Actually most studies have shown that hunter-gatherer societies have a lot more leisure time than industrial or agrarian societies. On average, they might spend 2-4 hours per day procuring food, compared to 12 or more hours per day in an agrarian society, or 6-10 in an industrial society. Instead, there are a couple things that one should consider. First, look at the line plotted by an exponential curve. It starts very flat, then rises very quickly. Assuming that "progress" (however you measure it) is an exponential phenomenon, it would make sense that things would appear to be progressing faster now than 100 years ago, and that things 100 years ago would be progressing faster than things 1000 years ago, and so on.
Secondly, consider the size of group sustainable by hunting and gathering. You simply cannot sustain the same population density hunting and gathering that you can with agriculture. Generally speaking, hunter-gatherers are quite mobile. Here, in the Great Basin, there might have been as few as 10 people per 100 square miles. In other parts of the world, where resources are more plentiful, densities might have been higher, but still not to the level of an agrarian society. Without high population densities, you are going to have less communication, and fewer people to collaborate on large projects.
Furthermore, and here is the kicker, everyone in a hunter-gatherer level society needs to be a generalist. All of the men hunt. All of the women gather. The children help where they can. Each person is basically the same as another. Once horticulture and agriculture begin to develop, people are able to settle down more (thus, food stores can be laid in more easily), higher population densities can be maintained, and individuals can start working on something other pure subsistance activities. It is craft specialization that allows technology to progress.
You know, I thought that prefacing the comment by noting that it was an email that ran around in circles was enough to let people know that this was meant to be funny, not true. Perhaps it was just too subtle for you.
This email goes around archaeological circles every once in a while (I'm sure it goes around other circles, too), and I just got a new copy of it from my uncle yesterday, so it seems as good a time as any to share:
People are always asking why we do things the way we do. Well, here is
the reason: railroad tracks.
The US standard railroad gauge (distance between the rails) is 4 feet,
8.5 inches. That's an exceedingly odd number.
Why was that gauge used? Because that's the way they built them in
England, and English expatriates designed the US railroads.
Why did the English build them like that? Because the first rail lines
were built by the same people who built the pre-railroad tramways, and
that's the gauge they used.
Why did 'they' use that gauge? Because the people who built the
tramways used the same jigs and tools that they had used for building
wagons, which used that wheel spacing.
Why did the wagons have that particular odd wheel spacing? Well, if they
tried to use any other spacing, the wagon wheels would break on some of
the old, long distance roads in England because that's the spacing of
the wheel ruts.
So, who built those old rutted roads? Imperial Rome built the first long
distance roads in Europe (including England) for the legions. Those
roads have been used ever since.
And the ruts in the roads? Roman war chariots formed the initial ruts,
which everyone else had to match for fear of destroying their wagon
wheels. Since the chariots were made for Imperial Rome, they all had the
same wheel spacing. Therefore, the United States' standard railroad
gauge of 4 feet, 8.5 inches is derived from the original specifications
for an Imperial Roman war chariot. Bureaucracies live forever.
So, the next time you are handed a specification/procedure/process and
wonder 'What horse's ass came up with this?' you may be exactly right.
Imperial Roman army chariots were made just wide enough to accommodate
the rear ends of two war horses (two horses' asses). Now, the twist to
the story.
When you see a Space Shuttle sitting on its launch pad, there are two big
booster rockets attached to the sides of the main fuel tank. These are
solid rocket boosters, or SRBs. The SRBs are made by Thiokol at their
factory in Utah. The engineers who designed the SRBs would have preferred
to make them a bit fatter, but the SRBs had to be shipped by train from
the factory to the launch site. The railroad line from the factory
happens to run through a tunnel in the mountains, and the SRBs had to fit
through that tunnel. The tunnel is slightly wider than the railroad
track and the railroad track, as you now know, is about as wide as two
horses' behinds.
