Mike Keedy:
Equating textbook writing to piloting

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Fellow TAA members and leaders thanking Keedy for his dedication to TAA.

Mike Keedy: Stopped counting after 50 titles "Authors should keep their writing simple. They should also use uncomplicated language. Don't try to make a textbook a literary masterpiece. You're producing a tool. There can be some exceptions to that. The McGuffey Readers, for example, are, in a sense, a literary masterpiece. But that's a special case." Books Formation Flying, Comanche Flyer Foundation, 1989. Informal Geometry, Addison-Wesley, 1986. Applying General Mathematics, Addison-Wesley, 1982. Geometry Prindle, Weber, Schmidt, 1981. General Mathematics, Addison-Wesley, 1980. Algebra Two, Addison-Wesley, 1978. Algebra One, Addison-Wesley, 1978. Fundamental College Algebra, Addison-Wesley, 1977. Fundamental Algebra and Trigonometry, Addison-Wesley, 1977. Algebra and Trigonometry: A Functions Approach, Addison-Wesley, 1974, 1978. Trigonometry: A Functions Approach, Addison-Wesley, 1974, 1978. College Algebra: A Functions Approach, Addison-Wesley, 1974, 1978. Essential Mathematics: A Modern Approach, Addison-Wesley, 1972, 1976. Intermediate Algebra: A Modern Approach, Addison-Wesley, 1971, 1975. Introductory Algebra: A Modern Approach, Addison-Wesley, 1971, 1975. Arithmatic: A Modern Approach, Addison-Wesley,  1971, 1975. Mathematics: A Modern Introduction, Addison-Wesley, 1970. Exploring Elementary Mathematics, Books 1-6, Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1970. Trigonometry: A Programmed Text, Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1969. Relations, Functions and Graphs, Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1967. Exploring Geometry, Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1967. Exploring Elementary Algebra, Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1967. Geometry: A Modern Approach, Addison-Wesley, 1965. Number Systems: A Modern Introduction, Addison-Wesley, 1965,1968. Exploring Modern Mathematics, Book III, Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1964. A Modern Introduction to Basic Mathematics, Addison-Wesley, 1963. Contemporary Second Year Algebra, Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1963. Exploring Modern Mathematics, Book II, Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1963, 1968. Exploring Modern Mathematics, Book I, Holt, Rinehart &Winston, 1963, 1968. Elementary Logic for Secondary Schools, Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1962. Contemporary Algebra and Trigonometry, Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1961. Laboratory Physics, Edwards Brothers, 1953. Education Ph.D., University of Nebraska, 1957 M.S., University of Nebraska, 1950 B.S., University of Chicago, 1946 Nebraska State Teachers College at Peru, 1940

Math author Mike Keedy, who loves flying his own plane, says that the way his remedial math textbooks approach the teaching of math is similar to the way he used to teach people to fly. "If I am teaching you to fly, I will break down the art into fundamentals. For example, early in the game I will teach you to make a turn," said Keedy. "I will explain how it is done, demonstrate it, and then guide you while you practice it. Afterward I will observe your performance to determine whether you have learned it well. What I will not do, at least in the beginning, is mix this learning with some other. That would confuse you. Later on we put things together. This approach made things very simple, but surprisingly it turned out to be something of a breakthrough in mathematics education and has been copied by a goodly number of competing authors."

Keedy's remedial textbooks, Arithmetic: A Modern Approach, Introductory Algebra: A Modern Approach, and Intermediate Algebra: A Modern Approach, co-authored with Marvin Bittinger, were written at the urging of an editor at Addison Wesley. When two-year colleges were proliferating in the early 1970s, Addison Wesley didn't have anything for their remedial math courses. "This editor had it in mind that he wanted to use something in the margins," Keedy said. "They had just published a calculus book having a rule down the page creating an outer margin in which there were graphs and an occasional comment or illustration, plus a lot of blank space. He wanted us to use that format."

One day in Boston, at lunch with this particular editor, Keedy was arguing against using the margins, saying that there was a lot of wasted space. He said to the editor, "If you insist on using margins like that let's at least make it count for something, perhaps something pedagogical. Before lunch was over, he said, they had a format. "That was surely creativity at my most rapid pace," he said.

This is how it worked: The text for each lesson was divided into parts. The skills to be acquired by studying the lesson were listed in the margin at the beginning. For example, at the end of the lesson, the student should be able to factor the difference of two squares. The lesson was then divided into segments, each of which addressed one of the skills. For each skill there was an explanation, followed by illustrative examples. Students were to work through them and then go to A margin and work one or more exercises very similar to the examples. Students were to check their answers with those found at the back of the book.

