direct Instruction" method (memorizing times tables, etc.), as opposed to the "Discovery" method (where kids can spend 2 weeks coming up with different ways to solve 8 times 7). Direct Instruction is the traditional way to learn math, and I still haven't seen any data show why we, as a country, abandoned it (other than having our math scores drop to the bottom of the world). While our child is not a genius, he was able to complete this book, plus the next 3 books prior to Algebra 1/2 in just over a year (and well before the material covered in school). That pretty much assured him never having to worry about his math education. I will always be indebted to John Saxon for his genius in writing these books.

Saxon Math can hardly be called experimental. I've been using it with my children for over eleven years, and it wasn't new then. All four of my grown children used Saxon. One is now an Artificial Intelligence Engineer (working as a computational linguist), one is a computer science major graduating in a few weeks, and another is a microbiologist. The fourth owns his own business as an electrician. I owe much of this success to Saxon-I am no math genius, so don't be afraid to teach your own children with this program. It works!

Excellent math program for homeschooling students. I have used various other titles and found the Saxon math program to be the best for all 3 of my children. The best part is the step by step approach to learning. Each day, a new topic is introduced as well as a review of all the previous topics. Students retain more and do better on achievement tests. For example, when studying fractions, you learn a little at a time and always review from before. You don't just do fractions for a chapter and never see them again until your annual achievement test.

We did this series starting with Math 3. It is SOOOOO good, nothing compares. My son, who is deaf, had an easy time learning math with this.