Homeschoolers have a complicated relationship with math. While there are occasionally homeschooled prodigies who excel in the subject, research indicates that math is a particularly challenging subject for homeschooling parents to teach their children. This is especially true as children enter high school and surpass their parents’ own grasp of math.
Teaching math is so challenging, in fact, that a “homeschool math gap” exists and has been documented by multiple researchers and studies. The homeschool math gap, as explained by the Coalition for Responsible Home Education (CRHE), is the fact that homeschooling appears to “improve students’ verbal and weaken their math capacities.” CRHE argues this occurs because, “in many cases, homeschooled teens are expected to teach themselves algebra or calculus out of a textbook without the aid of any kind of teacher or adult help—something most children likely cannot do successfully.”
Much of the complicated relationship between homeschoolers and math is due to one man and his math curriculum: John Saxon and the Saxon Math textbooks he created. “You’d be hard pressed to find anyone neutral about Saxon Math,” The Christian Science Monitor wryly observed in 2000. Saxon and his math textbooks are enormously popular among homeschoolers, especially evangelical homeschoolers. Or, I should say, the textbooks are popular among homeschooling parents. Homeschooled children and homeschool alumni have long found Saxon’s approach mind-numbing, joyless, and tedious.
About John Saxon
John Saxon, once dubbed “the angry man of mathematics,” was a soldier and later a teacher. He was born in 1923 in Moultrie, Georgia. He attended high school at Athens High School, graduating in 1941 and enrolling at the University of Georgia. In 1943, Saxon joined the Army Air Corps, where he worked as a B-17 aircraft commander in World War 2. In 1945, Saxon was appointed to West Point, where he earned a B.S. in Engineering. He earned a second B.S. eight years later in Aeronautical Engineering from the Air Force Institute of Technology.
In 1957, Saxon graduated from Air Force Test Pilot School and became a test pilot. After five years as a test pilot, he earned a Master’s in Electrical Engineering at the University of Oklahoma. He then taught engineering at the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs for another five years.
Saxon retired from the U.S. Air Force in 1970. He spent the next fourteen years as a part-time teacher of mathematics at Rose State College in Oklahoma City. He picked math because, according to a colleague, Saxon “had experienced frustration when he tried to become an engineer then discovered he had a weak math background.” He thus “wanted to remedy that for others.” Saxon resigned from Rose State College in 1985.
In 1981, Saxon founded Saxon Publishers with the goal of challenging “the math orthodoxy of the day.” Under this imprint, he authored or co-authored nine math textbooks covering grades four through twelve. His last two textbooks covered calculus and physics.
By 1986, newspapers were already calling Saxon “a controversial math book author” for his attacks against contemporary math textbooks as well as calculator use. To Saxon, “math books were too full of pictures, chatter, and not enough problem-solving.” He was also “one of the first to oppose the recommendation of the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics to integrate calculators into math classes.”
Saxon died in 1996 at age 72. According to his obituary, Saxon “devoted his last fifteen years to turning around math education in America.” Local news remembered him as a “maverick,” “the feisty educator who wanted math taught his way.”
About Saxon Math
John Saxon’s approach to math was incremental. Lessons in his textbooks’ earlier chapters would be easy and cover basics. Later lessons would build on the earlier lessons, both introducing new concepts and also reviewing everything from the earlier chapters. Because each lesson featured significant review of previous ones, memorization through drills was key to Saxon’s approach. According to Time Magazine, Saxon aimed “to confront two fundamental weaknesses that afflict most [math] texts: the lack of a sense of continuity and connection among topics, and student failure to remember the material already covered.”
There are 13 textbooks in Saxon’s math curriculum, each corresponding to a grade level. The first book, Math K, is for students in kindergarten; the last book is Calculus and intended for high school seniors. As Saxon’s publishing company grew, it also created a geometry textbook as well as a phonics and spelling curriculum. The latter, authored by special education teacher Lorna Simmons and first published in 2005, uses Saxon’s incremental approach and applies it to phonics and spelling. It has been used by “over four million readers in all fifty states.”
