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Join Marlin and Laurie Detweiler for this mini-episode as they discuss two new math programs coming to Veritas Scholars Academy that address these common challenges:

1. Helping students catch up to classical education standards.
2. Providing accelerated options for mathematically gifted students.

These new course options will eliminate the repetitive elements of Saxon Math and condense two years of concepts into single-year programs, allowing students to either catch up to grade level or advance beyond it.

Episode Transcription

Note: This transcription may vary from the words used in the original episode for better readability.

Marlin Detweiler:
Hello again and welcome to another episode of Veritas Vox, the voice of classical Christian education. Today we want to talk to you about a couple challenges that we've been interested in solving related to math. Tell us what those challenges are, Laurie. Laurie is my wife, of course.

Laurie Detweiler:
As Veritas has grown and since we started, how many years ago? 30 something.

Marlin Detweiler:
Yeah, 20. Well, Veritas Press is in its 29th year.

Laurie Detweiler:
There you go. What we've seen is that there are a lot more people interested in classical Christian education. Not only that, there are a lot more people that are interested in it later on, when their children might already be through elementary or grammar school. And so in a bricks-and-mortar school, it's a little bit different. One of two things happens: either they test a child and they're put back a grade or even two, or, you know, if they're in grammar school, I've seen many days where teachers have kept kids in from recess just trying to help them get caught up in something that they were behind in.

And so at Veritas, we've been trying to figure out how to solve it. Now, I want to say something before we get started about being behind. The United States is just behind in math in comparison to other countries, and it's way behind if you look historically. But when we look at many European countries, when we look at Asia, the United States is just behind. The average grade in the United States, unless a child is in a gifted program, is that they take Algebra 1 in ninth grade.

If we look at Asian countries—and we've had kids, I can tell you, we test them and it's true—they'll have Algebra 1 in fifth grade. Many classical schools have been trying to change that. And our grade that we started Algebra 1, that's kind of like the benchmark that I can help people understand, is seventh grade.

But before we get started, I want to say this. If your child's not there, that's okay. Like, don't be so worried and caught up in it because 20 years from now, it'll all be fine. But at the same time I say that, we've been wanting to, for those people that want to get their child caught up on our math pace—and there are good reasons that we do it—then it coincides with logic. There's just so many things.

Marlin Detweiler:
Yeah, it's not necessary, and it may not be practical for some of you, but it's a good thing and it's a standard that we have.

Laurie Detweiler:
Right. And so, the second thing I want to say about this is the person sitting to my left—I happen to know really well, because we've been married a really long time—is a math genius. I, on the other hand, struggled in math my whole life, and to this day, math is not something I really love. And so I want to really be careful here and say, you know, I don't believe all children are ready because there could be learning disabilities there.

There are so many things—not necessarily ready to do Algebra 1 in seventh grade, particularly. And this is what I think is important: if they didn't come up in the system. And what I mean by that is if you started early and you work through it and kids master math—which is what I didn’t have. I didn't have a mastery program.

At Veritas, we have a mastery program. And so I didn't get the basics that I should. And so we have parents that call us—hundreds and hundreds of parents every month—wanting to know, "I want to take this for next year, but I see you do this in fifth grade, and my child is, you know, two years behind in Saxon."

And so we've been talking for quite a few years now internally. How do we solve that problem for those families who want their kids to get caught up?

Marlin Detweiler:
So what we're doing is we're designing courses that will be released soon that are meant to help children get caught up. For parents and students who want to move to a different pace than what they've been on—maybe to our pace—that’s what we're doing it for. The objective is to find ways to do that.

There's a likelihood that over some time it'll involve some summer courses, but we're designing some specific courses for the school year that will allow students to start where they are. And it's really geared to the third through sixth grade range at this point. Describe what these courses will do.

Laurie Detweiler:
A student like in seventh grade, what these courses are going to do is we're taking and we know this is possible because we've been doing this for years as we've worked with kids, it's going to take two years of Saxon and combine it into one. For those of you who don't know, a third of each Saxon book is nothing more than reviewing the year before.

And so what happens is that's necessary when you've had a summer off. It is not necessary when you haven't had a summer off. And so we're able to take that third out of the book. And then we also know Saxon is an incremental approach. What that means is I might have, in early grammar school, I start off with teaching a child one plus one.

I'm going to have single digits. The following year, I'm going to have double digits. The following year, I might be doing ones, tens, and hundreds. Well, the difference between tens and hundreds in addition, once you learn to carry, really isn't that different. Right. And so we'll be able to combine some of those things also. So the concept is the same. We're just now working with larger numbers.

Marlin Detweiler:
So it's designed for people who say, I wish I had known about this sooner. I would have done more to be ready to meet the standard that seems reasonable that many classical educators have and that Veritas in particular has. And it's really exciting to me to think about providing significant means for people to do that, because one of the motivations that we have is to help children realize their potential. And so many schooling environments and other environments have not tried to do that.

