AskDrCallahan Blog

Many homeschooling parents contact us when their math students are beginning Algebra 1. They are wondering what the difference is between Jacobs’ Teachers Guide and the AskDrCallahan Teachers Guide. In addition, they often wonder if they need a Teachers Guide and Solutions Manual for the Algebra 1 course. The answer is YES. and let me explain why:

For the AskDrCallahan Algebra 1 course, we recommend parents get the AskDrCallahan Teachers Guide and The Solutions Manual (Solutions manual ISBN 9780615315010). The Solutions Manual is a new (within the last year–2009/2010) product that Harold Jacobs (along with AskDrCallahan) put together.

It contains step by step solutions to every single problem in the book and functions as a significant improvement over his previous teachers guide (Teacher’s Guide 0716710757). The previous book was designed to accompany his textbook, but it only contained some solutions and they weren’t detailed so once this new book came out, we stopped carrying the Harold Jacobs teacher guide that was originally designed to come with the textbook.

Probably there are still articles in the blog archives that mention the old manual, but our Algebra website (http://shop.askdrcallahan.com/categories/Math/Algebra/Algebra-Full-Course-Bundle/) as well as our current article material should point you to the new manual. If you should have questions about which manual to purchase (or any questions for that matter!) please contact us, we will be glad to help. support@askdrcallahan.com

For the Algebra Course, we recommend our Teachers Guide (which contains the syllabus, tests, test grading guide, and additional resource material like activity suggestions and pacing information–download here). In addition to our teachers guide we also recommend the Solutions Manual( Solutions manual ISBN 9780615315010).

That said, many parents find that they can purchase just a textbook and our DVD set and do fine. The reason is because the dvd set contains a cdrom with pdf versions of our Teachers Guide and The AskDrCallahan “Solutions to Selected Problems”. This “Solutions to Selected Problems” is where AskDrCallahan has compiled detailed step by step solutions to only the problems we assign for homework. There are 60+ problems per lesson in this textbook and we do not assign all of them for homework, so we created this smaller manual for parents that intend to use our syllabus and therefore might not need the larger book.

To view more information about Algebra click here.

You can also download the Teachers Guide and other Algebra resources for free, by clicking here.