"This was a very successful way of going about things," Keedy said. "It took laziness or stupidity not to succeed because the student's hand was guided all the way. Things weren't confused by extraneous material. The development focused on one skill at a time, a skill that when mastered, would lead to the next skill, and so on until they could all be put together at the end. Very much like teaching someone to fly."

Keedy went on to write or co-author some 50 titles, many of which have been recognized as innovative if not ground-breaking. His Exploring Modern Mathematics, published by Holt, Rinehart & Winston, a junior high school series, and co-authored by Dick Jameson and Pat Johnson, greatly influenced junior high school curriculum in the 1960s.

The series was "smashingly successful", said Keedy, with the seventh and eighth grade books each selling more than a million copies, not counting sales in California, where the state printed its own books under license from the publisher. "Back in 1964, when the books were adopted in Florida, all seventh and eighth grade students in the state used the books," Keedy said.

An elementary school series, Exploring Elementary Mathematics, written along the same lines as the junior high series, "explained things," said Keedy: "Students were given answers to why things were as they were and were encouraged to explore and discover things on their own." This approach was different from the traditional method -- which, unfortunately is close to the method being used today -- in which students learn a bunch of rules and try to follow them, said Keedy, but don't know why it all works.

His College Algebra and Trigonometry text, also co-authored with Bittinger, looked at graphs by way of transformations. This was the first book to do that, said Keedy, and now they all do.

Keedy and Bittinger met in the 1960s while Keedy was teaching at Purdue University and Bittinger was a student working on his doctorate. One day Bittinger came to Keedy's office and asked him how to get started on a writing career in math textbooks. Keedy offered some advice, then suggested that Bittinger try to make something out of a manuscript that had been worked on by some former students. Bittinger agreed. Their first co-authored text was Trigonometry: A Programmed Text, published by Holt, Rinehart & Winston in 1969.

Bittinger, now a professor at Indiana University/Purdue University-Indianapolis, still revises the Keedy-Bittinger textbooks. "I would not be at the point where I am now without Mike Keedy," Bittinger said. "I'm delighted to be associated with him. He has been a great mentor."

Keedy said he has always enjoyed writing. He self-published his first book, which was a laboratory manual, while teaching physics at North Dakota State University. He calls writing his doctoral thesis, which was on relation algebra, "creative fun."

He got started writing textbooks soon after teaching a summer course at a New York State University in 1957. One of his students there went on to become an editor for Henry Holt Co., and coaxed Keedy to help write a high school book on algebra and trigonometry. He did, and that became his first math text: Contemporary Algebra and Trigonometry, published in 1961. His co-authors were Alice Griswold and John Schacht.

A good textbook, said Keedy, should be readable, have accurate and well-organized subject matter, have sensible pedagogical features and be attractive. Being attractive doesn't mean that a book must have color, he said, many older black-and-white books were very attractive and effective.

Authors, he said, should keep their writing simple. They should also use uncomplicated language: "Don't try to make a textbook a literary masterpiece. You're producing a tool. There can be some exceptions to that, he said. "The McGuffey Readers, for example, are, in a sense, a literary masterpiece. But that's a special case."

Keedy said authors should see the job of writing a text as an engineering project: "The product is supposed to take the learner from a certain state of knowledge and skill to a higher state of knowledge and skill. This is analogous to designing a machine knowing what the input will be and the desired output. Be specific about what understandings and skills are to be developed. Write them down and do so in a lot of detail. Then use your creativity. Come up with the best and most appropriate devices you can think of to bring the learner along. Think of exposition, illustrations, exercises, reviews and whatever else you think will do the job. Resist the temptation, while developing an understanding or skill, to do something else. That is, stick to the point. Extraneous material is going to be confusing. Count on it! Remember that you are writing to develop a skill or understanding. Use language that is simple and direct. Do not let yourself become erudite."

Authors must work morning, noon and night; holidays and every other time, said Kennedy: "All available time must go to the production of your book. You must be virtually immersed in it. I had co-authors who were hoping to write a book by spending a couple hours per day writing. They didn't want the writing of the book to influence their lives very much. Those people dropped out. If that's how you're thinking about it, that it will be a sort of something you do when you get around to it, don't even start."

The biggest thrill as a writer, says Keedy, is to see what you've been working on so long finally between covers: "To actually see it exist -- that's the big moment. The second biggest moment is when you get good reviews and comments from people. The third biggest moment: the day you get your first royalty check."