So, a major Space Shuttle design feature of what is arguably the world's
most advanced transportation system was determined over two thousand
years ago by the width of a horse's ass. And you thought being a horse's
ass wasn't important? Ancient horse's asses control lots of things...
AND CURRENT HORSES' ASSES NOW ARE ARE CONTROLLING NEARLY EVERYTHING ELSE.
Too little water and you die of dehydration. Too much water, and you drown. Is water a good thing or a bad thing?
Perhaps the implication is that a city needs to have the occasional professional sports championship in order to be a good place to live, but that if it racks up too many championships, it becomes unlivable again. I have far less trouble with this assertion than I do with understanding why professional sports matter at all vis-a-vis the quality of a work location.
When referring to Office, I was actually thinking about some of the earlier versions, and comparing them to OpenOffice. My impression is that OO tries to duplicate the feature-set of, say, Word, and often does so in a haphazard kind of way. With regards to Vista, I don't know entirely what I was thinking.;)
Bear with me for a moment: where do elephants pack their cloths when they go on vacation? In their trunks, of course. Now, this is a joke that you or I get right away. There is a pun involved, i.e. the two meanings of the word "trunk," and the ambiguity of the context provided by the elephants. Now, tell this joke to the average 7 or 8 year old, and watch them as they repeat it to other children. It is quite likely that they will tell it incorrectly, leading to a joke that doesn't make sense (i.e. they might replace "trunk" with "suitcase," or forget that elephants are involved). They understand that the joke is supposed to be funny (people laughed when it was told, so it must be funny), but they don't really understand why it is funny, because they don't really get the pun.
I think that they same might be true of many developers. They see UI elements in software like Mac OS X, Vista, MS Office, or other programs, and understand that these elements must be important. However, they don't really get why they are important, so when they clone them into their own projects, they come out misshapen and not quite right. They clearly understand that the element is useful, and that people want it, but without understanding why it is useful, or why people want it, they end up with something that doesn't make sense.
See, perhaps that is the difference. I read Hubbard after reading Verne, LeGuin, and Bradbury. These authors are comfortable with ambiguities between good and evil, and are willing to write stories without clear heroes and villains. Moreover, both Bradbury and LeGuin are masters of the English language, writing prose that is both accessible, yet still extremely well crafted. Compared to such luminaries, Hubbard is a hack, more in the league of (and I know this is going to offend someone here) Stephen King.
If, on the other hand, I am looking for popcorn and adventure, I far prefer the stories of Burroughs or Heinlein (and I know that lumping Heinlein in with Burroughs is going to offend someone else). These authors write great adventures, and (for the most part, in Heinlein's case, especially when considering his young adult work) avoid preachiness. Even then, they write popcorn that is literate and fun to read, unlike Hubbard, whose prose sounds as though it were written by a 7th grader in lit class.
As to Star Wars, I am not really a fan, for exactly the reasons you outline.
You are confusing mathematics with arithmetic. Arithmetic is the manipulation of digits that are used to represent numbers in order to get a result. That is, addition, subtraction, multiplication, etc. In arithmetic, it is important to "show your work" in that it helps an instructor to understand what you have done, and where you might have made mistakes. Arithmetic is a subfield of mathematics, but does not comprise the whole. Mathematics, on the other hand, is the search for a certain kind of "truth." In mathematics, we start with a set of assumptions about how the universe works (we call these axioms), then use logic to work out what those axioms imply. A proof consists of the details of the logical process used to work out new truths.
First off, technology != science. That covers about half of your examples. Second, most of the rest of those examples are really not appropriate for an introductory level science class. High school science is about (or, at least, should be about) introducing students to the scientific method, and a scientific way of thinking, as well as giving students the basic background that they will need in specific areas so that when and if they go on to college, they have some basic understanding to build from. Dark matter has no bearing on the Newtonian physics experiments conducted in high school. Bleeding edge face transplants have no bearing on the frog dissections of high school biology. These are trivia. Yes, they are interesting. Yes, such trivia might pique some students' interest. However, they are not the part of the core of the curriculum, and 10 year old books also have interesting trivia.
