Math Textbooks a Textbook Example of Bad Textbooks 446
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?"
This applies to ALL textbooks (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Rushing?! For What?! (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Rushing?! For What?! (Score:5, Insightful)
+1.
There is absolutely no need for the textbooks to be revisioned as often as they are. Each year students are forced to purchase a new presentation of the same subject and material that has been available and defined for decades. I mean really, is there any NEW Calculus 101 research being done within the last 3 decades? Publishers ensure a new purchase every year by revisioning their books with no value updates. I think it amounts to industry abuse.
The problem is made worse by the rapid evolution of supporting software, hardware, and the operating systems they run on. I can't wait until our computer tools mature enough to be as least as stable, reliable, and long-lived to last through a four-year degree course without putting the user at a disadvantage near the end of the degree.
Re:T'was ever thus (Score:2, Insightful)
capitalism fail.
Re:This is a definitely a real problem, but... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:It's not just the textbooks (Score:5, Insightful)
The reason to keep reinventing the wheel is because reinventing the wheel costs lots of money.
The monopolistic nature of the public education system means that customer demands - the parents - can be ignored. So, we've got a textbook industry that can ignore cost and can ignore efficacy, since their customer is the school district, but can't ignore political fads.
If you want textbooks to get relentlessly better and relentlessly cheaper then the people who are urgently concerned about the safety and effective education of the kids - parents - have to assume direct control over education.
That's in the process of happening with the spread of charter schools, vouchers, parental trigger and tax credits but we're only just now getting to the point that those changes are starting to impact education. But another two to three years should see the monopolistic complacency of the public education system shattered as the nature of public education, and the costs of that nature, are more widely understood as they stand in contrast to the alternatives.
Re:It's not just the textbooks (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Rushing?! For What?! (Score:4, Insightful)
Fair enough, but educational techniques *have* been changing
Well, if you look at the trend in math, it's pretty clear that the changes have just made math education worse. Maybe what we need to do rather than create new texts and new techniques that don't work is resurrect older techniques and older textbooks that actually seemed to educate.
Re:It's not just the textbooks (Score:4, Insightful)
"Capitalism simply does not deliver good education."
Where exactly is the capitalism in the current education system? Money flows are so disconnected from the ultimate consumers (students), that there exist hardly any market signals.
Re:A Nation of Retards (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:It's not just the textbooks (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually, it has. A couple years ago my high-school aged son was stuck on a math problem: Plot a linear approximation through a set of points. I didn't remember the exact technique so I looked it up in his textbook. "Step 1: Enter the points into a graphing calculator. Step 2: Press the 'linear regression' button."
For better or worse, computers and powerful calculators are part of the curriculum. My younger son's Algebra 1 book has frequent "Spreadsheet Activity" and "Graphing Calculator Activity" sidebars.
Insert generic "In my day..." rant here. You could borrow the one used by my parents when my generation got to use 4-function calculators, or the one used by their parents when they got to use slide rules.
Re:It's not just the textbooks (Score:5, Insightful)
The textbook providers are capitalist enterprises. The article correctly points out that their incentives are to do whatever it takes to sell books, not to provide the best possible books.
The fact that this even affects MATH texts indicates how pervasive and corrupting the process is. Unlike history and science, there is no need for the content to change from decade to decade. We could have optimized math texts long ago.
Re:How about no textbook at all? (Score:4, Insightful)
I agree that it's best to teach the children first how to multiplication table came to be, however memorising it still has a very real value, otherwise you'll multiply so slow that it'll unfeasible while shopping.
Re:It's not just the textbooks (Score:4, Insightful)
Lobbying is a feature of fascism (corporations petitioning powerful governments to do their will by interfering with the market in some way).
Political corruption always exists. The extent to which it effects the people is the same as the extent to which government is allowed to interfere in the markets and in people's private lives.
Saying that capitalism devolves into fascism is like saying that a clean room devolved into a dirty one. You thus imply the absurd conclusion that in order to keep your room from becoming dirty, you should refrain from cleaning it.
Thanks for lining out your crappy argument in such a concise manner. Made it very easy to knock down.
Re:It's not just the textbooks (Score:4, Insightful)
This is in part because every university has its own programme arrangement, meaning the greatest textbook ever from some other university will only cover half of what is to be covered in your course, or it will cover something in a confusing way.
At highschool and lower this doesn't need to happen. Everyone, or nearly everyone should be on the same national curriculum, with the same textbooks. That will never happen in some countries though (like the US). You can even leave some of the day/week/month to 'teacher time' where they decide what to cover.
Unless it's a big class you don't get enough in royalties per book for that to be a particularly good plan. And if it is a big enough class it's important that the textbook fits with whatever the broader strategy of the university is, since you're training a huge portion of the student body with it.