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?"
History too (Score:5, Interesting)
T'was ever thus (Score:5, Interesting)
'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...
Re:History too (Score:5, Interesting)
It's not obligatory reference, but I think it sums it up very nicely: http://xkcd.com/803/ [xkcd.com]. In one episode of myth busters they were making concrete airplanes. Adam made the strangest wing I've ever seen, but I think it could be inspired by such example like in this xkcd strip. And it didn't fly almost at all.
Re:It's not just the textbooks (Score:2, Interesting)
After seeing websites like "khan academy" it may be that textbooks are obsolete. Why keep reinventing the wheel if there are excellent individual lessons available for free online? Clearly the textbook market is turning into a scam because of the disconnect between buyers and sellers.
Perhaps entities accrediting teaching institutions should begin accrediting textbooks - formalizing the process of textbook selection instead of pushing this crucial decision to the lowest levels.
Obligatory Feynman Writing On Textbooks (Score:5, Interesting)
Feynman wrote about the problems with textbooks and textbook selection [textbookleague.org] 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 vs. History (Score:5, Interesting)
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 [washingtonpost.com]
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/13/education/13texas.html [nytimes.com]
Re:It's not just the textbooks (Score:5, Interesting)
Lectures are extremely inefficient. Just use the same textbooks as 30+ years ago. Pre-university mathematics hasn't changed that much.
The correct solution would be, of course, to adopt a more left-wing education model. Soviet mathematics education was excellent, because (i) the USSR was interested in academic success as a vehicle to national technological advancement; (ii) it was not tainted by privatised publishers and exam providers desiring quantity over quality. China is following a not entirely dissimilar model, and they're doing kinda OK. Even France, keeping firm the foundations of its Polytechnique model, laughs in the face of America with the quality of its mathematics curriculum.
Capitalism simply does not deliver good education. There is no profit in a swathe of well-educated people, only the minimum needed to keep remaining consumers in line.
Re:It's not just the textbooks (Score:4, Interesting)
Entire exams [bbc.co.uk] have been ruined by incorrect questions. Apparently, reading and writing is not a hard requirement for being a mathematician.
It has alaways been like that. I can remember back in the 70s we were given a previous year's GCE A-level paper for homework. There was one question that we all decided was impossible. The teacher agreed, but we had one genius in the class (who later got a full scholarship to Cambridge) who said "Sir there is a solution in terms of sets using number theory" and then wrote some stuff up that none of us understood.
How about no textbook at all? (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:It's not just the textbooks (Score:5, Interesting)
Just use the same textbooks as 30+ years ago. Pre-university mathematics hasn't changed that much.
This is really where the open source model should be shining. If you're buying books to 100,000 students, then really you should be buying the copyright, not paying through the nose for each copy. As an author, I'd happily take a $30K up-front payment to write a textbook and hand over the complete writes to the country's education system. Then can then do a big print run initially, and a smaller run each year to replace ones that wear out. If they need to make corrections, they can print errata pages for the existing copies and just fix them in the new edition so when the old ones wear out they're replaced with ones with the fixes. And, of course, since they own the copyright they can give students PDF versions to keep.
Anthro too... (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:This applies to ALL textbooks (Score:5, Interesting)
The solution is simple: use PDFs of public domain textbooks. If you like, order a cheap bound copy of the PDF to be made.
Basic math hasn't changed much in a century, and there are numerous old textbooks out there that are generally proofread better than modern textbooks. I have found the problems are often better structured and designed as well.
Sure, there are minor changes in terminology, which any good teacher can address. But we should do this even just to save the backs of young kids -- those old textbooks are small, short, and therefore light to carry, rather than a 700-page glossy book that weighs 10 pounds (why the heck do we need this for math textbooks?).
When I was in junior high and high school, I picked up a lot of such old textbooks at used book sales for nothing. I think I learned more from them than I did from my actual math classes...
Re:How about no textbook at all? (Score:2, Interesting)
It isn't necessary to learn multiplication tables. They are an utterly useless thing to learn. I never learned them - or more importantly, I never learned them by rote. The critical moment for me was well after I'd muddled through 4th grade and started messing around with BASIC, and thinking about how numbers relate to each other. Once I realized the 9 times table must always just be the 10 times table minus the multiplier, I suddenly found I was able to remember or quickly do all the others since the principle is the same, and more importantly the method was universally helpful: find a simpler problem that's easier to do.
The "math investigations" sound awful, but far too many people get hung up on rote learning multiplication tables as though it magically confers mathematical understanding, whereas it does no such thing, and insistence on it is exactly the type of thing which is to the detriment of actually teaching mathematics.
