John Saxon

Who was John Saxon?

John H. Saxon Sr. was a U.S. air officer and educator. He was born in Georgia and graduated from high school in Athens, Georgia. He earned a bachelor's degree in Engineering from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point in 1949 and his master's degree in electrical engineering in 1961. Saxon flew 55 missions in a B-26 Night Intruder during the Korean War. After the war, he wrote or co-wrote a series of nine mathematics textbooks for kindergarten through high school which use an incremental teaching method often called "Saxon math". His books have gained popularity among certain traditionally-oriented groups of homeschoolers and private schools, but are also used in a number of public schools who favor a "back to basics" approach to mathematics. According to Saxon in media interviews in the 1980s and early 1990s and documentation coming with the high-school level textbooks, the inclusion of specialised and/or somewhat uncommon words such as "sciolist" in the story problems is intended as a vocabulary builder in preparation for the verbal section of the SAT and similar tests.