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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
A great book, "Lies My Teacher Told Me" details the history textbook situation which is pretty bad too.
'Sales and marketing budgets are astronomical because the expenses pay off more than investments in product.'
Ah, so textbooks are the same as 'enterprise' software then...
This issue is found with all textbooks, and has always been a problem. Even in the 70s and 80s, pretty much every textbook I used in high school and university had mistakes, omissions, and unsolvable chapter-problems.
The difficulty with learning maths and sciences stems from the fact that they tend to deal with abstract concepts, procedures, and algorithms for performing mathematical calculations. In the age of calculators and instant-gratification web searches, not only aren't students willing to put in the time to learn "how" to do something, they aren't even interested in learning "why" they should do something.
Instead, they point to their computers and the web as being able to do the work for them, and question the sanity of learning "the old way" of doing things. If the only purpose of an education was to prepare people for the workforce, I'd agree with them -- but the point of an education is to learn how to learn, how to interpret, and how to understand material. An education isn't about the facts taught, but about the learning process that prepares you for a lifetime of learning as you deal with new technologies, products, and ideas during your time on this planet.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
Its not like Math changes every year. The text book industry and publishers are just ripping students off every year. If they would just publish one edition of their text books, we wouldn't have this problem.
Feynman wrote about the problems with textbooks and textbook selection in the 60s. Sadly, I don't think much has changed. It might have gotten worse. I do hope that open source textbooks and book readers might help, eventually, if we can prevent the systems from perpetuating textbooks as revenue generation first and teaching aids second.
Math perhaps but anything with any political aspect will be fought over, i.e. Texas re-writing history textbooks in an effort to lesson the constitutional barriers of separation of church and state.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/03/17/AR2010031700560.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/13/education/13texas.html
blindly antisocialist = antisocial
....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.
My son's elementary school uses "Math Investigations" which is part of that "new math". You know, the type that believes that it isn't necessary to learn multiplication tables, or that your really only need to learn a few fractions: 1/2 1/3 1/4 and that is it. Oh yeah, and you shouldn't "stack" numbers while adding. He doesn't have a text book. He only brings home photocopied worksheets.
I complained to the teacher. They referred me to the principal who referred me to the district's elementary math education supervisor. Long story short, when schools say they want parents involved, they are lying. That is the last thing that they want. They want you to chaperone field trips. They want you to help fund raise. But when you want to actually input on the fundamentals of education, they shut you out. Even though you might have been a physics major and tutor, and brought peer reviewed research sponsored by the Department of Education pointing out that their particular math curricula has students score lower on standardized tests they imply that you don't know what you are talking about.
Investors valued Yelp restaurant and other reviews at $1.47B. How much is being spent on textbook reviews?
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
As someone whose published works have benefited from the collaboration with an outstanding editor, I feel for all the editors and writers out their that care about their craft. A writer creates a raw product, a good editor turns it into a work of art. When my editor was let go due to "financial constraints" I realized that the publication has begun the death spiral; and made sure my editor and I stayed in touch so I we could work together at some point in the future.
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
From a commenter: "The Internet is going to change textbooks forever. When retired Ph.D.'s in physics and mathematics and chemistry and biology can write a book and publish it online - without help from today's publishers - students win, elementary schools win, middle schools win, high schools win, colleges win."
I think part of the problem also is the ridiculous requirements put into textbooks by some of the states. Some locales have required multiculturalism parts of classes, even something like elementary school math, which should be pretty much a fact based class.
I live in Illinois, and I know my children's books are not up to the level of what I had 30 years ago. The books seem scatter brained with forced examples of what the states want put into the books. Also, the forced lack of focus on the fundamentals has gone a long way towards lowering the ability of students from the US to compete in a global academic environment, especially in the sciences and computer fields. Another item is what is wrong with timed drills, and letting students know that the world is not equal and that some people are better and faster in math than others. Welcome to the real world! I am not saying advertise who is the best, but don't stop doing timed tests and drills because some helicopter parent is complaining that their snowflake did not get the highest possible score. A friend of mine is a former principal at an elementary school, and he said that the biggest number of complaints he had were from parents who thought that it was traumatic for their children to not be able to complete timed math fundamentals tests.