Finally, you seem to be assuming that I would like to teach out of an 18th century text. I don't think I ever suggested that. Rather, I suggested that a 10 year old text is quite fine. You are arguing against a straw man. The language does not change that much in 10 years, and neither does the material covered in a high school classroom.
I think perhaps you and several other posters have misunderstood what I said. I never suggested that we should still be using 100 year old textbooks. I have many such texts (I like old books, especially text books, and have a small collection of them, though I admit that most of them are at more of a college level), and certainly would never want to inflict them upon my students. My point was not that we should be using 100 year old texts, but rather that things don't change that quickly, and a 10 year old text would be quite alright. Honestly, very little has changed in the last 10 years with regards to how mathematics is taught in the high school classroom. Look at a 10 year old text, and you will still see sections on using calculators, and biographies of important mathematicians (minorities and women included). These sections might be different from a modern text, and may be less substantial, but they will still be there.
Then, compare the 10 year old book to a 20 year old book. Again, there will be minor differences, but they will be mostly the same. Generally speaking, textbooks evolve over time. Compare this year's book to a 100 year old book, and you are going to see thousands of accumulated changes to pedagogy, material, and additional content. But these changes happen incrementally, and are less obvious and less important over a 10 year time span.
Again, I am responding primarily to the argument that having yearly revisions would be a blessing. I mean, who wouldn't want up-to-the-minute material? However, I tend to think it would be more of a curse. On the pro side, we have better updated material, which I have asserted doesn't really matter, as the material does not change that quickly. On the con side, there are all of the problems associated with new revisions, such as new course preparations, and an issue that I haven't even gotten into above, namely the typos and incorrect math that appear in new revisions (every new revision tends to include new problems; many of these new problems contain typographical errors that render the solution or the problem incorrect; while errata exist, it takes time to build them up, or to make notes in one's own copy of the text).
I have never once said that we should not buy new books from time to time. Rather, I just don't see what the point of updating texts every year is. From my perspective, it is likely to cause more problems that it solves.
Hawaii was admitted as a state in August of 1959. That is more than 49.5 years ago, thus close enough to 50 as to make no nevermind. I chose to use 50 years rather than 49 because it is a nicer number. I like zeros.;)
If I were teaching in 1960, I would be perfectly happy with a 5-10 year old civics text. Things would be substantially the same, and I could very easily point out in my lectures that some details had changed (i.e. that Hawaii and Alaska had become states). One doesn't throw out an entire book because one paragraph is incorrect.
My marine science textbook had one of those "by the way..." sections dedicated to pointing out why the giant squid, as in those things we now classify as larger than normal squid but smaller than colossal squid, was a myth and could not possibly exist.
Sometimes, things like that do need to be updated. However, that is one piece of information in a whole book, and it is trivia at that (i.e. it is not part of the core knowledge that one is supposed to get from the book). During the next update cycle, a book that does not include that bit of trivia can be selected. In the meantime, a well-informed (i.e. good) teacher will use that section as a "teachable moment," and a bad teacher will continue to be a bad teacher, and either teach it as fact or ignore it. Again, I really don't see the need to be constantly updating textbooks at the high school level.
Discounting age problems, consider weight. Not everyone has a locker, not everyone has enough time to get to their locker, and not everyone can safely use a locker (one razorblade from a pencil sharpener tossed through the vent and you're zero tolerance food).
You have brought up two objections here. The first is that books are heavy, and the second is that lockers aren't always available or useable.
Yes, books are heavy, and I think that a lot of instructors rely too much on students having their books with them at all times. There are several possible solutions. First, books stay in the classroom. In districts where funding is short, this is often what happens, so that several sections of one class can all use the same textbooks. The easily solves the weight problem, as students are not required to take books with them (in fact, they are actively discouraged). This may make homework harder to complete, as the student doesn't have a reference to work from, but students can stay after school, come in early, or make use of allocated study time.
