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Karen T
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| Posted: Oct 21 2009 at 10:41pm | IP Logged
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My ds has used TT for his high school math and I've been very pleased with it so far. He is in 11th grade this year and started pre-calculus. With the previous levels, most of the time he was able to understand the lectures/book and do most of the homework himself. when he occasionally had trouble I could easily help him. He usually kept a high B/low A average on tests.
Wow, pre-cal has been a different story. The very first week he had a lot of trouble and I ended up re-explaining most of it, and then he seemed fine for awhile. I have him bring his homework to me for correcting, so that I know how he's doing (I thought) long before test time. Each day, he'd have all or most of them correct and I thought things were fine. He even made low A's on the first 3 tests. But on the 4th one he made a 73, not terrible but enough of a difference that I told him to study and I made up a new test for him to take 2 days later, thinking he just hadn't studied for the first one. No, this one he made a 25, and I do believe he studied.
So I sat down and started going through it with him, and the problem is that this is not the kind of math I do every day, so even though I did well with it in hs/college, it's been a LONG time. I can read the text and watch the explanations and get most of it across to him, but in several instances I've had to backtrack through the text to find what the instructor meant by a certain procedure, etc. so it's very time-consuming (lest you think I brilliantly made up the 2nd test, no, I went through and pulled out homework problems from various lessons to make up my test - answers already prepared for me!)
So, now, after he'd supposedly finished Chap 4, we started over at the beginning of the chap and I was having him re-do all the lessons in the chapter. turns out he had trouble with some of the homework that actually goes back to previous chapters, so now we're back at the beginning of chap 3! He finally admitted that what he's been doing all along is just sort of memorizing how the instructor sets up a problem and then he plugs in the numbers for a current homework problem/test problem and gets it right most of the time. He wasn't trying to be sneaky but it was just so over his head that was his way of attempting it.
Anyway, after all this long ramble, I'm just curious if other people have used this and are finding a similar difficulty or not? I thought this was the first year TT precal was available but i saw a brief allusion to it in another thread, by Nancy? as if they'd used it previously.
Also, I found a few errors in the text and wrote for an errata sheet - the pages they sent me (quite extensive but they said those might have already been corrected by the 2nd printing, which my book might be but doesn't say so) - after the first few errors listed, their list doesn't match up with the text at all! LIke, it will list a homework problem on a particular page, when that page is entirely lecture text. I followed through several pages of this and all of them were incorrect. I wrote them again and never heard back at all.
I really want to stick with TT b/c I like how independent it's been for ds. However, now it looks like I will need to be much more involved with it on a day-to-day basis, time that I just don't have every single day. Right now I am having him re-read the book, relisten to the lecture and attempt his homework problems again (new notebook so he wont' be tempted to take the easy road), then sit down with me and have HIM explain the lesson to me. I figure if he understands it, he should be able to "teach" it to me. If he gets bogged down, then it takes me more time to figure out what's going on, since I haven't taken the whole first 3 chapters myself. I don't think I can keep doing this everyday; it takes a lot of time away from the youngers which have lots of one-on-one needs.
Even if we stick with TT, it might be a good idea to have a different text onhand to check for occasional different ways of explanation and also possibly for either extra homework if needed, or extra tests if I need to retest again (took me 2 hours to type it all in, with all the superscript and subscript exponents etc) so if someone can recommend a good one (preferably not Saxon but I'd consider that if it's highly recommended.)
Karen T
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Barb.b
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| Posted: Oct 22 2009 at 7:31am | IP Logged
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I know you said not Saxon, but I'll put in a plug for it (saxon advanced math): we love Saxon, especially along with the dive cd's. The explainations and examples are good. Also with the incremental approach you are not given too much at once - you build on things. You are given info in chuncks you can understand. Also, with the "spiral method" there is good review of past subjects (which is essential for all the topics in pre cal type trig topics!).
Barb
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hylabrook1
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| Posted: Oct 22 2009 at 11:30am | IP Logged
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Karen -
My son used TT Pre-cal for the 2007-2008 school year. At that time the answers were available by way of a download that I printed up.I think part way through the year the answer book came out. That was the answer book, not the solutions manual. There were no solutions or lecture DVDs. I don't know how much progress they've made in getting those things on the market, but they were definitely working on them. (It kind of sounds as if they are available, but not particularly reliable?). On a few topics it seemed that the lesson in the book was unnecessarily convoluted, or at least the approach was different from the way I had been taught. In those areas we studied the topic in Paul A. Foerster's Algebra and Trigonometry ( I don't know where we got that one from, but it is around our house). With the bolstering from Foerster he was able to go back into the TT and it was just fine. I've never written to the TT folks, but I have talked with them on the phone and they were always very nice; but I've only talked about ordering and maybe very minor questions. It sounds like you might get more clarity with some of your concerns if you could have quicker feedback, such as is possible with conversation rather than letter. For instance, you might be able to readily determine which printing you have. Also, you might be able to get a textbook with a different perspective from the library that could help with various sticking points. I hope this situation works itself out soon, because it sounds very frustrating.
