The sad state of school textbooks

[pokerfan]

In 1964 the eminent physicist Richard Feynman served on the State of California's Curriculum Commission and saw how the Commission chose math textbooks for use in California's public schools. In his acerbic memoir of that experience, titled "Judging Books by Their Covers," Feynman analyzed the Commission's idiotic method of evaluating books, and he described some of the tactics employed by schoolbook salesmen who wanted the Commission to adopt their shoddy products. "Judging Books by Their Covers" appeared as a chapter in "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!" -- Feynman's autobiographical book that was published in 1985 by W.W. Norton & Company.

http://www.textbookleague.org/103feyn.htm

[roody]

1. It is a racket. Signed, primary teacher

[AwakeAtLast]

2. The best steak dinner gets chosen

signed by another primary teacher. :D

[exboyfil]

3. With all the money spent by California on textbooks

why don't they go to some sort of open source model with textbooks developed by their own education employees (such as state Professors). Actually this could apply nationally just as well (program run by the Department of Education).

What I would like to see are packets by subject matter. If you look at math textbooks from grade to grade, it is amazing how much material is repeat (6th-8th use practically the same textbook). These packets could be placed into three ring binders, and, if a page is lost, then easily replaced with a printer.

One online entry is http://www.opensourcetext.org/

According to this website California pays $400M/yr for textbooks in 2002. It does not look like this project is very active. One textbook has been developed.

I would like to see the packet approach to reduce the shear volume and mass of the textbooks being hauled by the kids. These are very heavy books, and, if you are hauling five academic subjects you are carrying up to 25 lbs.

[mopinko]

4. the weight alone is nuts.

and they wonder why kids don't do their homework.
i await the school where they use their laptops, and read actual actual books. like the ones they actually want to read.

[gtar100]

5. You are so right. Open source text books would solve this issue.

There are already some great books and online learning sources available to the public. But is there sufficient information to cover a full curriculum for all grades and subjects? I think California is onto something. Here's some examples I've found:

• Physics: http://www.motionmountain.net/index.html

• Math: http://www.math.com/ or http://www.purplemath.com/

• Introductory programming: http://www.htdp.org

• MIT has put a great deal of its resources online: http://ocw.mit.edu/index.html

An organized effort to make use of all this and to take fullest advantage of it in classrooms would be a noble effort. I hope that one day this will be the demise of the shoddy textbook industry which is yet another shining example of American capitalism at its worst.

[joshcryer]

6. It's going to happen sooner or later (probably sooner). The people will demand it.

I don't see the whole textbook racket lasting more than 5 years. I actually wouldn't be surprised if it failed in 2 (Eben Moglen thinks that we'll have a textbook scanning and sharing revolution in 2010 in fact).

[exboyfil]

8. I really would not call it capitalism

Once you decide to nationalize something (education in this case), then the only logical thing to do is to operate it as efficiently as you possibly can. As the Feynman article shows, you have a whole lot of other things besides the interest of the students or the taxpayers going on. I have never considered the text book industry as an example of free market capitalism. It is one of many examples of crony capitalism.

I am simply amazed at my daughter's Algebra textbook. At 5 pounds it is almost as heavy as my three semester Calculus book from college (which is about a pound heavier than my older colleagues book from 15 years before).

[one_true_leroy]

17. Motion Mountain is really good, especially for free!

I used it to help review freshman physics before grad school, and I really liked its tone and content.

[joshcryer]

7. You (and others here) may be interested in this speech by Eben Moglen:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tbcy_ZxXLl8

http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Free_and_Open_Software:_Paradigm_for_a_New_Intellectual_Commons

He talks about how, in 2010 and beyond, students are going to emancipate their books with book scanners and share them via USB sticks.

[exboyfil]

9. Next step will be the book will be charged with the tuition at the

college level. $40 to access the book online will be my guess. A printed copy is more.

[joshcryer]

14. Yeah, but not sure they can make it compulsary. You can still opt not to buy the $40 ebook.

And then, you can always just get a copy of the ebook from a friend who already acquired it. Should last a semester or two. Basically the evolution of eduction in our information age is preventing them from being able to profit from raw information.