Re:How about no textbook at all? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:It's not just the textbooks (Score:4, Interesting)
Lectures are extremely inefficient.
Just a quote (I'm in a quoting mood today):
People have now-a-days got a strange opinion that everything should be taught by lectures. Now, I cannot see that lectures can do so much as reading the books from which the lectures are taken. I know nothing that can be best taught by lectures, except where experiments are to be shewn. You may teach chemistry by lectures:-- You might teach the making of shoes by lectures!
(Dr. Samuel Johnson writing to his friend Boswell)
Re:Rushing?! For What?! (Score:5, Interesting)
While pedagogical techniques have changed over the years, basic math hasn't. And old textbooks written, say, more than about 50 years ago, didn't have much "filler" in terms of pedagogical methodology.
You just have a very brief explanation of definitions and concepts, followed by a set of problems. The pedagogical method is left to the teacher to fill in, as it should be. No necessity for glossy photos of random non-math things or muticultural scenes in a math textbook, as we fill pages and pages with today.
Perhaps languages are different in this regard, although I have to admit I personally learned more about foreign languages than from any other book after I picked up a comparative grammar of six languages designed for language instruction that was published in the 1860s. The advances is elementary language instruction pedagogy, as far as I can tell, have mostly to do with replacing competent teachers who can speak fluently with lots of recordings that have to be cued to the textbook... which seems like the primary driving force for new editions of language books... but I'm no expert. (I am, however, a certified secondary math and science teacher.)
Re:How about no textbook at all? (Score:5, Interesting)
For a certain subset of students, it is better to teach them how to figure it out on the fly. But the problem here is that now you are running afoul of the history and civics classes you took which state that everybody is made equal - which, at least when it comes to math, is not the case. Some people are like you, others work best by memorizing formulae and running numbers through them without any further analysis.
in real life (Score:4, Interesting)
Inaccurate, incomplete, contradictory and poorly stated data and questions are par for the course.
Maybe it's a good thing for students to be exposed to some poorly worded and insoluble problems in their education.
Re:It's not just the textbooks (Score:5, Interesting)
I had a professor write an economics text book. He barely lectured and used the exact same words as in the book. He couldn't describe anything differently than the book. If you didn't understand the book, he would just say "it's right there in print. You didn't read the book" He failed to accept his book had problems or that not everyone learns the same way.
it was a terrible class and I was happy to get through it. The entire class was based on a formula. he only defined the variables on the first day of class. Everything was explained by this formula. The trick to the exams was to put in several variations of the formula into a graphing calculator and just run through them. I didn't learn much.
Re:This applies to ALL textbooks (Score:5, Interesting)
As a schoolchild, I went through the French system, and people complained that the textbooks changed too often. Which was a legitimate concern, but since the programme and standard were set system-wide, each iteration was, I thought, OK. Basically, it laid out the structure of the year, and gave supplementary material. Oh, and the maths books also had some exercise sets.
But that was an exception. And the proportion of exercises was small.
Likewise at university, I got textbooks, which were in the vast majority European in origin. And they were thin, densely packed with equations (or not so thin in the case of fluid mechanics and thermodynamics). And they contained almost no examples or exercises. They were designed as reference books.
But I also got a couple American textbook. Which were not badly written or wrong. But which were pieces of shit. Because the were huge, and contained stupid amounts of examples and exercises, instead of well-structured matter. On my shelf, I still have -- and consult -- the European ones, the American textbooks: dunno where I put them.
The author of TFA complains that the books are terribly written an badly copyedited. Sure, they might be. But even if they weren't, they would still be crap. This is because on this continent, people seem not to have understood the most important aspect of knowledge: its structure. The goal should never be that the student can do lots of exercises quickly. It should be that they understand the structure and logic of the subject -- and that, they can do the exercises, sure, but also understand how this subject relates to all the others. And each subject well understood helps in all the others.
And how knowledge, in general, forms a great overarching structure. Now of course, if you did that, you would never get engineer-creationists: because they would deeply understand that you cannot, in fact, compartmentalise knowledge.
This is not a "American education is crap" post. it is rather a "American education would in fact be very good" if you guys simply made the effort of respecting theory and structure more.
Nannies one and all (Score:4, Interesting)
First off, anyone making comments on college or higher level math in this thread did not RTFA - its about kiddies, not college kids. K-8.
So why are we even talking about such stupidity? Has the "math" taught to K-8 today suddenly changed from.. 10 years ago? 30? 100? 300? Hmm.. lets see.. add, subtract, multiply, divide. Fractions. Percentages (same thing). "Word" problems. Maybe a touch of very very simple geomentry.
