Chapter Nine - John Saxon's Story read by Jenny Hatch

another fitful start

Chapter 9: another fitful start

“Aren’t you interested in theory? 

No, man, I just want to know how to get the answer!”

John, on how students think

John was a retired military man who could fire accurately at the enemy and fly experimental jets with great skill, but, in spite of three engineering degrees and all the mathematics that came with those, he hadn’t felt truly secure in his “book” knowledge of the subject. Still, teaching mathematics was a natural move to make if he were to become a teacher.

Bob Park, head of the engineering and science department at Oscar Rose Junior College, had heard from a friend of Mary Esther’s that John was looking for a job. He hired John in the fall of 1971 to teach night-time college algebra classes. While John was thrilled with this part-time job of two days a week, he had thought to himself, “I hope the algebra book doesn’t have logarithms in it.” It did, and that distressed him. He talked about this in one of his videotapes as just one thing among the many teaching frustrations he learned to face.

He said he studied the book all morning. “Here I had a master’s degree in electrical engineering, been an electrical engineer and used logs, but I really didn’t know what they were,” he said. “Then I learned that morning that a log is just an exponent.” He went to lunch with another math teacher that day and asked, “Have you ever heard of anyone teaching logs without throwing away the base?” (John added that math people always try to conceal their ignorance with other math teachers.) The colleague said he had heard of that being tried but it didn’t work. John said he went back to his office and was furious. “I threw the book twice against the wall and I sat down to figure out how to teach logs—but they were nothing but exponents!”

He taught the first semester and second semester. “I taught up a storm,” he said. His students ranged in age from 18 to 50. “These people were totally unprepared to take college algebra. I was not successful.” Each semester, only 20 percent passed the final exam. The third semester he thought of a lieutenant colonel at the Air Force Academy whom he disliked—no, he corrected, who disliked him. This fellow was executive officer of the test pilot school—“maybe Freud has helped me forget his last name”—and he was considered an outstanding teacher. That fellow had copied what he had written on the blackboard one semester and then the next semester, he just handed out those lecture notes and students didn’t have to take notes themselves. He used a projector and all the students had to do was make a few notes on the sheets he had given them.

John tried this same method but it still didn’t work. For one thing, he was working with a different level of student at Oscar Rose than those at the Air Force Academy. “But,” he concluded, “these students weren’t stupid; they just were tired after working all day and raising families.” 

Then one day he said he gave a truly magnificent lecture. “I had done it in only 20 minutes!” He had 40 minutes left of class and he knew he couldn’t release the students because he would get in trouble with the college, so he sent them all to the blackboards that were on three sides of the classroom. He gave them the same problem he had just worked during his lecture. “I just knew that I had them in the palm of my hand while I had been teaching, but now most of them couldn’t work the problem!” He had those who could work the problem help their neighbors while he helped some others. 

As John then tells it, he went back to his office after that class and started talking to himself: “John, did you ever learn from reading the book? No, no one ever learned from reading the book. Did you learn from the teacher? No, no one learns math from the teacher, that’s why you take notes.” Then he confessed that his junior college students didn’t know how to take notes, either. 

Keeping this intrapersonal dialogue going, he said, “John, weren’t you interested in the theory? No, man, I just wanted to know how to get the answer! I had a whole collection of gimmicks that worked—turn it upside down and change the sign: Will that always work? The teachers had said, ‘Yeah’.” That had got him through West Point, he said, a degree in aeronautical engineering, through test pilot school, and a master’s degree in electrical engineering. He had rote rules that he could use but he didn’t have any idea of what he was doing.

John decided after seeing his students working at the blackboards that he shouldn’t be talking and they should be “doing” the problems at the board. He set it up so the smarter ones helped the slower ones. “That’s also the time I figured out that learning abstractions does not occur in a single setting,” he said.

He began talking to his office mate about new ideas for teaching the algebra classes. “What if we reviewed every day?” he asked. “Well, that wouldn’t work because you’d never get through all of the material and they wouldn’t learn algebra,” his office mate said. John retorted, “They’re not learning it now!” He went on, “We hear teachers say all of the time, ‘Oh, I’m going to try that next year.’ What we know is we keep trying stuff that doesn’t work. I had tried several different methods and they didn’t work.” 