Keedy's route to becoming an author has been a long and winding one. After high school, he worked in a local drugstore for a year and a summer to earn enough to attend college for one year. After his first year of college at Nebraska State Teachers College at Peru, he ran out of money and had to drop out. After trying to attend an aeronautic school in Chicago, where he worked nights at a drugstore, he finally gave up and joined the Army Air Corps. This would be his chance, he thought, to train as an aircraft mechanic, learning much of what he needed to know as an engineer. His plan was to then finish his engineering education after his service in the army.

That was his plan, but, instead of being trained as an aircraft mechanic, he ended up in weather school, where the Army "requested" that he go. He graduated from the weather forecasting school at Chanute Field, Illinois in 1942 and was retained there as an instructor for about a year. While he was there World War II started. He served as a weather forecaster at Selfridge Field, Michigan, where he was promoted from sergeant to warrant officer. Overseas he forecast weather for aviation operations in North Africa and points around the Mediterranean.

While in Tunisia and Corsica he became acquainted with the well known French pilot and author Antoine De Saint Exupery, probably best known for his book, The Little Prince. Exupery disappeared during a photo reconnaissance flight in a P-38. Keedy will tell you, sadly, that he made the weather forecast for that final flight and was one of the last persons to see Exupery alive.

Finding meteorology interesting, Keedy decided, after the war to try industrial meteorology. Toward that end, he earned a bachelor's degree in meteorology from the University of Chicago. To complete his dream of a degree in industrial engineering, he also attended the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago a year later. "Before too long, the idea of being a meteorologist began to lose its appeal," Keedy said. "I didn't relish the idea of working nights and weekends off and on all my life. I remembered how I enjoyed my teaching in the service and decided to make teaching my career."

Keedy taught high school math and science in Mountain Home, Idaho, from 1947 to 1949. It was there, near Mountain Home Air Force Base, that Keedy, who had always loved airplanes, finally learned to fly.

Keedy went back to Nebraska, his home state, where he earned his master's degree at the University of Nebraska in 1950. He decided that it was time to move up to college teaching, but soon realized that to teach at the college level, one needed a doctorate. He earned his Ph.D. in mathematics and physics from the University of Nebraska in 1957. After teaching at Nebraska State Teachers College, North Dakota State University, the University of Nebraska and the University of Maryland, he joined the math department at Purdue University in 1961. It was while he was at Purdue that Keedy wrote most of his textbooks. All of the royalties earned from sales of his texts sold at that institution were donated to the university to endow scholarships.

Asked about his early life, Keedy said that as a child of 4, growing up on a Nebraska farm, he thought when that he would grow up to be a farmer like his dad. But then at about age 10 he found that farming held little charm. About that time he elected to become a sailor. "I believe it was a cowboy a year or so earlier," Keedy wrote in an autobiographical essay in November 1979. "By the time I was 12 there was no more doubt, I was going to be an aviator. I made model airplanes, using every spare moment and every spare penny." As an adult, he became a flight instructor and taught a son, some colleagues and others to fly.

He goes on to write: "On through high school, as I matured and became level-headed, let's say, I realized that I didn't want to go through life as just a pilot, so I planned to combine this love of airplanes with an engineering career. I was going to be an aeronautical engineer, and a pilot too of course." After years of considering and toying with careers in engineering, meteorology, physics and math, Keedy said he finally knew what he wanted to do when he grew up: Be a mathematician and teach math.

Keedy retired from Purdue University in 1987. That year he donated money to help establish a special math computer laboratory for graduate students at Purdue, now called the Keedy Lab. The laboratory and the scholarships that he has endowed, said Keedy, are the two things he is most proud of: "They give me a small piece of immortality. I think most people would like to have a chunk of that." He is also proud of the title of professor emeritus Of mathematics that Purdue bestowed upon him.

Throughout his teaching career, Keedy had delved into his other love: flying. He owned several airplanes. One of them was a Piper Comanche 400, a fast airplane with a long range. He used it to travel to author conferences, conventions and for recreation. He also bought an antique biplane and then another to be restored. Since the restoration was done in Florida, he decided to spend one semester of each year there. He did that for five years before retiring to Orange Springs, Florida, where he bought a horse farm, built an airstrip and hangar and developed a live-in aviation community.

That done, he was restless, and began to think about starting an organization for textbook authors. There was no such organization in existence in 1987, said Keedy, and there were a number of authors who realized that they were "individuals swimming alone." When it came to relationships with publishers, he said, authors were at a disadvantage. His goals were to establish better and more effective relations with publishers and to share ideas with other authors. When he bounced the idea off his co-authors, including Paul Anderson, he found them interested, but without much time to devote to an organization. But retiree Keedy did.