It is also possible to hand out textbooks at the beginning of the semester, and have students keep those at home. Then, during class, an instructor can lecture from a book that is projected for the class (in my district, most high school classrooms have ELMOs), or an extra set of books can be kept in the classroom. This probably more directly addresses the problem of weight, because that problem automatically assumes that every student has a copy of the text.
Conveniently enough, these also address the problem of locker access, though I think that students complaining about getting to their lockers is more of an excuse than a real problem in most schools. Perhaps in some very large inner-city schools, it is a problem, but there are no schools in my area where the 5 minute pass time is insufficient for getting from one class to another with time left over to his one's locker. And, before you complain that I don't know what I'm talking about, I have take a stopwatch and timed how long it takes for me to get from one end of campus to another when the halls are full of students. There is plenty of time.
If you get books once in a decade wouldn't it be nice to be able to have a new book every year?
Not particularly. Mathematics at the high school level has not changed much in the last 100 years. New books serve basically two purposes: they include new pedagogical ideas (sometimes good, sometimes bad), and they contain new problem sets. In terms of pedagogy, I can get the same information by attending in-service and university classes. That is cheaper for the school, and has the added benefit of making me a better teacher. In terms of problem sets, I can always write my own, or get problems from one of several problem banks on the internet.
Instead paying $100+ per book that becomes out dated in 2 years and isn't replaced in 10 years you spend ~$10/year on a new book handed to each student at the beginning of the year?
High school texts don't go out of date in 2 years. As I said above, mathematics at the high school level hasn't really changed much in the last century. English is still English, and there is little call to update texts every year. History is still moving on, and one might claim that yearly updates could be useful, but a ten year cycle isn't that bad, either. It is going to take something like a decade for historical ideas to pass through enough peer review to become consensus, and make it into textbooks, anyway, and more recent events will be within the memories of the students themselves, and my need less teaching and/or analysis. Civics are pretty much unchanged over the past 50 years, if not more (there are still two houses in congress, 50 states, and presidential elections every four years). Even the sciences don't change that much at a high school level. Newton's approach is still good for physics, and there is not really any cutting edge biology or chemistry going on at the high school level.
On top of that, it takes time for an instructor to get used to a new text. I would hate to be teaching out of a new text every year. I don't know if you have ever had to prepare a class, but there is a lot of work involved. If one is familiar with the text that one is teaching out of, it is much easier to prepare.
So, in short, no. No, I would not like to be teaching out of a new text every year. It might not be that bad to teach out of new editions of the same text every year, but even that seems unnecessary
I would be really curious to know where you went to high school, and how your school was able to afford new editions every year. Where I teach, we are lucky to get new math books once in a decade. We might get some NCLB money to buy new books next year to replace our five year old texts, but we aren't counting on it.
...important archaeological sites? I mean, what if they upset Viking? or interfere with either of the two NASA probes that are already up there and working? That would be AWFUL! WON'T SOMEONE PLEASE THINK OF THE CHILDREN!
Nitpick: The Anasazi generally did not live in the Grand Canyon area---they were farther to the east, in the four corners region. There may have been some Sinagua presence near the Grand Canyon, but even then the area is not really suitable for agriculture or horticulture, and most of the Sinagua were farther to the east.
Slashdot Mirror
That's exactly what a terrorist would say to throw suspicion on someone else! O_o
You mean, something like this? And, before you ask, this one is pretty nifty, too.
No you aren't. :(
Actually most studies have shown that hunter-gatherer societies have a lot more leisure time than industrial or agrarian societies. On average, they might spend 2-4 hours per day procuring food, compared to 12 or more hours per day in an agrarian society, or 6-10 in an industrial society. Instead, there are a couple things that one should consider. First, look at the line plotted by an exponential curve. It starts very flat, then rises very quickly. Assuming that "progress" (however you measure it) is an exponential phenomenon, it would make sense that things would appear to be progressing faster now than 100 years ago, and that things 100 years ago would be progressing faster than things 1000 years ago, and so on.
