In defense of Teaching Textbooks

When I stumbled on to Teaching Textbooks I was overjoyed. This program has been amazing for my children. Then while reading some comments on TWTM board I was somewhat concerned that it was not rigorous enough to prep for college math. This really puzzled me because the writers of this program seem to be more than qualified to write a high school math program. One of the brothers has two degree form Harvard and has tutored college level students. Surely he would know what was needed to prep for college math. Someone wrote to them and voiced the concern about all of this. Here is their response....
This is from Greg Sabouri..

It may help to give you a little background on the TT series. We first developed the curriculum while running a school for academically-gifted students. We used the same techniques with them that are now used in the TT books. The academic performance of our students was outstanding. Their test scores were extremely high and a large percentage ended up attending very prestigious colleges. For instance, one student went to Dartmouth where he made the highest score in history on their math placement exam. Four years later, he graduated first in his class in math, and he s now getting his Ph.D. in math. With this background, it should be obvious that we would never produce materials that are not college prep. As for our personal backgrounds, I have two degrees from Harvard and tutored graduate students in statistics, probability, and game theory while I was a student there. My brother attended Swarthmore College in Philadelphia, which is one of the very best colleges in the country. We both have 12 or 13 years experience teaching math, and several of those years were spent teaching homeschoolers exclusively. So we're very familiar with homeschooler's unique needs. A few people asked whether TT would prepare a student for college algebra. The series will not only prepare a student for college algebra, but he/she may be able to test out of that course, because there is a lot of overlap between high school Algebra 1 and 2 and college algebra. You asked why our Algebra 1 does not include quadratic equations. It absolutely DOES include quadratic equations. A quadratic equation is just a second-degree equation. We have an entire chapter on that subject in Algebra 1 and all the subsequent chapters of the book review quadratic equations (in the problem sets). Quadratic equations are covered even earlier in our Algebra 2 book. It is true that we don t cover logs. But that is only because the TT series is not finished yet. The same is true of the 2 or 3 other topics that were mentioned. Our Pre-Calculus is coming out next year and that book will cover all those topics extensively, along with many others. The TT series, once it is finished, will cover ALL of the topics that a student needs, no matter what his/her future career plans (including science, engineering, medicine, etc.). Why is it that we put some topics in Algebra 2 instead of Algebra 1 or vice versa (or wait to do logs until Pre-Calculus)? We introduce topics in the order that we think will help the student learn the most. And we've had quite a lot of experience teaching math, as I've discussed. I don t think the goal should be to race through the most number of topics in the shortest time. What's more important is to really learn what you cover. Our approach is to help students gain mastery over foundational areas before moving on to new things. More generally, there are always differences in the sequencing of topics when you compare publishers. For example, to get through all of Saxon s geometry lessons you would have to take Algebra 1, Algebra 2, and Advanced Mathematics. And even then, you wouldn't get a complete high school geometry course. Videotext covers Algebra 1 and Algebra 2 in only 180 lessons, whereas most books take about 260 lessons to cover the same material. But I'm not saying that Saxon or Videotext is bad because of their sequencing or the small number of lessons. When choosing a curriculum I think it makes more sense to focus on how well the book EXPLAINS the concepts, rather than just count up the topics. If topics covered were so important then public school students would have high test scores. That's because the public school books are full of topics. In reality, of course, many public school graduates can't multiply or divide or solve even the simplest algebra equation. And the U.S. is near the bottom of the international math rankings. The biggest problem we have in math education is not that topics aren't introduced early enough. It s that the books don't give enough explanation and the instruction they do contain is usually very poor (maybe because mathematicians are often bad communicators.) Inadequate explanation is an especially big problem for homeschoolers, who are often studying independently once they reach middle school age. The TT series is designed to deal with this problem. We cover all the major topics and we do so in depth, with full explanation so much explanation, in fact, that the student can pretty much teach himself! I am convinced that a student who uses the TT series will be BETTER PREPARED for the SAT and ACT and for college than if he/she uses any other series on the market. And the reason is the quality and quantity of our instruction. It doesn't hurt that we make math enjoyable either. Everybody knows that the more interested a student is in a book, the more he's likely to learn. As for the Jay Wile e-mail, I already told you that we will cover every one of the extra topics he mentioned in our Pre-Calculus product. And for those students who don't want to go all the way through our Pre-Calculus, we ll post certain topics (like logs) on our website for all users to access. The physics lesson that was mentioned was not on imaginary numbers. It was on complex numbers. A complex number can be viewed as a vector in 2 dimensions (and in the lesson we used a two-dimensional example). Also, the addition and subtraction of complex numbers and vectors are the same. This gave us a rare opportunity to show, in a way that a high school student can understand, how complex numbers (a very abstract and difficult concept) could actually be used in a real-world context. Other math authors have taken a similar approach.
Greg Sabouri
This makes so much sense to me, and I have seen this in my own children. It is an outstanding program and we will continue with it all the way through Pre-Calculus.
You can view samples on their website TT