Yes, the textbook manufacturers are sleazy and always trying to sell the new latest greatest edition, but don't forget some of the ever changing junk they have to put in to make the politicians happy in the big states (thank-you California and Texas). Let the experts decide what needs to be in an effective textbook, not the politicians.
My wife used to teach an Intro to Anthropology course (among others) and each year was a new textbook, which she would get a week before class started in Sept. Towards the end of her teaching career, the textbooks were less complete than the previous year and each book came with links to a publisher's website of 'supplemental material' which was the stuff that was missing plus some videos and flash demos... The links were embedded throughout the book. At the end of that school year, the website 'expired' making that textbook useless to be replaced by the current years' textbook and corresponding website. Pure evil.
In addition, there were lots of errors in the chapters causing my wife to have to spend a great deal of time fact checking each lesson plan against the book.. Eventually, she stopped simply telling the students about the errors and issued a challenge for students to identify the errors in the book, and then next class they would discuss the chapter focusing on the errors... It turned into a great teaching tool while simultaneously demonstrating to students not to believe everything they read.
1. A key part of any good text is the flow - how do chapters interrelate and build on each other, i.e. what is the story line? That needs an editor in charge that makes and enforces decisions; something noticeably absent from most OS products.
2. The people with the most knowledge are often the worst to have explain a concept - things that are initiative and simple may be obscure and hard to understand for a student. Writing a good text book means actually explaining stuff in enough detail for the reader to understand, and putting in stuff you think everyone would know when in fact they don't.
Even with simple concepts there are often multiple ways to obtain the same solution - do you put them all in; if not how do you decide which ones to include?
At least with math, if you avoid any historical context you can avoid some of the challenges that history text books would have, for example, with political and social views and arguments thereover.
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
I teach at the elementary level. I’ve pilot tested several textbooks in several curriculums. After using many publishers’ products, I’ve got a feel for what works well for me, and what materials I need. But what’s most important is how well the students work with the materials. If the students struggle with a pilot curriculum due to poor presentation, then that curriculum isn’t going to get my vote. And if there are mistakes in the materials, the sales rep is going to get an earful from me, but not my business (I hope).
The real problem is the complete lack of qualified teacher's. A teacher needs to be a true master of all subjects so regardless of a text book the teachers should work with numbers like a mathematician. Bad text books can be overcome by excellent teaching and from what I remember my teachers were jokes. Don't blame the text books blame the unqualified teacher's.
My experience as a student and an adult who knows many teachers, is the cover the full spectrum - some really great, some that need to retire or move on, and most somewhere in between. They work in a profession where someone else defines what they must do, (the curriculum) how they will be assessed (students passing standardized tests), and students (and parents) who often are only interested in a grade, not actually learning the material. For this, they get paid a pretty low wage especially if they are actually good at math and science and have a degree to back that up.
In addition, as more opportunities opened up for women; many who would have only had teaching (or nursing) as viable career options rightfully went into other fields where their abilities would be recognized and rewarded far beyond what teaching offered; removing a large segment of potentially excellent teachers from the pool. Many of the good teachers I know would not let their kids go into teaching because they know what awaits them. There still are new teachers that do so because they really love teaching, unfortunately most become jaded and abandon the field for far more rewarding careers without the BS that accompanies actually trying to teach. Until we actually value teaching as a profession we'll get why we are willing to pay for; an dteh teachers will continue to be a convent scapegoat for everything that is wrong with our educational system.
Finally, when you have a potential presidential candidate from a major party calling our current president a "snob" because he dared suggest that getting some post-high school education is a good idea and needed to get the skills required for most good jobs, and deriding the idea the education is needed and should even be avoided because it's all about liberals brainwashing our youth, I fear for the future.