Secondly, consider the size of group sustainable by hunting and gathering. You simply cannot sustain the same population density hunting and gathering that you can with agriculture. Generally speaking, hunter-gatherers are quite mobile. Here, in the Great Basin, there might have been as few as 10 people per 100 square miles. In other parts of the world, where resources are more plentiful, densities might have been higher, but still not to the level of an agrarian society. Without high population densities, you are going to have less communication, and fewer people to collaborate on large projects.
Furthermore, and here is the kicker, everyone in a hunter-gatherer level society needs to be a generalist. All of the men hunt. All of the women gather. The children help where they can. Each person is basically the same as another. Once horticulture and agriculture begin to develop, people are able to settle down more (thus, food stores can be laid in more easily), higher population densities can be maintained, and individuals can start working on something other pure subsistance activities. It is craft specialization that allows technology to progress.
I would be quite happy to "foot the bill" by having my tax dollars go towards metricification. Or is that not what you meant?
You know, I thought that prefacing the comment by noting that it was an email that ran around in circles was enough to let people know that this was meant to be funny, not true. Perhaps it was just too subtle for you.
Too little water and you die of dehydration. Too much water, and you drown. Is water a good thing or a bad thing?
Perhaps the implication is that a city needs to have the occasional professional sports championship in order to be a good place to live, but that if it racks up too many championships, it becomes unlivable again. I have far less trouble with this assertion than I do with understanding why professional sports matter at all vis-a-vis the quality of a work location.
When referring to Office, I was actually thinking about some of the earlier versions, and comparing them to OpenOffice. My impression is that OO tries to duplicate the feature-set of, say, Word, and often does so in a haphazard kind of way. With regards to Vista, I don't know entirely what I was thinking. ;)
Honestly, I think that is part of the problem.
Bear with me for a moment: where do elephants pack their cloths when they go on vacation? In their trunks, of course. Now, this is a joke that you or I get right away. There is a pun involved, i.e. the two meanings of the word "trunk," and the ambiguity of the context provided by the elephants. Now, tell this joke to the average 7 or 8 year old, and watch them as they repeat it to other children. It is quite likely that they will tell it incorrectly, leading to a joke that doesn't make sense (i.e. they might replace "trunk" with "suitcase," or forget that elephants are involved). They understand that the joke is supposed to be funny (people laughed when it was told, so it must be funny), but they don't really understand why it is funny, because they don't really get the pun.
I think that they same might be true of many developers. They see UI elements in software like Mac OS X, Vista, MS Office, or other programs, and understand that these elements must be important. However, they don't really get why they are important, so when they clone them into their own projects, they come out misshapen and not quite right. They clearly understand that the element is useful, and that people want it, but without understanding why it is useful, or why people want it, they end up with something that doesn't make sense.
See, perhaps that is the difference. I read Hubbard after reading Verne, LeGuin, and Bradbury. These authors are comfortable with ambiguities between good and evil, and are willing to write stories without clear heroes and villains. Moreover, both Bradbury and LeGuin are masters of the English language, writing prose that is both accessible, yet still extremely well crafted. Compared to such luminaries, Hubbard is a hack, more in the league of (and I know this is going to offend someone here) Stephen King.
If, on the other hand, I am looking for popcorn and adventure, I far prefer the stories of Burroughs or Heinlein (and I know that lumping Heinlein in with Burroughs is going to offend someone else). These authors write great adventures, and (for the most part, in Heinlein's case, especially when considering his young adult work) avoid preachiness. Even then, they write popcorn that is literate and fun to read, unlike Hubbard, whose prose sounds as though it were written by a 7th grader in lit class.
