This has been a very interesting discussion for me. And I have to say yes, and yes, but... Yes, in that the teacher makes the difference. I bought SM for DS's teacher to use with him for HSing - but it turns out that she only used them as ready made problem sets. No Singapore method. That definitely did not work.
We switched over to Aleks, but I wanted to use SM for the problem-solving strategies. I bought the books (the Standard Edition, b/c I wanted the extra content and the more colorful textbooks), but there aren't any home instructor guides available for his level. I just checked on the website and I see how helpful they'd be. Bad timing.
And teacher guides are exactly what I need to teach everything. Otherwise, we're just reading through everything together and he's doing the problems. That's partly why I was asking about K12 on another thread.