So, John decided to try his review method. After about the sixth lesson on one piece of one concept, they had practiced it for six nights; now it was time for another “bit” of the concept. A female student asked him if he would “write some words to go with the problems” he was giving them so they could read those words outside of class and understand the steps. “The key thing to remember is that she asked me to write some words. If she had said, ‘Write a book.’ I never would have done it.” As he taught through that year, he wrote words to go with his lessons and gave those to the students. At the end of the year, he realized he had a manuscript. 

His students were doing better and he decided he was onto something. “I decided that what I had done was vastly superior to other textbooks. But how could that be? Of course, it couldn’t be,” he answered. “The reason I thought it was so good was because I was so dumb. I had written it so dumb people could understand it; these other people had written their books for smart people and that’s why I couldn’t read them. It didn’t dawn on me that people writing math books might have known a little bit of math, but they were totally incompetent as teachers, and people using the books couldn’t speak out because that would be like saying, ‘the emperor has no clothes’.”

John put together his hand-typed pages and hand-drawn graphics and had them printed in the University of Oklahoma printing office. That first 8½ by 11 inch paperback, titled Intermediate Algebra, with its 345 pages sold for $7.65 in 1976 in the Oscar Rose bookstore. In its preface, John established his principle for teaching algebra concepts that he later preached throughout his publishing career. 

“This book is not an easy book, for algebra is not an easy subject. The concepts of algebra are total abstractions. A small percentage of students can comprehend these abstractions quickly and with relative ease. Most students, however, find that the comprehension of algebraic abstractions comes neither quickly nor easily. For these students, comprehension of the concepts requires continued practice over an extended period of time…The book is built around the homework problem sets. Mathematics is not taught—mathematics is learned. The finest teacher can accomplish little unless the teacher’s efforts are paralleled by an equal effort from the student doing the homework…I hope you find the book readable, and I wish you success in this course. Any comments you have on the book will be welcomed.”

John did later change his wording about “algebra not being an easy subject to learn.” His new and permanent mantra would be, “Algebra is not difficult. It is just different.”

In 1977, he published a second paperback manuscript, Incremental Algebra, Book 1, again through the OU printing office. It was actually an introduction that reviewed and simplified basic math skills for students who were not ready for his first book. With 408 pages, it sold for $8.75. 

It was with this initial formalizing of his “incremental learning with continual review,” as distinct from “spiral” learning, that John began to set himself apart in curriculum design for mathematics education. There is a large difference, he said, between the spiral curriculum found in most mathematics books for the past century and his incremental approach. “The spiral book goes away and comes back to a topic, usually during a review at the end of the lesson. Incremental development has a continuous daily review and is like stair steps or increasing plateaus.” In later years he would say, “I don’t review a topic; I never drop it.” According to John, his method would work in any subject for more successful learning and retention. In fact, he later planned to prove that concept with books in history and English.

When he started teaching from his original paperback book, he decided his topics weren’t developed correctly or that they were misplaced. So he rewrote it over the summer of 1977 and had it reprinted by OU as a new paperback. By now, he knew he wanted confirmation from others that his idea was a good one and that it could make a positive difference in student learning.

He also knew this meant he should test his teaching methods with other sites. Most junior colleges pull their standards down to meet the level of students, he said, just as he had to do at Oscar Rose, so he began asking junior colleges to help him test his book. He went to Dallas and they ran a test in a junior college but it was inconclusive because of the turnover in students.

A friend’s wife taught at another junior college. “She was skiddish of me, though. She didn’t think I had it all together.” She agreed to test his book anyway. She subsequently called John to say her students scored 12 to 15 percent higher than her students in another class who had used the highly respected algebra book written by Mary Dolciani. She said, “John, my kids aren’t that smart; you’re onto something.”