He founded the Textbook Authors Association in April 1987, using an office on his horse farm in Orange Springs. Anderson became member number one. The other founding member was Howard Anton, a successful calculus author. The association's first meeting was in Las Vegas during Christmas break. Keedy was elected President and also served as executive director. He flew his plane around the country to recruit members. At one time, he had the membership approaching 1,100. His pitch: "We have just formed an association for textbook authors, we understand that you are one, send us $25 (dues at the time), and we'll put your name on the list."

Headquarters remained at his horse farm in Orange Springs until Keedy sold the farm in 1991. At that time a temporary headquarters was set up in a mobile home on a farm tract near Orange Springs, where TAA secretary Norma Hood lived. By that time Keedy was no longer president and gave up the executive directorship. "I had given TAA a lot," he said. "I was president and/or executive director for a number of years, had provided office space, computers, payroll and so on. I figure that I also put about $100,000 of my own money into the organization. So it wasn't exactly easy to give up. I reasoned, however, that the organization needed to function without me, otherwise it would never grow up and survive. There were times when its survival looked dubious, but I can say with a lot of satisfaction that it looks like a permanent, growing and ongoing situation now."

TAA's current executive director, Ron Pynn, a political science author, first met Keedy in Las Vegas while attending TAA's first meeting. "The idea for TAA was well along by then and the original three committees were proposed and agreed to: contracts, used books, and complimentary copies. "My involvement was immediate and extensive, becoming one of the senior members along with Keedy and Anderson," said Pynn. "As senior members, we ran the organization and were responsible for its activities, financially and policy-wise."

"In those early years, Mike was a ball of fire, full of energy and fresh initiatives," Pynn said. "The initial glow of success swelled membership to more than 1,200. But we were soon hit by non-renewals and a lot of non-awareness from academics. This frustrated Mike. Our best efforts at publicity, policy initiatives and conventions drew modest results. Mike would continually call, full of excitement and enthusiasm for some initiative. This project, Mike said, was going to turn around TAA. A few days later, he would call back again, now pessimistic and even somewhat angry: 'Why didn't people pay attention? Why didn't the members follow through with what they said?' I tried to remind Mike that TAA was a third tier organization for most members. They had their job -- teaching, advising, committees, etc. Then they had their discipline -- its conventions, journals, committees. Finally came TAA. If we were even that high a priority, not counting church, Rotary, Chamber of Commerce, etc. But for Mike, TAA was a passion, his priority. He never could fully understand it wasn't so for others, especially the membership."

Frank Silverman, a speech pathology author who was president of TAA in 1998, said he first heard of TAA about a month after Keedy launched it. "Keedy's decision to devote the first part of his retirement to founding TAA profoundly impacted both academic book publishing in the United States and me personally," he said. Silverman wrote to Keedy soon after he heard of TAA, telling him about an authoring workshop he had created. "He encouraged me to join TAA and to present my workshop at annual conventions," said Silverman. "I think that I presented my workshop at all of the early conventions. He further encouraged me to publish a book based on the content of the workshop. By doing these things, he got me involved in with TAA in ways that have greatly enriched my life during the past dozen years."

Now retired from teaching, authoring, flying and TAA, Keedy lives in Bartow, Florida, concentrating on his latest passion: singing. Actually, his passion for music began in high school, where he played the violin in the orchestra, bass horn in the band and sang in the glee club and mixed chorus. He also sang solos in contests and was a member of a boys quartet. He acted in a number of plays and won an award as best actor in a one-act play in a regional contest.

In 1952, while teaching physics at North Dakota State University, he played and sang the lead in a community production of a musical comedy. Through the years he sang in choirs and solo, studying with a teacher in Chicago. "Since retiring to Bartow, I have found music to be my 'thing'", wrote Keedy, in an another autobiographical essay he wrote in July 1999. "I don't write much anymore but music keeps me busy. I sing in a choir, do solo work, and am studying voice again. I probably sing as well as I ever did despite my advanced age." At 80, he is singing in a barbershop quartet and coaching high school boys quartets. He also arranges music and has written some songs.

Keedy has two sons. One is a family counselor in Massachusetts and the other has been a judge in Montana and now practices law there. He has four grandchildren and one great granddaughter. "When it comes to being retired, I know that some people hate and/or don't handle it well," said Keedy. "I think it to be simply great. I have more than enough interests to keep me as busy as I wish to be. And if I wish to do nothing for a while I can do that, nothing."

— reported by Kim Pawlak, 2000