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
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.
....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.