With great trepidation, John sent off his manuscript to book publishers John Wiley and Prentice-Hall. Wiley rejected his submission, but Prentice Hall wanted to see him. The math editor was Ed Lugenbeel. He offered John a contract for 10 percent of the sales. John told him his books were worth more than that. He told Ed to talk with the lawyers and get a better an offer. Later that day, they went to lunch and Ed slipped him a contract for 15 percent for his algebra book, volumes one and two. Then, he was assigned to work with copy editor Harry Gaines on the books. 

“Publishers send manuscripts out for review and the author is asked to look at the suggestions,” explained John. He thought he was being harassed with all of the suggestions; he said he had just wanted to write the book. “Harry was a good guy, though, and reasonable,” he said. The first volume came out in 1979 and the other in 1980. Bob Parks at Oscar Rose bookstore let him sell them out of the college bookstore. 

It had become clear to John that the place to teach the algebra foundation students needed in college was in high school. This would at least give them a fighting chance in their degree programs. John said he tried to get Prentice-Hall to let him go to “the other side of the publishing house” and talk to the high school math editor, but was told they were having an internal fight at the time. He was told, “If you’ll stay away from over there, we’ll give you a release to go to any other publisher to write your high school book.”

With that release in hand, John walked the streets of New York City, knocking on publishers’ doors. “I didn’t realize I was a country bumpkin coming to the big city from Oklahoma. They didn’t throw me out, but the man at MacMillan Publishing said ‘No’ in a funny way.” John asked, “No, what?” The man said, “We won’t even watch.” John, curbing his language on the videotape that was recording this story, said he thought, “You blankety-blank-blank-blank.” 

There were a couple of major editors, though, who listened to what John said for about an hour and a half. After saying his idea wouldn’t work, mainly because he was not a “committee of experts,” one of them suggested he try Bob Worth’s Publishing company. As John was leaving that office, he saw a sign on the desk of “Sally Polson.” He had been stationed with a John Polson at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base and he asked her if she were related to that Polson. She was, and she had heard about John Saxon from her parents on many occasions. 

After taking her to lunch, John asked if she knew “Bob Worth.” She did. “Can you get me to see him—today?” He couldn’t believe it when that very afternoon, Mr. Worth’s secretary told him he could have 15 minutes in the publisher’s office. “Yes, ma’m!” responded John. An hour after entering Mr. Worth’s office, John looked at his watch and, startled, said, “Am I making any sense to you?” Mr. Worth told him he was fascinated by what John was saying and asked him to continue. Shortly afterward, however, the secretary came in, got Mr. Worth by the arm, and they left.

John said he went home and pouted all that fall of 1980. “I realized I was 57 years old and I needed to do something right away.” During that time, he had kept the notion to himself that the problem with student learning wasn’t incompetent teachers. “It wasn’t until four or five years later when I was attacked for what I was doing by people who weren’t successful in writing math books that I decided I was right. It wasn’t incompetent teachers. It was the companies that are in business to make money for stockholders,” he said. “It’s the big bucks on the bottom line. They just want short-term profits in order to get promotions for themselves.” The books weren’t, after all, about kids.

While he was looking for a publisher, since he didn’t think Bob Worth was really interested, John believed he had to prove his program worked before he could honestly promote it to schools and teachers. Because he didn’t teach classes on Tuesdays and Thursdays at Oscar Rose, he decided to use those days to visit as many public schools as possible in Oklahoma with the hope of talking principals and teachers into trying his curriculum. It could be in either junior or senior high school settings, since first year algebra was content based and not grade based. 

He put 15,000 miles on his Pinto car and laughed recalling those days: “Here was this wild man coming in and saying he knew more than anyone else.” He had told them he would provide his junior college Prentice-Hall book with extra problem sets, since 120 such sets would be needed for the public schools’ daily classes, instead of the 30 sets in his college book. Each teacher had to teach at least two different algebra classes with similar demographics among the students, he said, so a true comparison could be made between his book and the competitor’s. He ended up finding 20 schools with teachers who were willing to test his program under his conditions.

