Castle in the Sea: Homeschooling High School: Math

Well, this should be short.

I am not a math person. Some of my children are not math persons. Others of them are. Over the years, as I have dealt with both math persons and non-math persons, in the context of having to launch them, eventually and more or less single-handedly, into the rest of their lives, I have distilled my philosophy of math education to the following single word:

Whatever.?

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OK, that's not really acceptable as a philosophy of anything. Try again.

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I have often observed that one of the real advantages of homeschooling is the way that it gives the student opportunities to struggle honestly with something difficult and not (ultimately) fail. That is, the student may fail the first time, or the fifth time, but because we're not rushing on to the next thing, we can count those as attempts toward a summit of mastery. We work at what doesn't come easily to us until we can get it at least acceptably right, and the getting it right is what we count in the end. Nobody says, Oh, you didn't climb Mount Everest that time; ?obviously you're a loseroid at climbing, generally, and will never climb anything ever. Maybe you're a hole-digger, have you ever thought of that??

Homeschooling also means that what works for one child does not have to work for the next, that a "good" curriculum is only as good as the good it does that student.

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Thus far I have educated one person who would not voluntarily touch anything mathematical with a ten-foot pole, and one person who embodies the title of a book I picked up once at a library sale: ?A Romp Through Mathematics. The only thing that really worked for the former student was the Teaching Textbooks series, which I wish I had bought sooner than I did, because it would have saved us endless algebraic angst early on. She could self-teach, which was what she wanted, and while various mathematically-inclined friends of mine have opined that the program lacks depth and rigor, it was the right choice for a student who was, as my own college math professor put it, "not making a career of mathematics." In this instance, the question was not whether the student was going to learn mathematics deeply enough; ?it was whether she was going to learn mathematics at all. My own experience has been that it is, truly, entirely possible to spend fourteen years in school and not learn mathematics at all; ?as a parent?I was eager that my daughter not relive that part of my life. Teaching Textbooks was the answer in this instance, and while her standardized test scores in mathematics were not that impressive, she did pass her one college math class (Euclidian and Non-Euclidian Geometries) with a B+, which we both regarded as a highly satisfactory closure to the mathematical chapter of her story.

UPDATE: ?I should add that this child completed Algebra 1, which took the better part of two years, Geometry, and Algebra 2, finishing in her senior year. She did get into all the colleges to which she applied, and she handled her one math credit well. Now, of course, you tend to see that colleges want four credits in high-school math; ?we felt lucky to squeak by with three, but with all my other children, I am anticipating the need to do four.?

My second child, and current high-schooler, began working through Saxon Algebra 1/2, which I'd picked up off a freebie table at a homeschool-support-group meeting,?as a sixth grader. I have never been particularly a fan of Saxon and have always said, Hear hear, when people have described it as dull, dry, repetitive, and so on. Saxon looks to me the way math classes felt?to me. Brrrr. Prickly. Unfriendly. Inhuman.?No, thanks.?My son, on the other hand,?credits Saxon with awakening him to the enjoyment of math. He is also very much a self-teacher, and my approach to his math has been to buy the Saxon books, because that's what he's requested, and to find some video-teaching component to accompany them, either the D.I.V.E. CDs or the Art Reed DVD class lectures, for the times when he gets stuck. He also leans heavily on Khan Academy?for help when he needs it. Thus far he has not needed actual tutoring in math, though we do have access to a college tutoring center.

He has so far worked through Saxon's Algebra 1/2?and Algebra 1, and is currently in Algebra 2. Though, supposedly, the two algebras are supposed to cover geometry as well, I've had him do as much of Teaching Textbooks Geometry as he could get through last summer, for the sake of dealing with proofs, and he will probably finish that course next summer (Because we already own it, that's why). From there he will either move into Saxon's Advanced Mathematics or begin taking classes at the college, as math professors advise us. His ultimate interests have to do with science, and it will behoove him in high school to take as much math as he can as well, to be a strong candidate for the kinds of things he wants to do in the future.

ADDENDUM: ?This student has also enjoyed math literature -- Flatland, which he read as a sixth- or seventh-grader, comes to mind, though I know he's read other things, too: ?Game, Set, and Math, by Ian Stewart, math puzzle books, Penrose the Mathematical Cat . . . He has Life of Fred: ?Advanced Algebra, and he's read it some, but time constraints have meant that he's mostly just concentrated on Saxon.?

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Unlike me, my friend Anne-Marie is a math person, and I rather suspected that her philosophy with regards to mathematics would not be whatever. I was glad that she responded to a plea for input on this subject with the following:

Source: http://fineoldfamly.blogspot.com/2012/12/homeschooling-high-school-math.html

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