Scandalously bad textbooks, problem with American textbooks.

[psi29a]

source

Scandalously bad textbooks
As younger, inexperienced teachers are thrown into classrooms to meet new federal standards, as much as 90 percent of the burden of instruction rests on textbooks, said Frank Wang, a former textbook publisher who left the field to teach mathematics at the University of Oklahoma.

And yet, few if any textbooks are ever subjected to independent field testing of whether they actually help students learn.

“This is where people miss the boat. They don’t realize how important the textbooks are,” Wang said. “We talk about vouchers and more teachers, but education is about the books. That’s where the content is.”

If America’s textbooks were systematically graded, Wang and other scholars say, they would fail abysmally.

American textbooks are both grotesquely bloated (so much so that some state legislatures are considering mandating lighter books to save students from back injuries) and light as a feather intellectually, flitting briefly over too many topics without examining any of them in detail. Worse, too many of them are pedagogically dishonest, so thoroughly massaged to mollify competing political and identity-group interests as to paint a startlingly misleading picture of America and its history.

I found this to be true without realizing it. When I was in HS, I often found myself ignoring what was in the textbook and to use my stack of 1950's textbooks that where 1/4 the size and weight that I had borrowed from my neighbor.

Now that I think back, those text books where absolutely horrid. Any one else notice the quality of their textbooks?

[Killfile]

Of course, we all took a lot of classes in High School - and for many of us, High School was where our training in those subject areas ended. I took Biology, Chemistry, Physics, and English Literature in High School and never received a more through grounding in these subjects in college. Granted I took Bio, Chem, and Phys in college - but my performance in the latter two and the pathetic nature of my class in the case of the former lends me to eschew attempt to judge my High School background in those subjects.

The only fields I feel capable of rendering judgement in are History, Math, and Computer Science. Now I think we'd all be hard pressed to find a Math or Computer Science text book in use in the public schools today that was seriously impacted by competing political ideologies.

History is another matter. History, or as a friend of mine put it, the study of everything that has ever happened, is just a collection of stories - interlocking to form a continuous fabric of human civilization over the course of the centuries. Historians can choose to study the entire tapestry, or they can focus on the path of individual threads.

Which of these methods the school system and textbook uses impacts enormously upon the nature of the class. My school system chose the tapestry - and as a consequence, the intimate details of any specific event were lost to me until I entered college. History is mundane, homogeneous, and featureless from such an elevated perspective. But those events, kings, battles, and wars contain human stories, intrigue, romance, and terror.

If the goal of a history class is to give students a general idea of who France was at war with in 1537 (I have no idea, but the odds are it was the British) then the more holistic perspective is ideal. If the goal is to indoctrinate them with a love of history, an interest in the human condition, and an appreciation for the trials and tribulations of past generations - we have failed miserably.

Of course, on top of this are political considerations. Anacronistic revisionism enters into almost any contentious portion of the record. Look at the way a high school history book deals with the Atomic Bombing of Japan, the Vietnam War, the Iraq War, or even the Desegregation of the South.

History is not about Good v Evil. There is no Good or Evil - not as abstract absolutes. Even the Nazis were not some sort of corporeal manifestation of Evil -- yet that's what we teach in our schools. Human beings are capable of horrific deeds. To write those crimes off as the insanity of a few "Evil" people implies that if people aren't evil they won't do evil things. Were that the world were so simple.

[Quest]

do all americans have to take some kind of national exams in hs where everyone takes the same paper so they can be graded and ranked on an equal level?

in singapore we take such an exam and the scripts are shipped to the UK's cambridge university to be marked.
i think in the end its how you are graded that counted as well. the textbooks are a tool to that end.

[psi29a]

In my particular HS, a majority of the material was redundant. We had either already learned about it in Middle School (which was awesome, I learned a lot in those years) that I found myself bored as hell in HS. It wasn't till College and then University that it wasn't boring anymore as we where actually being taught and more importantly, we had better textbooks.

Aside from Chemistry, Physics, Algebra, Geometry, and non-native languages, the classes where the SAME year to year.

World History, US History, Geography... we where all taught that stuff way back in Middle School that it was an easy A (It isn't hard to learn dates of events). The people that did struggle the most where the transfer students.

However, the fact remains that all those classes had textbooks, and rarely was I not bored by them. Not one cut to the point, and more importantly in math books, they spent more time on problems than on making the material better.