During the Christmas break in 1980, as John was going to Egypt, he dropped by Mr. Worth’s office again. “He wouldn’t say yes or no about publishing my book,” John said, “but I found out that’s how he works. He eventually comes around to an answer.” What he didn’t know was that Bob Worth would be instrumental in John’s establishing himself as a publisher.

In what some would later see as a normal but presumptuous move for John, he wrote to Reader’s Digest and asked if they would follow the testing program and write up the results. Saying they only reprinted articles, a woman there suggested he contact William F. Buckley, Jr., an author and the publisher of National Review magazine. So John wrote a brief note to Mr. Buckley about the test he was going to run on his book; he received a reply asking, “How much will it cost?”

On Jan. 21, 1980, John responded to Mr. Buckley with a two-page letter, in which he described his epiphany as a junior college teacher—that mathematics textbooks were being written to separate the “fit from the unfit”—and the field test that he would be running in Oklahoma schools. He told about the unwillingness of those in power to even consider their programs might be wrong. He told of approaching six different book companies to show an interest and observe the test. “They are not interested, for their high school books are all written by committees,” he said. “This way, no one—not even the mathematics editor—can be blamed when they fail to sell. This committee approach to creating the books is what makes the books so poor and what allows students who use my books to obtain scores that are so much higher.” 

He continued in his letter to Mr. Buckley, “As knowledgeable as you are, I doubt that you have formed an opinion as to exactly what has gone wrong in high school mathematics. You have been prevented from doing so by this aura and the fear that you are not qualified to voice an opinion on such an abstruse and inscrutable topic as the teaching of seventh, eighth and ninth grade mathematics. You know exactly what to do about China, but you fear the possible reactions that might accrue from a misstatement about exactly what is wrong with the teaching of mathematics.” 

In closing, John explained he needed advice, not money, and he needed help—but “I don’t know what kind of help I need or what help you can offer. That will have to come from you.” John received the following note: 

National Review Letter from Bill Buckley

Dictated in Switzerland, Transcribed in New York, February 10, 1980

“I have meditated your letter. It seems to me that the best we could do for you is to give you the advantage of our magazine (read by about a quarter of a million people) and let you state your case. You write well, lucidly. You make excellent points. You should give us some concrete examples of how your book proceeds as against how the inadequate ones do. Then hurl your defiance at the appropriate bodies…What do you think?” 

Yours cordially,

Wm. F. Buckley, Jr.

c.c. Mr. William Rusher

The first response from John was one of running around his office saying, “Bill Buckley said I write lucidly! This is from Bill Buckley!” His second response was to write back and say that any immediate article would mean he was just like everyone else—“just pointing a finger at what’s wrong.” He asked that Mr. Buckley give him 15 months to run the test and said, “Then I’ll be able to write an article you’ll be proud of.”

John smiled on the videotape and said, “Mr. Buckley’s middle name must be succinctness, because he wrote another letter with two sentences.” The first one said, “Fine.” The second one said, “I would be delighted to wait 15 months for the article you propose.” Several weeks later, John received another letter asking him to write a two-page, single-space paper explaining what he was doing with the testing. 

“Now, Mr. Buckley was born a wealthy man,” said John, “and he wrote God and Man while at Yale University. He knows all the important people. He got me a $6,500 grant from a private education institution to help pay for the testing costs.” John always saw that act as “just magnificent.” For one thing, he had come to realize he could use some extra money for the testing program after all.

He continued visiting the schools during the first semester and looking for a standardized test for first year algebra that had any depth or penetrating questions. There were multiple choice questions which meant they couldn’t ask a straight-forward question or the answer would be obvious. “That meant you had to make the questions cute or tricky,” said John. He suggested to the teachers they send him a total of 10 problems on 16 different areas. He then picked 10 problems in each category from those submitted questions and created 16 tests which were to be given, four per month, during each month of February, March, April, and May. 