Laurie Detweiler:
It's treading water.

Marlin Detweiler:
And working according to a standard that is far from an international norm and far from a historic norm. So we want to create that opportunity. Look for those courses to be released in our course listing soon, if they're not there already by the time this goes live. There's another thing. Yeah, there's another aspect.

Laurie Detweiler:
And this is what gets him real.

Marlin Detweiler:
Like this does. When our oldest son was in third grade, we were in the process of moving from Florida to Pennsylvania. And so we took them out of the school that we were involved in, starting the Geneva School in Orlando. And we were starting Veritas Academy in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and going back and forth. I think we ended up making five trips that school year back and forth to help get Veritas Academy established for the following fall.

Laurie, with our four boys, joined up with Michelle Watt and her husband and their kids. We all joined up together to homeschool together. They had two boys, the age of our two oldest. Michelle's background—you may know her because she's the musician behind the history songs in our grammar school history curriculum—but in this case, it was about math.

And she's a CPA, and she looked at the math books. She knew our oldest son and her oldest son, and she said, those boys are talented enough in math that they don't need the repetition. It was too easy. They don't need the math repetition that Saxon provides. What I'd like to propose, she proposed to us, is we'll take the repetition out of it so that they can start advancing.

They don't have to be doing math in a way that doesn't challenge them, that allows them to be bored. We'll accelerate things for them. What we didn't know would happen—well, we didn't know that would end up happening—was that at least for our son, I think this was true of their son too.

We kind of lost contact with them, with some of the academic conversations after this year. But our son continued to move at a faster and faster pace, and it allowed him to do calculus three, linear algebra with differential equations his senior year in high school. And it really set him up well for his engineering program at the university that he went to. So this is really exciting. Tell us a little bit about how these are structured, Laurie.

Laurie Detweiler:
So it's going to be the same thing. This program will be a little bit different. We don't ever do this at Veritas. If you're wanting a placement test and you asked for one, we'll happily give you one. If you're in our full-time diploma program, normally we have parents just place their students.

But this is going to be a program that students will be tested to be accepted into. Think of it as an honors program or a gifted program at a local high school or elementary school. Once we do this and we know what the student's ability and aptitude are, then this is going to be a program that will not only take a couple of years of Saxon, but it's also going to stretch them in ways with some application-type things that they'll be able to do.

Now, I've had a math teacher say to me, "Oh, well, I've seen this catch up with kids when they do this." And I understand that, and that's why we're going to make sure that they get the basics of how they're doing what they're doing. Let me explain that. My oldest son, because we homeschooled, went through some books on his own, after he worked with this woman, we continued to go on. When he got into calculus, the woman who had been teaching him came to me and said, "You know, he has figured out stuff because he just can see it in his head. But there are some basic things that nobody ever made him do."

He was able to solve the problem, but he didn't get the basics. And she said, "So don't think I'm going backwards, but I've got to make sure he understands that. Because when he gets to linear algebra, he's going to have problems." She knew he was wanting to be an engineer and go on.

And so she did. What I want to be clear about is we're going to make sure that doesn't happen. We're going to make sure that they understand and have the principles and basics of what they have. But I'm pretty excited about that too.

Marlin Detweiler:
Yeah. Well, to be clear, just so that we don't set wrong expectations for you as a listener, this again will be in the third through sixth range where we're combining classes. But in this case, those combined classes are going to be for kids. I don't like using the term gifted, but it's fairly common.

But kids who really find they excel at math and want to move faster, they want to be challenged, or their parents want to challenge them. And so we're providing an opportunity for those too. The two types of classes are very different. So they'll be grouped separately and taught to different groups.

We don't know yet what the next year will look like after this year, but for the 25-26 school year, for kids in the third through sixth range, maybe even as far as seventh, we're looking at providing classes that will put two years into one. This will be achieved by eliminating some of the review and repetition, creating opportunities for the kids who don't need that repetition.

The scale and size of Veritas Scholars Academy now allows us to do things like this that might be for a very small group of students. But if we can fill a full section of it because we have so many students that we're working with, we want to be able to do that. We want to meet your children where they are and where their needs are. To be able to customize like that is pretty exciting.

I heard you're right. I didn't look, but I think we have about 30, maybe 32 algebra one sections right now. So we've grown to a scale where a section or two of a combination of two books is now a possibility. And so we're going to, plan to do that for next year if that interest you, call our service team or talk to your academic advisor or a family consultant, and they'll talk to you about them, those classes and, and see if they might be helpful to you, whether it's in trying to catch up or trying to, jump ahead and get, your student working at the level of the gifts that God's given them. Any other final thoughts?

Laurie Detweiler:

I think that's it.

Marlin Detweiler:

It's really exciting, to be able to do this. And we look forward to doing it. Look forward to hearing from you what your thoughts are as we, jump into it. So until next time, thank you for joining us on Veritas Vox, the voice of classical Christian education. Bye bye.