As to Star Wars, I am not really a fan, for exactly the reasons you outline.
I read a few of his books when I was younger, before I had ever heard the word "scientology." I thought they were awful.
You are confusing mathematics with arithmetic. Arithmetic is the manipulation of digits that are used to represent numbers in order to get a result. That is, addition, subtraction, multiplication, etc. In arithmetic, it is important to "show your work" in that it helps an instructor to understand what you have done, and where you might have made mistakes. Arithmetic is a subfield of mathematics, but does not comprise the whole. Mathematics, on the other hand, is the search for a certain kind of "truth." In mathematics, we start with a set of assumptions about how the universe works (we call these axioms), then use logic to work out what those axioms imply. A proof consists of the details of the logical process used to work out new truths.
You might want to have a look through the articles on Wikipedia about logic, predicate-logic, and mathematical proofs.
Yeah... because it is impossible for an intelligent person to have an opinion different from your own...
First off, technology != science. That covers about half of your examples. Second, most of the rest of those examples are really not appropriate for an introductory level science class. High school science is about (or, at least, should be about) introducing students to the scientific method, and a scientific way of thinking, as well as giving students the basic background that they will need in specific areas so that when and if they go on to college, they have some basic understanding to build from. Dark matter has no bearing on the Newtonian physics experiments conducted in high school. Bleeding edge face transplants have no bearing on the frog dissections of high school biology. These are trivia. Yes, they are interesting. Yes, such trivia might pique some students' interest. However, they are not the part of the core of the curriculum, and 10 year old books also have interesting trivia.
Finally, you seem to be assuming that I would like to teach out of an 18th century text. I don't think I ever suggested that. Rather, I suggested that a 10 year old text is quite fine. You are arguing against a straw man. The language does not change that much in 10 years, and neither does the material covered in a high school classroom.
I think perhaps you and several other posters have misunderstood what I said. I never suggested that we should still be using 100 year old textbooks. I have many such texts (I like old books, especially text books, and have a small collection of them, though I admit that most of them are at more of a college level), and certainly would never want to inflict them upon my students. My point was not that we should be using 100 year old texts, but rather that things don't change that quickly, and a 10 year old text would be quite alright. Honestly, very little has changed in the last 10 years with regards to how mathematics is taught in the high school classroom. Look at a 10 year old text, and you will still see sections on using calculators, and biographies of important mathematicians (minorities and women included). These sections might be different from a modern text, and may be less substantial, but they will still be there.
Then, compare the 10 year old book to a 20 year old book. Again, there will be minor differences, but they will be mostly the same. Generally speaking, textbooks evolve over time. Compare this year's book to a 100 year old book, and you are going to see thousands of accumulated changes to pedagogy, material, and additional content. But these changes happen incrementally, and are less obvious and less important over a 10 year time span.
Again, I am responding primarily to the argument that having yearly revisions would be a blessing. I mean, who wouldn't want up-to-the-minute material? However, I tend to think it would be more of a curse. On the pro side, we have better updated material, which I have asserted doesn't really matter, as the material does not change that quickly. On the con side, there are all of the problems associated with new revisions, such as new course preparations, and an issue that I haven't even gotten into above, namely the typos and incorrect math that appear in new revisions (every new revision tends to include new problems; many of these new problems contain typographical errors that render the solution or the problem incorrect; while errata exist, it takes time to build them up, or to make notes in one's own copy of the text).
I have never once said that we should not buy new books from time to time. Rather, I just don't see what the point of updating texts every year is. From my perspective, it is likely to cause more problems that it solves.
Lion King was Hamlet, whether or not they stole the character design and name from Japan.
Sometimes, things like that do need to be updated. However, that is one piece of information in a whole book, and it is trivia at that (i.e. it is not part of the core knowledge that one is supposed to get from the book). During the next update cycle, a book that does not include that bit of trivia can be selected. In the meantime, a well-informed (i.e. good) teacher will use that section as a "teachable moment," and a bad teacher will continue to be a bad teacher, and either teach it as fact or ignore it. Again, I really don't see the need to be constantly updating textbooks at the high school level.