Anecdotal evidence: I know someone who spent 30+ years training auto mechanics. He once told me at the start of his career he could take a kid with some mechanical aptitude and turn them into a decent mechanic who could make a good living and career out of it. At the end of his career, he said even a high school eduction was not really enough - there was so much advanced math, electronic theory, and computer theory that unless you had a solid education in this areas you were lost. What started as a basic trade school evolved into essentially a technical school associate degree level education; the point the President was actually making about the need for post-high scull education.
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
I had a organic chemistry text book that had a similar problems. I remember one question where it asked a question that you had to know about aromaticity. That would have been ok except aromaticity wouldn't be introduced for another 2 chapters. (The only reason I knew about it was I had read ahead a few chapters before looking at that problem in the text.) Come to think of it they also introduced resonance structures as the very first concept then proceeded to completely ignore the concept. (It only came up at the beginning of my orgo II class. Why they didn't move introducing the concept to right before it was going to be used instead of where they did and everybody forgot about it I'll never know.)
Did you know 80 to 90% of the moderators on slashdot wouldn't recognize a troll even if one dragged them under a bridge.
As usual its not capitalism at fault its where capitalism and government collide that we have problems. We have private industry producing education materials and and public educational entities that have consistently worked over the past century and half to make sure it is far beyond the reach of accountability to those it serves.
Private schools in most parts of this nation spending drastically less per student (even when adjust out the cost of special ed for they don't provide) than most public schools. They also achieve consistently better results. Now some of that can be ascribed to their picking their pupils and the usually superior social and economic backgrounds of those pupils; hover it does appear at least on the surface the more ideologically pure capitalist institutions do better with less than the socialized educational services that are provided.
A fully vertically integrated socialized education system might work well too, but we don't have one of those here in the US to look at; and looking at international ones would only add more difference difficult to control for.
So once again don't bash capitalism; its not at fault here. You only think that because of leftist propaganda. Clearly the fault lies with the way public education is being run. Its public education that is creating a market for second and third rate educational materials. Capitalists are merely serving that market. They have finite number of customers (public school districts), if those customers demanded different terms, and something better they'd get it. They don't because they be run be the inept; who were trained by the inept before them, and they don't like or want change; and won't have their ideas challenged by outsiders. The who institution of teacher education, license, curriculum development, degree requirements, etc is run like mid evil guild.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
Inaccurate, incomplete, contradictory and poorly stated data and questions are par for the course.
Maybe it's a good thing for students to be exposed to some poorly worded and insoluble problems in their education.
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.
Arthur Benjamin has an interesting TED talk suggesting that having our main math tract lead to calculus as the end point for most students is a mistake. He argues that statistics should be the targeted end point. As beautiful as the calculus is, I have to admit that our society makes more collective errors due to the public not understating statistics than not understanding derivatives.
Cultivating a nation of docile workers who will do as they are told, without question, and who would not start any sort of revolution
FTFY. The point of public education is to train people to be good workers who do what their bosses tell them to do, and who have just enough ability to read and write so that their employers do not have to give them remedial training, not to create an educated populace. If you want to have your children become educated people, you have to pay for it -- and pay a lot -- thus ensuring that only the wealthy (who are already in charge) will ever be able to change the course of society (not that they would ever lead a revolution for the working class who serve them).
Take a moment to think about what life is like for the 12-13 years the next generation spends in public education. To advance to the next level (promotion), you must complete your work to your superiors' (teachers) satisfaction. If you work really hard, you can get bonuses -- special privileges other students do not have, a chance to work even harder, and if you are really lucky maybe even a chance to do something interesting. If you do nothing but ace your exams (i.e. if you learned or understood the material without doing any of your homework or classwork), you get an F or perhaps a merciful D, because you are not doing what your superior told you to do (the fact that you aced the exams is irrelevant; failing the exams is the only thing that matters, but if you work extra hard then even failing exams is not something that will hold you back); if you receive poor grades, you are denied opportunities that students who received A's can receive (including the chance to study material that does not bore you).
