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Seebach: To prof, Saxon math doesn't add up to much

Published March 24, 2007 at midnight

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A couple of years ago I wrote a column about Israeli mathematician Ron Aharoni, and what he learned about math when he taught it to elementary schoolchildren. He expanded his ideas into a book, Arithmetic for Parents, and because he'd seen the column, the publisher of a new English translation sent me an e-mail asking if I would like to see a review copy.

Nothing unusual about that? No, but the publisher is unusual. He is Alexander Givental, a professor of mathematics at the University of California at Berkeley. Last year, he started a mathematical publishing house, sumizdat.org, so he could bring out his own adaptation and translation of a famous Russian geometry text, Kiselev's Geometry, which was first published in 1892 and is still in use today. He inscribed the very first copy to his 8-year-old son Emile.

He first learned about Aharoni's work four years ago, he said by e-mail, when he was trying to persuade Emile's school to switch to the Singapore Math program. And when he discovered that Aharoni's book had not yet appeared in English - though it was a best-seller in Israel - he was in a position to do something about it.

The subtitle is A Book for Grownups About Children's Mathematics, and it's aimed at parents who want to help their children with math, or for that matter at any adult who'd like to revisit the mathematics of their childhood in the hope that it would be less traumatic on the second go-round. It's excellent, and I would expect that many math teachers would benefit from reading it.

As Givental and I were exchanging messages, I mentioned the Saxon math program, and the successes some local schools have had with it. He thinks it is deplorable. "All U.S. math programs I've seen," he said, "are apparently designed by people who speak math as a foreign language. Using these programs makes no more sense than inviting Russian emigres to teach your kids English. Take Saxon Math, with its main features being mindless fragmentation, monstrous size, and perpetual drill. It is exactly the opposite of what mathematics really is: a unifying way to manage your environment, based on simplicity, concision and logic."

I'm not entirely persuaded that Saxon is all that bad, though you should note that his opinion on mathematical topics carries greater weight than mine. But I suspect part of the reason Saxon often works well anyway (at least compared with most other math curriculums) is that many teachers don't understand mathematics at any deep level, and don't like it much, so they are more successful with structured programs to tell them what to do.

The Singapore Math program, and in particular Earlybird Math and Primary Math, the core programs for K-6, is far superior, Givental said. "It seems to be the only available elementary curriculum that makes sense mathematically. It is very simple and efficient in use, and to be successful, teachers only need to trust those 'native speakers' who created the program, and make an effort to learn math from it.

"Aharoni's book, too, can be extremely helpful in this regard."

At math.berkeley.edu/~giventh/, his home page, there's an essay comparing the treatment of a single topic, the addition and subtraction of unlike fractions, in Primary Mathematics 5A, from the U.S. edition of Singapore Math, and in Mathematics, book 5, from the California edition, published by Houghton Mifflin. You should read it - especially if you never understood how to add fractions.

Linda Seebach is an editorial writer for the Rocky. She can be reached by telephone at (303) 954-2519 or by e-mail at .