To assure no one would accuse him of cheating, John went to the Oklahoma Education Office for monitoring support. Since his daddy had been the executive secretary of the Georgia Education Association, “which is now the National Education Association,” he said, “which is a teachers’ union and doesn’t have a damn thing to do with teaching and I don’t know if it did when Daddy was with the GEA, but I asked the man there if he would supervise the test for me.” After his visit, John concluded, “The man in the office was an idiot.” He was a professor of education from Central State University in Edmond, Oklahoma and he said they “weren’t in that business.” John, again curbing his language for the recording, said he thought, “You blankety, blank, blank.” He then went directly to the American Federation of Teachers’ office, which he thought at the time was against his better judgment because, “I am definitely not a union man but I’m more of a union man than an NEA man.” John then added, “Those NEA people turn my stomach.”

Mike Barlow, AFT’s executive director for Oklahoma, asked John what he wanted them to do. “I want teachers’ results mailed directly to you. Make a copy and put it in your safe. After I check the original tests, I want math teachers to check my data reduction and certify that I didn’t cheat.” Mr. Barlow said it didn’t seem like John wanted much, so he took it before the board. They agreed to do it.

While making his school rounds to check on the teachers and his testing program, John realized he was going to have a particular challenge with a teacher named Mickey Yarberry at the junior high in Del Crest. “She was a pretty one with a big diamond ring on her finger,” he said. “She thought she was a good teacher—and she was a good teacher—but she thought I was a smart-aleck and decided to show me that it didn’t matter which book is used; her kids would outscore any other classes, she said.” It turned out that “John’s students” worked 2.59 problems correctly for every one worked by her control group. 

At the end of the testing period, he went back to Del Crest Junior High School. The principal said when Ms. Yarberry came to his office at the end of the first test, she said, “I taught all of these kids and the results are amazing.” She told him about having to spend 15 minutes in the hallway one day with a fight and when she got to class, her kids didn’t even look up. “They were working their Saxon,” she said. “I just sat down behind my desk and didn’t say anything.” Ms. Yarberry then told the principal she was going to be late to class everyday just to see how the kids did that week. “At the end of four days, she told them they would have the test tomorrow and that was all she said in that class the whole week.”  An excited John thought, “This was the first indication that kids could work ahead because of the review process and the two new problems were totally explained in each lesson.” 

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John received his first test results from the Oklahoma AFT office in February. He immediately called Bob Worth in New York City and told him, “There is an airplane that leaves LaGuardia at noon on Friday and gets here at 5 p.m. I can pick you up, feed you, and give you a place to sleep. You can talk to the teachers Saturday morning and see if you would like to publish a book on these remarkable successes.” Mr. Worth said he would come. John laughed and said, “Now the man lives on Park Avenue and goes to the theatre, so someone would have to have something for him to do while he’s here.” 

John rounded up five teachers to meet with Mr. Worth at his house, which he left so his presence wouldn’t compromise their reports. Later, he could only take him to the Cowboy Hall of Fame because Mr. Worth had to leave at 5 p.m., but, “I did take him to see an oil well getting drilled.” While on this scenic tour, Mr. Worth said he didn’t want to take on a high school division at his company since his focus was on college textbooks but said, “If you can afford it, I will help you. Is your manuscript totally ready to go?” John said it was. A week later, Mr. Worth called, “not overly excited but pleasant,” reported John. He had found a copyeditor named Nancy Warren in Maine and had John send her his manuscript. (She eventually became Saxon’s production manager.) About four weeks later, Mr. Worth’s production manager called about a place in Singapore that would print his books.

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With those test results in hand, it was also time to write that article for National Review. The response from Mr. Buckley became one of the highlights of John’s life. 

National Review Letter from Bill Buckley

Dictated in Switzerland, Transcribed in New York, March 24, 1981

Dear Mr. Saxon,

I am as excited by you at this point as an English stylist as I am as a pedagogical innovator. It is an absolutely splendid article. I am sending a copy of this letter to Bill Rusher so that we can make arrangements for a meeting with you. With warm regards and congratulations,

As ever, 

Wm. F. Buckley, Jr.

cc: Bill Rusher

John received his call from Mr. Buckley’s office. Could he have lunch with Mr. Buckley in New York? John said, “It’s the only lunch ever bought for me that cost me $786.43—because I had to buy a roundtrip ticket to New York City.” He said the articles editor met with him to get the article ready to go. Then, there was a call for John to go up to Mr. Buckley’s office. When he got upstairs, he saw Mr. Buckley going across the hall, but he turned and came to John, stuck out his hand, and said, “You’re John Saxon. I’m Bill Buckley. I’m so glad to meet you.” John said he nearly fell over dead.

