Originally Posted by Val
Originally Posted by Kai
My son's school just adopted the Glencoe book after a year with an IB math text (which was truly the most horrible math book I've ever dealt with). The books they use for Algebra I and II and geometry are exactly as you're describing the Glencoe book to be--procedural with zero concept development. Which is why I'm homeschooling math this year and will be for the foreseeable future. It's a small school with one math teacher for high school, and she just doesn't get it.

IME, very few schools get it, and the textbooks just make that problem worse. My kids' school uses Holt-Rinehart starting in pre-algebra, and they're as you and HK described. The Sadlier-Oxoford series for K-6 is pretty much completely driven by recipes.

Meanwhile, two other local schools use Saxon Math. You can get many of those books free online as PDFs. I looked at the pre-algebra book. It has the same problem, and is compounded by an ADD approach in the book: there were umpteen types of problems with no cohesion between them.

I even let this teacher borrow my copy of Lial's Precalculus. She kept it so long that I ended up buying another copy. So it's not like she never had an opportunity to see a decent precalculus book.

After struggling with this teacher through three classes and two kids, I found out that she did Kumon worksheets for fun as a child. Makes perfect sense.