Slashdot Mirror
Math Textbooks a Textbook Example of Bad Textbooks
theodp writes "Over at Salon, Annie Keeghan does an Upton Sinclair number on the math textbook industry. In recent years, Keeghan explains, math has become the subject du jour due to government initiatives and efforts to raise the rankings of lagging U.S. students. But with state and local budgets constrained, math textbook publishers competing for fewer available dollars are rushing their products to market before their competitors, resulting in product that in many instances is inherently, tragically flawed. Keeghan writes: 'There may be a reason you can't figure out some of those math problems in your son or daughter's math text and it might have nothing at all to do with you. That math homework you're trying to help your child muddle through might include problems with no possible solution. It could be that key information or steps are missing, that the problem involves a concept your child hasn't yet been introduced to, or that the math problem is structurally unsound for a host of other reasons.' The comments on Keeghan's article are also an eye-opener — here's a sample: 'Sales and marketing budgets are astronomical because the expenses pay off more than investments in product. Sadly, most teachers are not curriculum experts and are swayed by the surface pitches. Teachers make the decisions, but are not the users (students) nor are they spending their own money. As a result, products that make their lives easier and that come with free meals and gifts are the most successful.' So, can open source or competitions build better math textbooks?"
Entire exams have been ruined by incorrect questions. Apparently, reading and writing is not a hard requirement for being a mathematician.
Syllable : It's an Operating System
....as a former math teacher, I can assure you that teachers rarely get to make the purchasing decisions regarding textbooks. Teachers, even most rookies, can tell when a textbook is bad, but have to use what they are given for the most part. They are free to supplement the curriculum with their own created content, but of course they are expected to mostly teach the state standards with the given textbooks.
At one point he was invited to sit on the committee that chose which textbooks to use for the California school system. He was unhappy with every single book he reviewed and made copious notes that he brought to the committee meeting.
It turned out that basically nobody else on the committee bothered doing more than skimming through the books, and in one case a book that hadn't even been written yet got a good score, something like 7 out of ten -- it was part of a 3-book series and it got slightly better scores than the two that were actually available to review!
PS: It's not "most teachers". Most teachers don't get any input into which books their district (hell, their state[1]) uses. That was a cheap dig, and politically motivated; OP is contemptible.
[1] Lots of states will just use whatever California uses, or whatever Texas uses.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
No, this ain't no "in soviet Russia" joke, though it could be I guess.
The best math textbooks I saw were the old soviet math school textbooks. They had one (1) textbook for a given grade for the entire country. It was the same book, with minimal adaptations and changes year after year. These books covered science without any "added sugar" - and they worked. Of course, none of that exists anymore - but that's a whole another story.
In any case, this is one field where open source and competition will likely result in more of what we already have. Central planning fails at delivering consumer goods and services, but it worked quite well delivering scientific education.
The correct answer is "some airplanes can fly upside down by using a high angle of attack, which overcomes the Bernoulli effect." Note also that even rightside up, most airplanes use some angle of attack.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
Not in mathematics. I didn't use the third rate designation lightly in this case. American mathematics prior to the 1930s was not world class, whereas Germany from about 1905-1930 was the leading mathematical country in the world, having taken over from France. The French took a particularly severe blow in World War I, because all the young mathematicans were sent to the front to die. After WWI, French mathematics didn't recover until a bunch of students rebelled and learned the new mathematics from the Germans around the 1930s and really started teaching after the second great war. These students became known as the Bourbaki group. By the time of WWII, all the significant work was being done in the US and, separately, in the USSR. This separation broke down only slowly and the mathematical world united around about the 1980s.