They went to a Spanish restaurant on 34^th street. He remembered the menu was pasted on a hunk of board. “I didn’t know what was on that menu and I said, ‘Mr. Buckley, you need to order me something because I’m so excited my eyes won’t focus.’” They had a total of two hours, he said. “He’s just a very kind, wonderful man.” On May 29, 1981, John Saxon became a nationally published author about mathematics education with an article titled, “al-ge-bra” \’al-jә-brә\ n. The snowball had started to roll.

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Running against the clock for fall 1981 school purchases, John said he decided to skip galley proofs and go right to page proofs, a very risky and potentially expensive venture considering how many mistakes are made in printed textbooks. “We were awful lucky,” he said, “because we printed that book in a hurry.” He called his new company Grassdale Publishers after the name of some property his grandparents owned in north Georgia. He enjoyed telling people that “The only thing you need for a publishing company is an address.” Sitting in his living room, he would declare, “You are sitting in the office of the president of Grassdale Publishers right now!”

As John tells this story, he comes back at a later point to clarify the “no mistakes in the book” statement. He said this was all due to Frank Wang, that 16-year-old Chinese young man who was a junior at Norman High School and who was hired by John to help proofread his book and who later became CEO of Saxon Publishers. Frank was actually taking a calculus class at OU when John stuck his head in the classroom and said he needed someone to help him. “He had an unbelievable capacity for work and I’m talking about reading page proofs,” said John. “Frank could read those proofs like no one else. That’s why there were no mistakes in the Algebra 1 book. Well, there might have been four or five.” (The book’s second edition, however, was a case of pure frustration. “It was a disaster with all the errors. It cost us a half-million dollars because we didn’t have Frank,” he said The skinny Chinese kid was off to Princeton University by then.)

John received a letter from Mr. Worth in August saying “the wildest thing you ever heard: Dear John, I enclose a bill that will set you back on your heels for the typesetting of your book. If it’s convenient, please pay the typesetter. If it’s not, let us know and we will pay the bill and make arrangements for you to pay us.” John said, “He didn’t have a lien on my books—he didn’t have anything. The bill was $28,000! But I had borrowed the money and we paid the bill. We ran off 10,000 books.” 

The story of how John “borrowed the money” was repeated in almost every news story about the Saxon program for the next two years. The figures weren’t always accurate, but the explained activity was generally close. He had taken out a second mortgage on his home for $45,000. He had inherited $20,000 from Mimmy. Then he called his three older children and said, “I need each of you to go to the bank and borrow around $5,000 and send it to me.” (Sarah was only 18.)  That would give him around $80,000 to bankroll the publishing and distribution of the book. 

Selby said when he called her, she was living in Atlanta, Georgia, and doing her medical intern rotation at Emory University. “Are you kidding?” she asked, when he told her to “go get a loan.” She said, “Daddy, I don’t have any collateral. I have a Pinto. That’s the sum total of my worldly possessions!” He told her just to go and do it. So Selby went to her aunt and uncle in Albany, Georgia, who took her to their banker, a family friend. When Selby told the woman that her father wanted her to borrow $5,000, the banker, named Patsy, said with a lovely lilting southern drawl, “Okaay.” Selby responded, “No! Your answer is ‘no.’ I don’t have any collateral.” Patsy said, “Don’t worry about it. When can you pay it back?” John had told Selby she’d have her money back within six months. “I did get the loan, and at the end of the six months, the loan was paid off.” Also trusting he would keep his word to pay back the loans, Johnny and Bruce had done as their father had directed.

Having a book and getting it into the schools would be another new kind of battle for John. With his being a direct kind of fellow, the politics in which he would find himself was more than he could have imagined. John was about to enter an unbelievably complex and politically-enmeshed world of school textbook adoption and purchases.