[to be read in a cheesy advertiser's voice:] Do you want to make your child LOATHE math? I mean, they probably already kinda hate it, but wouldn't you like to suck every bit of joy and wonder from it? If Saxon did not already do the trick, have I got a program for you! Seriously, I tutor kids in math from elementary to Calculus and right now almost all of my students are homeschooled. Parents choose the curriculum, and I tutor the kid. I have recently decided that I will likely turn down business rather than help a child through any level of Shormann again. (My only absolutely hard no is Abeka Geometry - there is a special place in hell for that hot mess of a textbook, but that's an entirely different discussion.) I've used the Art of Problem Solving, Thinkwell, Jacobs, Foerster, Math-U-See, Horizons, UCSMP (I think I remembered all the letters in that acronym, but who knows?), Saxon, various generic public school textbooks, Abeka, Alpha Omega, CTC, and probably others. Some of my objections Shormann: I'm not a fan of not grouping like concepts with like concepts. Let's learn all about functions as one cohesive topic instead of interjecting 14 different concepts between each lesson on functions so the student had no hope of understanding the topic as a whole. The most profound statement I had a Calculus student make about this incremental approach was "I feel like I know a little bit about everything, but I don't know everything about anything." In case you couldn't find the scope and sequence of Shormann cleverly hidden in their parent guide, derivatives (Calculus) are introduced in lesson 20 of Algebra 1. Why do this to a kid? Yes, it relates directly to slope of a line, but the concept is introduced as a "memorize this fact" rather than giving the student a full picture of what a derivative is. My style is to give a child all the necessary background info when teaching a new concept, so they can tie it to a concept they've already mastered. It stays in their memory longer if they have a logical hook in their brain on which to hang the information. I rarely say "just memorize this for now, it'll make sense later," but I find myself saying this a LOT as I have helped a student through two courses of Shormann, and I'm saying it with less and less conviction. The truth? I no longer believe it'll make sense later if he sticks with Shormann. As we work through Algebra 2, I keep wondering what on earth will be left to teach in precalculus and calculus? I took a sneak peak: it looks like he teaches calculus in precalculus and calculus 2 in calculus. Shormann also has a weird devotion to Euler Word Problems: "Two persons owe conjointly a debt of 29 gold coins; they both have money, but neither enough to enable him, singly, to discharge this common debt: the first debtor says therefore to the second, 'If you give me 2/3 of your money, I can immediately pay the debt'; and the second answers, that he could discharge the debt if the other would give him 3/4 of his money. Required, how many gold coins each had?" That's one of many such questions - bad punctuation and all. I'm sure someone out there is thinking, "But it ties language and math together! Our children need to be able to parse through tough language to derive meaning! How will they be able to ready the classics if we don't challenge them?" Um - by reading the classics and parsing through tough language to derive meaning in a context where they are not also trying to keep afloat in an unnecessarily complicated math class? Don't get me wrong: I loved doing this problem! I am a hard-core math geek. But I don't love it for the student. And don't get me started on Shormann's approach to geometric proof which again seems to resort to a "memorize these steps" to spit out the info. Not to mention that he rounds everything to one decimal point almost invariably even when the exact answer could be given in terms of pi or a radical, but that's probably an objection limited to math geeks. So yeah. I've run out of steam. Bottom line? Choose something else.