Anyone not like Jacob's Algebra?

[summer]

Jacob's Algebra seems like a fine program, I was just wondering if anyone did not like it?

[Tullia]

After the first few chapters, the lack of a detailed solutions manual made it almost impossible for me to evaluate his work properly, and it wasn't a good fit for me to re-learn the subject...and oh my...I had forgotten a lot over the years. One other gripe I have is that the print is too small and too densely packed on the answer pages both in the back of the text and the teaching guide.

 

I'd say it's a good text that has some features that made it hard for me to use. YMMV, of course. It's been a few years since we used Jacobs. Maybe someone has published a solutions manual since then.

[Tiramisu]

I think Jacob's must be an excellent text based on the all the reviews I've seen, but it was not our choice. I agree the formatting of Jacob's is really off-putting, especially because it's very wordy. All those words are small and densely-packed. We liked Lial's after looking at that, but chose Foerster's because of the reviews I read here and looking closely at it ourselves. It's very clear, straightforward and easier on the eye.

[KAR120C]

And it was a pretty good text, but we had an issue with the explanation of Distance/Time = Rate problems being really unnecessarily confusing. I ditched it and used something else for that. That's pretty easy to remedy, if you have something else (ANYTHING else) at hand.

 

I don't think it's a bad text, but having tutored one kid with it while teaching DS out of Singapore NEM, I find NEM much more challenging (in a good way). It's not necessary to do the most challenging text possible (and there are texts more challenging than Singapore!), but I think it's worth knowing how they compare. I think there was one topic covered in Jacobs that isn't in the algebra portions of NEM 1 and 2 (the quadratic formula), but there is more depth and problem-solving in the Singapore approach, and the extra problems I took from Singapore for the Jacobs kid were mostly from the Primary series. That said, the kid I was tutoring came out of Jacobs with good understanding of the topics, and excellent fluency with algebraic manipulations. He's not going to be held back from higher math by having done Jacobs instead of Singapore.

[hswarden]

I know of a student who did not like having to read in order to "do" math problems. I also suspect she did not like to have to think very much. She mostly wanted to follow a pattern that was given in the text and apply it to a bunch of examples in mostly the same way. Personally, I am pretty crazy about Jacob's, but I was a math-hater for 4 decades.