I was reading Cynthia Walker’s opinion piece in the Gilroy [CA] Dispatch where it states that only 0.62 % of high school graduates are placed in college-level math classes when they enroll at their local college.
I read “… .62 percent …” and thought, “Well, that got translated wrong. That’s less than 1 percent. That can’t be correct.” And yet it is! Less than 1% of Gilroy High School students who go onto Gavilan College are able to be placed in college-level math courses.
I’m wondering, “What is going on?” It’s not like they’re all at the beach instead of fiddling with x and y because Gilroy’s not near the beach. So I searched out the original article that Cynthia Walker was referring to: Most Grads Unprepared for Gavilan. The article didn’t tell me the cause of this deficit, but I did find out that these students have English as their first language. So. Hmmm.
Anyway, Cynthia Walker is a homeschooling mom who’s currently teaching at a homeschool co-op. She likes Saxon and used it with her students at her home. She explains why she likes Saxon in this article. At Live Oak Academy, the co-op’s name, she is required to teach from Jacobs and Foerster. She prefers Saxon.
In case you’re dying to find out, I taught my son out of Foerster. It’s excellent, imo, but doesn’t have spiral review. You have to make your own spiral review by doing the evens for each lesson and picking up the odds from previous lessons. It works just fine as long as the instructor has the few extra minutes it takes to plan a lesson.
If I had it to do over again, I would still use Foerster for Algebra 1 with my son—he didn’t get along with Saxon. However, with my daughter we’re using Teaching Textbooks (TT). My son used TT Alg. 2, but it was a bit too easy after Foerster. TT is an extremely simple product to use. Each book (Pre-Algebra, Algebra 1, Geometry, etc.) comes with a set of CDs to use on the computer that teaches lesson slowly and methodically and with good graphics. All examples are shown step by step and so are the solutions. It’s like a dream come true for the homeschooling parent.
We didn’t use Jacobs for algebra, but my son used it for geometry. He used the third edition, which is nice and colorful. Harold Jacobs really loves geometry, and it shines through in the problems he gives students. They’re so creative and interesting. The book is organized nicely also, making it easy to learn/teach from.
Cynthia Walker thinks that if Gilroy United School District (GUSD) would only use Saxon math texts that all its math problems would be solved. She does provide plenty of anecdotal evidence to demonstrate that her own homeschooled students were more than prepared for college-level mathematics after using Saxon mathematics texts. However, I don’t think Gilroy’s problems will be solved so easily.
Do you know why? It’s because homeschooling outcomes are not easily replicated in the classroom setting. What happens in the homeschool can rarely happen in the classroom. Mom vs. trained teacher. Doing the work on one’s own bed vs. at a desk in a room full of people. While eating popcorn vs. starving. Not to mention that there’s a better than average chance that the objectives and methods are going to be different, too, even though the same materials are used. I maintain that homeschooling outcomes are not easily replicated in the classroom setting. It’s nearly impossible. I doubt that the math textbook the GUSD is using is really the culprit.
Which puts me right back to the question I asked at the beginning: What is going on? Why are only 0.62 percent of Gilroy graduates entering Gavilan College prepared to perform college-level mathematics?
