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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.
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
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.
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.