Peace,
Nancy
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Karen T
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| Posted: Oct 22 2009 at 8:29pm | IP Logged
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Barb.b wrote:
I know you said not Saxon, but I'll put in a plug for it (saxon advanced math): we love Saxon, especially along with the dive cd's. The explainations and examples are good. Also with the incremental approach you are not given too much at once - you build on things. You are given info in chuncks you can understand. Also, with the "spiral method" there is good review of past subjects (which is essential for all the topics in pre cal type trig topics!).
Barb |
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Thanks, Barb. I checked it out online, the table of contents, and it doesn't seem to follow a similar progression. In fact, a lot of what is listed in Saxon, he did in Geometry and Alg II in previous years. The very last lesson in Saxon talks about using a graphing calculator, and the TT Pre-cal has them doing that from about the 10th lesson. In fact, that's some of the stuff he's been stuck on lately, so I am not sure Saxon covers the same stuff.
Doesn't it seem strange that none of the common homeschool math curricula have Calculus? I took it my senior year of high school, and that wasn't all that unusual; most people who intended a math or science type of degree in college did (of course we still had to take more calculus in college but at least it was a good intro) And since the trend now is for the kids to be taking algebra I by 8th grade (not just homeschool but in ps as well), you run out of math after 11th grade. I noticed Seton listed Saxon Adv Math for 12th grade.
Karen
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Karen T
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| Posted: Oct 22 2009 at 8:34pm | IP Logged
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Aah, Nancy, so the pre-cal was available earlier, just not the DVDs. They didn't get them done until Aug of this year b/c I pre-ordered and had to wait on them. And I just got an email from them saying they are mailing out a new set b/c there is something wrong with these - not errors in the math, I believe, but just software problems or something.
I have heard of Foerster's, so I may look for that or something similar. Thanks for suggesting the library - a good place to start. And I think calling TT might be a good idea as well, to figure out the errata etc.
At least it's good to know someone else has used the TT precal and survived it! Did you feel like there was a big jump in difficulty? One problem might be that I had ds do Alg I, then Alg II, then geometry in that order b/c I disagree with splitting alg I and II apart. But, that means the alg II is not fresh in his mind. And I've already sold that set so I can't use it for refreshing.
Karen T
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Barb.b
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| Posted: Oct 23 2009 at 7:13am | IP Logged
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Karen, Yes, Saxon - either its a fit or not. For us it works great. I just looked at the table of contents of TT precalc and found that we have done ALL that is listed there. Once again I like saxon (since I found it does cover the same material as TT)because of the contstant review of past subjects. Although I confess that I don't know if TT does this. The table of contents of Saxon is confusing - the way they title each lesson isn't always the name of the skill being covered. So one has to be careful not to judge what is being covered by the table of contents. Also, saxon puts geometry in will Alg II and Advanced Math. One has to complete through the first half of advanced math to geat full credit for Geometry. So, if your son has had geometry then he may not be a fit for adv. math. As far as the calculator goes we too have been using it since alg. II. I have found the dive cd will give instructions at times, and the manual has also been helpful. FInally, I think that DS did well on SAT test because of the review in Saxon. But like I said - its seems that either one loves or hates saxon! I wouldn't worry about having to go back to previous chapters or the beginning of a current chapter to review - these topics can be difficult and if he needs that review that go for it. Before calculus, it is probably a good idea to make suere they get pre calc. Don't rush it. He will get it.
Just my two cents - Saxon has a calculus book. But if you don't like saxon, then I that won't work for you. I have heard of people liking Larson Calculus, but I don't know a thing about it myself.
Barb
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Karen T
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| Posted: Oct 23 2009 at 5:58pm | IP Logged
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Oh, so it's just that the lessons are titled so differently. Plus, i was seeing some alg II and geometry type stuff so I figured there was a lot of overlap there.
TT does do the spiral thing, just like Saxon. They have 5 practice problems which cover only that particular lesson, and then 21-25 more problems which cover some of that lesson but mostly previous ones. I know lots of people like that spiral but I feel it does not give enough practice in the current lesson usually (more so in the Saxon 8/7 we did than in TT - it seemed like it was overbalanced on review) and then by doing the review problems, sometimes it's hard to figure out where to go back and find the lesson that it was taught in. Although I think I remember Saxon having the lesson number in parenthesis? Anyway, I'd much prefer having, say, 15 'current' problems and then 10 review at most. Or, just doing 5 lessons with current problems and then every 5th lesson be a review or something. Oh well, no program is perfect for everyone! I'm not trying to bash Saxon; I know tons of people love it and I wanted to like it, and possibly a different year would have been better but that one year was enough for us.
This week we have been going through the lessons about 5 lessons back from where he got stuck and he seems to be doing OK with it but I think we are going to need to go more slowly than in the previous years, which is fine. There's no reason he HAS to finish it now in 11th grade (actually my friend today asked me why he was even taking it, since he's completed enough math for a hs diploma and right now has no intention of even going right to college, much less into math or sciences. I said I didn't think it was a good idea to just drop math after 10th grade, and that who knows what he may end up doing years from now so I'd like him to at least have the exposure, as long as I don't make him hate math  )
thanks,
Karen T
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Barb.b
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| Posted: Oct 23 2009 at 6:04pm | IP Logged
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Quote - "Anyway, I'd much prefer having, say, 15 'current' problems and then 10 review at most"
Yes! I completely agree!
Barb
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4Real Forums : High School Years and Beyond
Topic: Teaching Textbooks PreCalculus