While there are multiple aspects of Saxon Math that homeschooling parents like, I would argue the most significant draw is the general perception that the curriculum is essentially self-teaching. Many homeschooling parents, when they start getting out of their depth teaching higher levels of math, simply hand the textbooks’ answer keys to their children so the children can self-grade.
While self-teaching and self-grading answers to Saxon Math problems can be doable for lower textbook levels, it is much more difficult once a student reaches Advanced Mathematics and beyond. I experienced this personally while I was a homeschooled child. My parents taught me math through the Saxon 5 or Saxon 6 textbook. Then it started to get beyond my parents’ understanding. So, they gave me the answer key to grade my own work. I was able to teach myself until I hit Advanced Mathematics. Without a tutor or teacher, I could not make heads or tails out of that textbook and eventually gave up.
How Saxon Math Was Popularized
Saxon Math was not immediately popular. Saxon faced at least two significant obstacles. The first was publishers’ disinterest in his approach to math. According to The Oklahoman, “National publishers scoffed at Saxon’s textbook proposals.” This was because math educators believed “rote drill is not an effective way to teach math for most students.” Saxon nonetheless persisted, mortgaging his house and drawing from personal funds to start his own textbook publishing company in Norman, Oklahoma.
The second obstacle was getting his textbooks into schoolchildren’s hands. Overcoming this, wrote The Oklahoman, “led him to tangle with numerous school boards,” as “Oklahoma City and Norman schools… squared off against Saxon while debating whether to use his books.” Many teaching professionals thought he used “too much emphasis on rote memorization.”
While public schools resisted Saxon’s traditional, anachronistic approach to math, he soon found the perfect audience for his textbooks: evangelical homeschoolers. In a 2014 survey of 3,702 homeschool alumni, the overwhelming majority—74% of respondents—said their homeschool used Saxon curriculum. The next most commonly used curricula were Abeka at 69% and Bob Jones at 50%.
Homeschoolers became interested in Saxon and his math approach after conservative kingpin William Buckley promoted Saxon in his magazine, National Review. According to Time Magazine in 1981, Saxon began mailing letters about his approach and textbooks to members of the media—one of whom was Buckley, who “responded and became a believer.” Buckley was excited by the prospect of “bringing the textbook establishment to Armageddon.”
“With Buckley’s help,” Time explained, “Saxon got a small foundation grant and wrote two pugnacious and polemical articles in the magazine [National Review] about textbooks and the teaching of algebra. They stirred considerable controversy, bringing Saxon a national audience and, eventually, hundreds of letters from teachers and parents curious about the book.” The controversy paid off: soon, “schools all over the country” were “requesting Saxon’s [curriculum].”
Appeasing the Evangelical Homeschooling Market
Towards the end of his life, Saxon encountered a dilemma: evangelical homeschooling leaders and parents loved his approach to math but continually complained about and lambasted him for including math problems featuring supernatural or fantastical characters. In 1993, Mary Pride—the founder and publisher of the very popular Practical Homeschooling magazine—wrote an article about how her fellow homeschooling peers were “sniping at the best math program ever made available to home schoolers.” The program was Saxon’s and the sniping was because his math textbooks featured “a light sprinkling of references to demons, poltergeists, and other unpleasant spiritual beings.”
In her article, Pride argues Saxon’s detractors “had a point, though they certainly weren’t taking the best way to express it.” The detractors were “circulating letters condemning the Saxon texts as ‘New Age’ and urging others to boycott them.” But Pride felt Saxon was harmless: “John Saxon, not being either a fundamentalist Christian or a New Ager, does not believe in such beings. He thought they were harmless ‘fairy tale’ creatures that he could use to spice up his problems. When confronted with letters and calls from Christians who objected to these terms, he promptly cleaned up his books.”