[struggle4progress]

10. School textbooks have often been sorry things -- but Feynman's essay is wrong on a number of points

He's right, of course, about the idiocy and incompetence of the boards that make such decisions, about improper influence, and so on. And of course he's right about the many content errors and the nonsense

But various comments here and there are mind-blowingly wrong. Consider, for example, Feynman's "Translating from one base to another is an utterly useless thing." It is entirely astonishing that a well-informed physicist could have made such a comment in the early sixties, as the computer revolution began

[redqueen]

11. Somehow I don't find it so astonishing.

Not coming from him.

[PVnRT]

12. It may be important for some (programmers, electrical engineers)

but for the vast majority of people, even those going into technical fields, it's trivia at best. We spent a week converting between base 10 and binary/hex for an elements of electrical engineering class after eight weeks of circuit analysis - far more useful would have been transformers and power transmission. I have yet to apply anything learned in that week.

[struggle4progress]

13. One purpose of elementary education is to provide understanding of basic concepts

and for that purpose there is really no substitute for hand-calculation. In many places hand arithmetic has disappeared, with the cry The students do not need it, with the observation they all have calculators. But I taught mathematics classes at a university for many years, and the students who arrived with no real mastery of hand arithmetic usually had enormous difficulty with algebra: I have, for example, seen students reach for calculators to perform such calculations as 0 x 25 or 1 x 36 or 10 x 100. An understanding of the base systems will later help students better understand topics like polynomial multiplication or logarithms

I once had a wonderful electronic reverse Polish notation hand calculator. It was a reasonably early model, and I used it extensively with much pleasure for many years. But eventually, it began to provide answers that did not make numerical sense: its circuits were failing. If I had not been in the habit of asking myself what sort of answer I expected, I would not have noticed there was anything wrong. I have encountered many students not in the habit of asking such questions, and they will be completely oblivious when their answers are nonsensical: I once had a student (asked to estimate the speed at which hair grows, in mph) turn to his calculator and cluelessly report back an estimate of half a mile an hour; that student had not been well-served by his elementary education

To produce a solid conceptual understanding in a young mind, one must provide more than one avenue to the concept. Students will never need ancient Egyptian arithmetic itself, but by teaching a bit about it, one can help solidify a number of other concepts. For example, the ancient Egyptian multiplication and division are closely related to the so-called "Russian peasant's algorithm," which is closely related to binary arithmetic

If one does not understand the base systems well, one cannot even answer simple clock questions such as What time is 2:40:15 before 11:25:00? or How many seconds is 3:04:05? The proper thing to do, of course, is to make students learn an honest bit of ancient Babylonian math

I have used hexadecimal arithmetic to debug C code (which does not check for array out-of-bounds errors): since nothing deeper than an elementary school understanding is required, I see no reason elementary students should not be exposed to hex and base conversions between hex and binary and decimal. Since all the standard algorithms work the same way, doing a few arcane conversions (convert this from base 5 to base 7, convert that from base 3 to base 4) can only help solidify concepts. Why did the early electronic arithmetic calculators often have a square root key? Look how easy the usual square root algorithm is in binary!

[hunter]

15. Textbooks are crap. Lugging around textbooks sucks.

Give all the kids a reader so they can download open source books.

http://about.ck12.org

[Igel]

16. I pity textbook teachers and evaluators.

Seriously. I'd hate to write a textbook.

I tutored chemistry for some students last spring and found their textbook to be borderline idiotic, but they were having problems with it.

Then there were students who thought the textbook simplistic. It was.

Still, the teacher ignored some things. How do you discuss pH without using logs and ideas such as ? Without having some idea about Kw, and that for water under standard conditions it's 1 x 10E14? Well, we were introduced to pH in maybe 3rd grade. This textbook, for 10th grade chemistry, both explored the idea of Kw (simplistically) and used logs. She had to skip the logarithms because the math program hadn't covered logs yet.

And did it matter? There was AP chemistry the next year for those who wanted it, and a biology-oriented track for those who weren't science-averse. Otherwise, the kids probably wouldn't even take chemistry in college.

I liked the college chemistry text I reviewed with. On the other hand, a lot of it was very, very topical. Intereting now, it'll be of interest primarily to history teachers in 5 years. Do you make it topical and "relevant," meaning you'll replace it in 4-5 years, or do you leave out a lot of the topical stuff and bore kids? Or leave it up to the teachers and parents to motivate kids?

Tough call.