Grades themselves are an interesting example of the point of public education. The grade you receive is what matters; why you received it is not something that is considered by anyone. It does not matter if you received an F because you never showed up to class, if you received an F for getting all of the questions on every test and homework assignment wrong, or if you received an F because you did not turn in any homework but receive 100 on every exam. Your grades are your salary in school, and your teacher is your boss; if you do not have the money to join to country club ^H^H^H^H the grades to be allowed to take an AP class, then you are not granted admittance.
Palm trees and 8
Grammar Nazis should learn to capitalize the first word of each sentence.
First off, anyone making comments on college or higher level math in this thread did not RTFA - its about kiddies, not college kids. K-8.
So why are we even talking about such stupidity? Has the "math" taught to K-8 today suddenly changed from.. 10 years ago? 30? 100? 300? Hmm.. lets see.. add, subtract, multiply, divide. Fractions. Percentages (same thing). "Word" problems. Maybe a touch of very very simple geomentry.
There is no need for a new mathbook for these kids. In fact, they would probably best be taught by grabbing one which was used in the 1920s or 1950s. Just wondering.. can your grandparents (or in some cases, if alive - great grandparents) add, subtract, multiply and divide? Or were the books and teaching "methods" just so atrocious back then that everybody ended up a dolt? Whats that? test scores ahve declined! Well maybe going back to what was used when the scores were higher might be a better thing to do? When in a hole the first thing to do is stop digging!
Bottom line: nannyism. school boards ptas publishers state and federal governemnt alll trying to find ways to justify their existence by fucking up what already worked quite well.
Only for large values of 2.
The advantage of open sourcing K-12 textbooks is that when schools finally go digital, they'll save a great deal of money per student. Free books = more educational money to go elsewhere. Also open sourced K-12 textbooks means you can buy kids in 3rd world countries a laptop through OLPC, and they'll have a chance at a first world education. Textbooks are just the beginning, I think all sorts of tutor software could be used too. People think it would be great for when we get Artificial Intelligence that it can teach our children, but we could make a software suite to help do it now.
God spoke to me
Guess who was the first man on the moon according to one of *my* textbooks (written by a teacher- no, not in the US).
Louis Armstrong.
Absolutely brillant.
And when he stepped on the moon, he said to himself: "What a wonderful world." :-)
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
Interesting dynamic here: guy goes a bit off-topic to staunchly defend capitalism (the whole thing) against those who follow "leftist propaganda" (really?), and everybody who chides him for it has been marked down to zero. I don't see anything trolling, otherwise offensive, or off-thread-topic of those replies. Kind of looks from first-blush to be a bunch of /. modders determined to turn /. into a kind of propaganda itself, only one view represented.
Well, mark me down to zero then, gang, because you can only hold capitalism blameless by considering it to be a mindless mechanism, and government the only human-operated entity that makes moral and professional choices.
The same blame allocation has been applied far more extensively to financial regulation recently: because the banks just do what's legal (and government is at fault if they break the law and are not caught for it), the concept of government bears all responsibility for new regulations the banks successfully "lobbied" (bribed) for. We have bad banking because government is bad, get rid of government.
We have bad textbooks because bad government ALLOWS the amoral process of capitalism get away with delivering them, so get rid of government.
Given the crap the publishers are now putting out, would we have better math textbooks from them, or from a government department of textbook-writing? Do we need less government here, or more? And indeed, the substance of the /. post was "do we now need to step outside the whole rotted system and produce textbooks by open-source, an extension of the hugely successful Wikipedia (which has destroyed the once-proud private encyclopedia industry by BEATING THEM, fair and square)?"
These questions are much more complex than doctrinaire left/right positions can solve.
Not for content ("steak") but for presentation ("sizzle").
Some things like pre-college math and "established" history* simply don't change much.
A middle-school course on US history prior to WWI will cover pretty much the same things as
it did in 1980. Ditto Algebra or calculus.
But the delivery should be updated.
A 1980 history book that might have come with 2 or 3 16mm movies in a "teacher's package"
will instead come with both student- and teacher-oriented web sites and other
modern resources.