There is no need for a new mathbook for these kids. In fact, they would probably best be taught by grabbing one which was used in the 1920s or 1950s. Just wondering.. can your grandparents (or in some cases, if alive - great grandparents) add, subtract, multiply and divide? Or were the books and teaching "methods" just so atrocious back then that everybody ended up a dolt? Whats that? test scores ahve declined! Well maybe going back to what was used when the scores were higher might be a better thing to do? When in a hole the first thing to do is stop digging!
Bottom line: nannyism. school boards ptas publishers state and federal governemnt alll trying to find ways to justify their existence by fucking up what already worked quite well.
Re:This applies to ALL textbooks (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm fed up with the meme that education is all about learning how to learn (how to interpret, how to understand.) If that's all that 12 or 16 years of schooling provided, we'd have a crowd of illiterate young adults all ready to learn SOMETHING, without the ability to do so because they couldn't read or do math. Such young adults would be useless, because they had no practical knowledge.
Education is primarily about learning facts: what things are, how they work, how they're connected, how and why they were developed, how to solve problems, what honor consists of, and so forth and so on. "Learning how to learn" and its relatives, though important, is mostly an implicit part of education and requires some, but not a lot, of explicit effort to teach.
Re:It's not just the textbooks (Score:5, Interesting)
Mod up!
I substitute taught a few years ago and objectives and curriculum just for a single day is mindboggling. A 1st grade classroom as an example needs to go through 4 objectives per subject 4 times a day. That is 16 lessons in just 6.5 hours! The books need to be in synch with this and explains why you can't use a book from 30 years ago even if the mathmatics are the same.
No Child Left Behind puts huge requirements. 30 years ago 1st graders were being taught to count to 50, the ABCS and how to put together simple wordss and after that children spent 2 hours a day painting, playing, and cutting shapes out of construction paper.
Today they are being taught multiplication, juggling (yes it is in some state standards), health, vowel rules with moderate words, etc. It is a pain in the butt and hard on the kids and teachers, but we keep whinning on how American kids are behind the rest of the world so No Child Left Behind is enforcing this. Now just imagine if a state changes the standards again?? Pfft time to through out those 2 million dollars worth of text books and start again!
Re:It's not just the textbooks (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:It's not just the textbooks (Score:5, Interesting)
To be able to read a mathematics textbook successfully, you have to be able to pace yourself: to read one section at a time, slowly, work through the exercises, and not assume that you understand the material simply because it makes sense. It's a different skill from reading a novel, and many people don't have that skill. A lecture intentionally slows the book's material down to the appropriate pace for students who haven't learned how to read textbooks properly. It is inefficient by *design*.
Re:This applies to ALL textbooks (Score:5, Interesting)
The solution is simple: use PDFs of public domain textbooks. If you like, order a cheap bound copy of the PDF to be made.
Basic math hasn't changed much in a century, and there are numerous old textbooks out there that are generally proofread better than modern textbooks. I have found the problems are often better structured and designed as well.
This is a perfectly reasonable idea, but it would require massive legislative change to implement it in K-12 education, and that legislative change isn't going to happen because of lobbying by textbook publishers.
As a random example, the California Education Code contains the following:
When adopting instructional materials for use in the schools, governing boards shall include only instructional materials which, in their determination, accurately portray the cultural and racial diversity of our society, including: (a) The contributions of both men and women in all types of roles, including professional, vocational, and executive roles. (b) The role and contributions of Native Americans, African Americans, Mexican Americans, Asian Americans, Pacific Islanders, European Americans, lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender Americans, persons with disabilities, and members of other ethnic and cultural groups to the total development of California and the United States.
It doesn't specifically say that pictures of kids in a math textbook have to include pictures of kids in wheelchairs, but it's a specific example of the extremely tight regulatory environment for textbooks. Another good example is that state law allows a school to pay $200 for a textbook, but does not allow it to spend $10 at Kinko's to print out a paper copy of a free digital textbook. When Governor Schwarzenegger started his Free Digital Textbook Initiative [bbc.co.uk], one of the big obstacles was the state bureaucracy involved in textbook selection. They tried to streamline the process, but basically the initiative seems to have been a total failure.
I'm the author of some free online physics textbooks. They're written for the college level, but I have quite a few adoptions from high schools as well. Virtually all of those are from private schools, especially Catholic schools.
It's certainly true that algebra and calculus don't change very much over time. However, the public education system in my state, including both K-12 and the state college and university systems, has general rules that forbid us from using old textbooks. That makes a lot of sense, as a matter of fact, for physics, history, etc. There is no exception written into these requirements for math. In any case, if you look at the catalog in my sig, you'll see that there is not any shortage of high-quality free textbooks for math that are recent. There's no real need to use old public-domain math books rather than modern, free ones.