You have brought up two objections here. The first is that books are heavy, and the second is that lockers aren't always available or useable.
Yes, books are heavy, and I think that a lot of instructors rely too much on students having their books with them at all times. There are several possible solutions. First, books stay in the classroom. In districts where funding is short, this is often what happens, so that several sections of one class can all use the same textbooks. The easily solves the weight problem, as students are not required to take books with them (in fact, they are actively discouraged). This may make homework harder to complete, as the student doesn't have a reference to work from, but students can stay after school, come in early, or make use of allocated study time.
It is also possible to hand out textbooks at the beginning of the semester, and have students keep those at home. Then, during class, an instructor can lecture from a book that is projected for the class (in my district, most high school classrooms have ELMOs), or an extra set of books can be kept in the classroom. This probably more directly addresses the problem of weight, because that problem automatically assumes that every student has a copy of the text.
Conveniently enough, these also address the problem of locker access, though I think that students complaining about getting to their lockers is more of an excuse than a real problem in most schools. Perhaps in some very large inner-city schools, it is a problem, but there are no schools in my area where the 5 minute pass time is insufficient for getting from one class to another with time left over to his one's locker. And, before you complain that I don't know what I'm talking about, I have take a stopwatch and timed how long it takes for me to get from one end of campus to another when the halls are full of students. There is plenty of time.
Not particularly. Mathematics at the high school level has not changed much in the last 100 years. New books serve basically two purposes: they include new pedagogical ideas (sometimes good, sometimes bad), and they contain new problem sets. In terms of pedagogy, I can get the same information by attending in-service and university classes. That is cheaper for the school, and has the added benefit of making me a better teacher. In terms of problem sets, I can always write my own, or get problems from one of several problem banks on the internet.
High school texts don't go out of date in 2 years. As I said above, mathematics at the high school level hasn't really changed much in the last century. English is still English, and there is little call to update texts every year. History is still moving on, and one might claim that yearly updates could be useful, but a ten year cycle isn't that bad, either. It is going to take something like a decade for historical ideas to pass through enough peer review to become consensus, and make it into textbooks, anyway, and more recent events will be within the memories of the students themselves, and my need less teaching and/or analysis. Civics are pretty much unchanged over the past 50 years, if not more (there are still two houses in congress, 50 states, and presidential elections every four years). Even the sciences don't change that much at a high school level. Newton's approach is still good for physics, and there is not really any cutting edge biology or chemistry going on at the high school level.
On top of that, it takes time for an instructor to get used to a new text. I would hate to be teaching out of a new text every year. I don't know if you have ever had to prepare a class, but there is a lot of work involved. If one is familiar with the text that one is teaching out of, it is much easier to prepare.
So, in short, no. No, I would not like to be teaching out of a new text every year. It might not be that bad to teach out of new editions of the same text every year, but even that seems unnecessary
I would be really curious to know where you went to high school, and how your school was able to afford new editions every year. Where I teach, we are lucky to get new math books once in a decade. We might get some NCLB money to buy new books next year to replace our five year old texts, but we aren't counting on it.
Internet Rule #34: If it exists, there is porn of it. No exceptions.
Though I hesitate to even consider what Google on free software porn looks like...
...important archaeological sites? I mean, what if they upset Viking? or interfere with either of the two NASA probes that are already up there and working? That would be AWFUL! WON'T SOMEONE PLEASE THINK OF THE CHILDREN!
Mmm... Slashvertising. How tasty!
Nitpick: The Anasazi generally did not live in the Grand Canyon area---they were farther to the east, in the four corners region. There may have been some Sinagua presence near the Grand Canyon, but even then the area is not really suitable for agriculture or horticulture, and most of the Sinagua were farther to the east.