Permit me to introduce you to John Saxon, a 58-year-old mathematics teacher who practices in Oscar Rose Junior College, in a suburb of Oklahoma City. He will probably figure as prominently in the history of mathematical pedagogy as Hyman Rickover in the history of nuclear submarines — and for much the same reason.
The two gentlemen are temperamental clones. If it ever occurred to Hyman Rickover that he was wrong about anything, one must assume he lay down until he got over it. It is so with John Saxon, a graduate of West Point, a decorated veteran, a former test pilot, who when he retired from the military, took up the teaching of algebra.
What he discovered shocked him. And anyone who shocks John Saxon should be prepared to take the consequences. He found himself surrounded by a generation of algebraic illiterates. The math scores were going down, down, down; and there was no obvious reason why.
Americans had not lost their basic mechanical intelligence, which we like to think of as congenital. So John Saxon set out to find the cause of this creeping illiteracy. And as one would expect, he did find it.
The fault lay in the textbooks being used universally in the United States.
These, his researchers revealed, were the result of the panic of 1957, when the Russians got up there with their Sputnik, and President Eisenhower instituted a crash program designed to hype American interest and skill in engineering.
The difficulty arose with the preeminence then given to the theoretical mathematicians. These are gentry who do not relate their work to any particular problem — that is for the physicist to worry about. They were the dominating influence in the creation of a set of textbooks blighted by jargon (John Saxon’s English is a model of precision), indifferent to practice, and rather snobbish about utility.
The result has been that Johnny would be introduced to a difficult concept today that tomorrow he could be counted on to forget.
In a demonstration that is bringing the textbook establishment to Armageddon, Saxon has revealed that students who use his own textbook outscored others who used the conventional textbooks by 159 percent in 20 Oklahoma schools tested. Moreover, second-year algebra students were bested by Saxon’s first year algebra students when tested in those fields they had both studied, by an astonishing 200 percent.
In 1980, Saxon mortgaged his house to produce his textbook (the publishers had refused him). It will sweep the country. By the end of this year, he will have finished his second-year textbook. It will predictably do the same.
I can see why people seem to either love or hate Saxon math — for reasons that may or may not relate to pedagogy.