Math Can Be This Simple?

This may be either the most inspiring post you've ever read or the most inane, depending on whether you are a homeschooler or not.  Math is one of those subjects for homeschoolers that rarely gets solved without sweat, tears and sometimes blood. Another would be writing - but one miracle at a time!

Seriously, who knew math could be so easy!  We have tried nearly every math curriculum available to us, both American and Canadian over the last 11 years, but it wasn't until last year that my 5-9th graders hit the sweet spot, and by that I mean a visible lack of sweat, tears and yes, blood. Of course it came in it's least expected form, or else I would have found it earlier.

The zeitgeist of math (and other subjects) these days is that it must be taught intuitively, in that the child should discover for himself the algorithms and principles in order to understand and be inspired.  What this looks like in practice is teaching 3 different ways to do subtraction.  Or giving the child 20 blocks and telling him that 5 children each want blocks, so how many would each get? There is nothing wrong with any of this, unless the child is completely frustrated and confused and never picks up on their own the fact that there are always four 5's in 20. Believe me, some kids never get this.

My 16 year old, active player in the sweat, tears and blood scenes and not-so-patient subject of all my experimentation, had some very erudite thoughts on the topic: in order to benefit from the "discovery learning approach", you actually have to care about learning - or at least doing the activity that will produce the learning.  If you don't care, you don't want to, you would rather be playing computer games or having your eyelashes plucked out, you are NOT going to benefit from this approach.  He should know.

So, out of new and creative curricula to try, and needing something more self directed since I was busy with cancer etc., I resorted to my last resort:


I know, I know, it's old fashioned, it's drudgery, it's too repetitive, the books are too plain, there are too many questions in each lesson, there are no cute pictures, no colours, no clowns or animals to keep you company throughout the year.  Exactly. All those factors also make it too cheap, too straightforward, too reusable, too predictable, too easy know how long math will take each day, too easy for students to teach themselves too... need I go on?

I'm not kidding, we have now had 2 full years of Math Nirvana. In case you don't know what "Math Nirvana" might look like, picture this: children reading and understanding the lesson themselves; children (mostly) uncomplainingly completing their lesson; children actually learning their math facts;  knowing exactly how long a lesson will take because it's the same every time; constant review built in, so no one is forgetting what they learned 3 weeks ago; no teacher prep.; sooooo easy to mark; topics integrating easily into the learning outcomes of our province; each child scoring well over 80% in a curriculum that works substantially ahead of what's normally used here.

Maybe it's working for us so well because we tried all these first (and investigated and rejected the other big names you don't see here), and can really appreciate the simplicity of a straightforward text:

Miquon 

Bob Jones

Math Mammoth

Rod and Staff

Study Forge

Thinkwell

Making Math Meaningful

Math Makes Sense (no, it doesn't, not in this book)

Math Focus

My disclaimer here is that I have not used Saxon levels K-5/4.  We started with 6/5 in grade 5, because I have used Rightstart Math with my last 2 kiddos from K-grade 4. 

Rightstart is in the "discovery math" category and is teacher intensive. If I had it to do again, I would look at Saxon's early grades, but that said we have been thrilled with Rightstart - as long as I did not push the "let's see if we can figure out 2 new ways to solve this problem before we've mastered the first way" thing.  I really don't believe you can escape math being teacher-intensive in the early years if you want to set a good foundation.

So maybe I've got weird kids who are interested in a lot of other things besides math and really just want to git'er done. Or maybe as I've witnessed, we're backwards, and conceptual thinking comes from learning what someone else has figured out before you.  Even so, I'm amazed we have found a way to cram the math learnin' in so that it will be there when they need it!  Who knew Saxon was the answer??