SHOULD YOU GRADE THE DAILY SAXON MATH ASSIGNMENTS?
I continue to see comments on familiar blogs about correcting – or grading – the daily work of Saxon math students. That is a process contrary to what John Saxon intended when he developed his math books. Unlike any other math book on the market today, John’s math books were designed to test the student’s knowledge every week. Why would you want to have students suffer the pains of getting 100 on their daily work when the weekly test will easily tell you if they are doing well? There are even programs out there that will assist you in grading the daily work – but do you really need that?
I always tell homeschool educators that grading the daily work, when there is a test every Friday, amounts to a form of academic harassment to the student. Like everything else in life, we tend to apply our best when it is absolutely necessary. With few exceptions, most students will accept minor mistakes and errors when performing their daily “practice” of math problems. They know when they make a mistake and rather than redo the entire problem, they recognize the correction necessary to fix the error and move on without correcting it. They have a sense when they know or do not know how to do a certain math problem; however, when they encounter that all important test every Friday, – as I like to describe it – they put on their “Test Hat” to do their very best to make sure they do not repeat the same error!
In sports, daily practice ensures the individual will perform well at the weekly game, for without the practice, the game would end in disaster. The same concept applies to daily piano practice. While the young concert pianist does not set out to make mistakes during the daily practice for the upcoming piano recital, he quickly learns from his mistakes. Built into John Saxon’s methodology are weekly tests (every four lessons from Algebra ½ through Calculus) to ensure that classroom as well as homeschool educators can quickly identify and correct these mistakes before too much time has elapsed.
In other words, the homeschool educator as well as the classroom teacher is only four days away from finding out what the student has or has not mastered during the past week’s daily work. I know of no other math textbook that allows the homeschool educator or the classroom teacher this repetitive check and balance to enable swift and certain correction of the mistakes to ensure they do not continue. Yes, you can check daily work to see if your students are still having trouble with a particular concept, particularly one they missed on their last weekly test, which can be correlated to their latest daily assignment. However, as one home school educator stated recently on one of the blogs “Yes, they must get 100 percent on every paper or they do not move on.” While this may be necessary in other math curriculums that do not have 30 or more weekly tests, it is a bit restrictive and punitive in a Saxon environment.
John Saxon realized that not all students would master every new math concept on the day it is introduced, which accounts for the delay allowing more than a full week’s practice of the new concepts before being tested on them. He also realized that some students might need still another week of practice for some concepts which accounts for his using a test score of eighty percent as reflecting mastery. Generally, when a student receives a score of eighty on a weekly test, it results from the student not yet having mastered one or two of the new concepts as well as perhaps having skipped a review of an old concept that appeared in the assignment several days before the test. When the students see the old concept in the daily work, they think they can skip that “golden oldie” because they already know how to do it! The reason they get it wrong on the test is that the test problem had the same unusual twist to it that the problem had that the student skipped while doing the daily assignment.
In all the years I taught John Saxon’s math at the high school, I never graded a single homework paper. I did monitor the daily work to ensure it was done and I would speak with students whose test grades were falling below the acceptable minimum of eighty percent. I can assure you that having the student do every problem over that he failed to do on his daily assignments does not have anywhere near the benefit of going over the problems missed on the weekly tests because the weekly tests reveal mastery – or lack thereof – while the daily homework only reveals their daily memory!
NOTE: The upper level Saxon math textbooks from algebra ½ through calculus have a test every four lessons, making it easy to standardize the tests always on a Friday – with a weekend free of math homework. However, from Math 54 through Math 87, the tests are taken after every five lessons which either require a Saturday test or place the test day on a rotating schedule. You can easily remedy this by having the student do the fifth lesson in the test series on Friday morning, then an hour or so later, have them take the weekly test leaving them to concentrate on resolving the one’s they missed on the test – with no week-end homework. This places them on the same Friday test schedule as the upper level Saxon math students.