A 1980 calculus book was probably 3- or 4-spot-color with maybe a full color
page or two in each chapter. The "real world examples" were contemporary to
its time. A 2012 textbook - if it even exists as a book/PDF, will be
full-color and will use examples today's students can relate to. Cars will have higher
gas mileage, "mathematics in the work world" sidebars will have modern scenarios, etc.
But in both the history and the math texts, the concepts and even the very questions can
be carried over verbatim to today's students.
*"Established" history is typically history which 1) is factually established and 2) whose
interpretation isn't in flux. History from cultures that haven't left much in the way
of records isn't factually established, and the "preferred interpretation" of history of the past few decades is
still being written.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
My company does typesetting, and that includes typesetting math for publishers. The quality of what we are asked to set is sometimes excellent, sometime abysmal. We use LaTeX for the work, regardless of what the publisher sends us, because we can trust it not to fall over and break under pressure, something we cannot say for other systems. As a result, we often get the publisher coming back to us asking how we got it to look so nice, which is very flattering (and we never tell them what we used), but supports Ms Keeghan's point that the publishers know that some of their product is rubbish. Some of the authors may well be to blame — we don't get to meet them — but publisher illiteracy plus publisher veniality is going to account for a lot of the problem.
Lectures are an efficient ways of learning something. Especially Mathematics. Most of the time (immersing yourself in some subject matter that exemplifies some part of Mathematics can be much more effective, but it takes more time and effort too). Besides, there is good reason why textbooks haven't changed: the subject matter has largely remained the same. Only people change (and their background knowledge and attitude).
What I see with Mathematics is that it just takes too much intellectual strength and concentration for 95% of the population to master under their own steam. Even if you gave them twenty years, they'd get absolutely nowhere. People in general simply haven't the smarts, the talent, and the perseverance it takes to discover Mathematics on their own.
This has a reason: Mathematics takes an effort to learn (unless you are lucky enough to be very gifted at it, which 99.9% of humanity is not). It's the mental equivalent of rock-climbing. It's not easy. However, just like rock-climbing, it's so much easier to climb up *after* someone than to climb in the lead.
Just consider the route you take: if you climb up after someone, you're guaranteed that the path up will lead you somewhere. Climb lead, and suddenly that's not a given anymore: you will need to *search* for the path. Apart from that there is the small matter of the rope that your lead climber can let down to you ... to help you over the tricky bits. You need a lot less strength, stamina, and knowledge to climb up after someone than to climb lead.
And that's why there are lectures. During a lecture, someone who has studied e.g. Mathematics guides you up, and drops you a rope. If you follow the lecture, you get to enjoy the view and (hopefully) enough understanding of what this particular part of the landscape looks like in order to apply the techniques you just learned to new problems. But no matter how good the teacher, you will have to expend the effort to hoist yourself up to the level of the subject matter. There is no "royal" way to learning.
Mathematics (even high-school Mathematics) is the product of more than two thousand years of struggle and groping by the best minds of their generation. Don't be surprised if you're not smart enough to hoist it all aboard without effort, and don't be disappointed if the stuff that's causing you trouble to learn is almost no different (apart from choice of subject matter) from the stuff that caused your grandfather trouble to learn. And unless humanity does something drastic to its brains, your grandchildren will have precisely the same trouble learning the same stuff as you do. That's not failure, that's normal.
This is because there is nothing that separates any of us from the level the Middle Ages, except for a mountain of accumulated knowledge and skills (e.g. the Scientific Method). Knowledge and skills that we learned about in school, through books, and nowadays through multimedia.
Soviet-era Mathematics shone for the same reason that Soviet-era ballet and musicians were such superb performers: it demanded (and got) extremely levels of dedication. Such focus actually *hurts*, so people in general don't do it (people aren't masochists). The people who do tend to do so either because e.g. it's their only clear ticket out of abject poverty (contemporary China or India), or their only chance to improve a life that would otherwise be without perspective life (the Soviet Union again).
If anything the US is lagging because people have it so good and because society as a whole values easy short-term results rather than hard-won long-term ones.
I believe that there is something about the fabric of US society that makes it more natural and attractive to join a gang and to goof off than to go to school, study, a