While Pride is correct that Saxon eventually removed many of the supernatural and fantastical elements of his math problems to appease evangelical homeschoolers, Saxon resisted somewhat and was a bit salty about it. A sidebar to Pride’s 1993 article featured Saxon’s own thoughts on the controversy. Saxon said he “took out everything that refers to the occult,” but “refused to take out ghosts, fairies, leprechauns, and all of the wonderful little imaginary people that… children have found so fascinating for hundreds of years.”
Saxon then admitted something significant: “What distresses me is how much pleasure many of these Christians get out of hate. They are writing letters to all of these people, telling them about the evil in my books because I have fairies and ghosts in them.” In other words, Saxon knew and understood that capitulating to evangelical homeschoolers was capitulating to hate—and yet he still did their bidding. This is much like how early unschooling pioneer and progressive children’s rights advocate John Holt befriended and partnered with evangelical homeschoolers to promote his own work.
The appeasement was lucrative: when Saxon passed away in 1996, his publishing company employed 100 staff members and was racking up $27.5 million in annual sales.
Alumni Experiences
While Saxon became a minor celebrity to homeschooling parents and programs, homeschooled children and homeschool alumni felt and feel very differently. Many students who were taught Saxon’s math approach found it difficult and unhelpful. To some, it even drained all joy out of learning math.
I talked to seventeen fellow homeschool alumni for this piece to better understand these perspectives. (Read my interviews with them in full in this companion piece.) Most alumni had negative memories of Saxon Math. When asked if they liked anything about the curriculum, several did not mince words: “Absolutely nothing.” “Not that I recall.” “No.”
Many alumni’s frustrations with Saxon Math related to how it was taught: most alumni said they were required to teach themselves and also grade their own work. “That students could teach themselves was the selling point of the curriculum for my parents,” explained health writer Christi R. Lina McCormick-Morin, Deputy Director of the Southern California College Attainment Network, told me, “I always graded myself with the test key in the back of each book, so it was incredibly easy to never do the actual work.” Writer and podcaster D.L. Mayfield felt similarly, telling me, “I was definitely responsible for grading myself and that was the worst part.”
A few alumni did not grade themselves, but that did not mean their experiences were better. Social worker Bethany Sparkle said their mom “had me go through the problems myself and then come to her to show I could do it. If I couldn’t, she would try to show me and quickly get angry at me. I never did learn algebra.”
Because most alumni taught themselves, they had similar or overlapping experiences. One common theme was not understanding math conceptually. Brad Barton, a mechanical engineer, explained that, “I felt like concepts were taught out of order. I would have to look ahead several lessons in order to understand something in the current lesson.” Isaac Woelfel, Seismic Field Technician for the Oklahoma Geological Survey, agreed: “It lacked conceptual explanation. It wasn’t until I took math in college that I realized how much Saxon Math focused on memorization, rather than conceptual understanding.”
Another theme was feeling inadequate at math due to Saxon’s curriculum but later in college realizing they like or are good at math—it was Saxon’s curriculum that was dragging them down! Greta LaFore, Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Gonzaga University, had this experience: “I took math in college and was shocked when my professor was eager to meet with me to help me learn how to complete problems. More surprised still was I to find that I had a gift for math when I was given a modicum of support.”
While most felt negatively about Saxon Math, a few also had positive things to say: Engineer Luke Moughon said, “It taught me the basics well. Its pedagogical strategy appeared to lead with rote repetition, with understanding emerging gradually. This seemed to work for me.” Emily, a graduate student studying clinical mental health counseling, agreed: “I liked the repetitive nature of the content in that it provided plenty of practice for each concept over time.”
Though the alumni I interviewed have varying feelings about Saxon Math, they were united in their opinion that homeschooling parents should not just hand their children math books and expect them to teach and grade themselves. This very common practice in homeschooling is doomed to failure (or cheating… or maybe even both!). Anna, a librarian, explained to me that, “You have to teach your child. Do not just give them the teacher book and expect them to come to you when they have questions. Get a math tutor if you don’t feel confident about teaching.”
“I don’t recommend Saxon Math,” she concluded.
Saxon math was the only thing I enjoyed about being homeschooled.