For example, 3 pages describing with pictures and text how the basic FOIL method works. In comparison, I have a book that was loaned to me that in no-none sense fashion how to do the same thing, quickly in under a page. The next page was 4 problems, each progressively harder but mostly because of the arithmetic.

Repetition is busy work, if you can't get it after 4 problems then your a fuck-up. It was a waste of time, but you had to do it for a grade. Utterly worthless and we paid for it in back-problems lugging those beasts around.

[Daedelus]

American textbooks are both grotesquely bloated (so much so that some state legislatures are considering mandating lighter books to save students from back injuries)

I want to say that it's Arizona that requires schools to have two copies of text books. One for home, one for school. Lessens the burden, but not totally. Oh, and laptops for every kid would rock, as would electronic books on said laptops. That's a pipe dream though... *sigh*

I agree that textbooks are crap. I can remember in HS that the teacher would start somewhere on page 300 randomly in the book, and we'd jump around the book covering small sections. Yet if we had a pen mark on one page, they charged us a buck at the end of the year. If they actually used that money to correct the problem, great, but they didn't.

Even in college, I've found bullshit. First semester this last year, the professor had us buy a $120 book and $80 course pack (photocopies of selected documents that the prof would use in class, 'saving' us from buying more books). The book was 500 pages and the CP was about 300 pages. How much did we use? Well, once the 300-person class was broken in about 20 groups, each group was assigned ~20 pages of reading to give a presentation on. For those of you playing the home game, that's ~400 pages. We had bought 800 pages worth. Needless to say we were ticked, especially that he didn't dole out group assignments until after the return date had lapsed.

do all americans have to take some kind of national exams in hs where everyone takes the same paper so they can be graded and ranked on an equal level?

No, we don't have a stadnardized exit exam. California tried one, and something like 50% of the students were failing - so they got rid of it. Why fix it when you can dump it and improve your graduation rate? Assholes. I'm an advocate of a national exit exam, and really think we could benefit from it. We do have ACTs and SATs, which are just apptitude exams which the resulting scores are used by colleges to help determine admission. That's the closest we get to high school-aged national exams.

[Buzkashi]

Yea most textbooks are pretty bad. But not that many teachers in my school teach by the book. Our school is a top one though, we got like top scores on all of the Standardized tests[/Brag]. Anywho, there was one text book I particularly liked and that was my Western Civilization book. I actually still have a copy right here.

[Daedelus]

I've kept a few books through the couple of years I've been able to. First was a writing handbook I received during my English class senior year of high school. Lots of great stuff in there, including MLA and APA formatting (common citation styles for papers written at American university) made simple, since the handbooks for those styles are awful. I had a great English class my freshman year of college, and I kept a few of the novels we read in there. Codeine Diary by Tom Andrews and Me Talk Pretty One Day by David Sedaris (brother of Amy, if you know her). Great reads. Not textbooks though, so I suppose maybe those don't count.

[Buzkashi]

We all got MLA books called "writing with style" when we were freshman. Those books are handy as hell.

[Quest]

textbooks get more and more ambiguous as we climb up the education ladder. initially yea, its important to get a solid base of knowledge on the basics. but as we get to higher learning, textbooks get replaced by "recommended readings" or "suggested books".

suddenly its not so much important how you learn as long as you can pass the final exam or project.
we can get by with just notes or if you are adventurous, question-spotting. not spotting exactly what questions will come up, but what kinds of questions usually come up in the past exams.
just by studying past exams you can usually tell what kinds of problems always appear.

[vtwahoo]

World History, US History, Geography... we were all tought that stuff way back in Middle School that it was an easy A (It isn't hard to learn dates of events).

This pains me. History is NOT merely a list of dates...geography even less so. These social sciences are the foundation of analytical thought and should concentrate upon context. A deep understanding and appreciation for history and geography is the foundation for a civilized society.

Your experience with these subjects, therefore, explains a lot about the current dismal state of US geo-politics.

[panasonic]

ouch

but history in high school, at least at my school in toronto, is basically expanding on points taught in middle school.

[psi29a]

World History, US History, Geography... we were all tought that stuff way back in Middle School that it was an easy A (It isn't hard to learn dates of events).

This pains me. History is NOT merely a list of dates...geography even less so. These social sciences are the foundation of analytical thought and should concentrate upon context. A deep understanding and appreciation for history and geography is the foundation for a civilized society.

Your experience with these subjects, therefore, explains a lot about the current dismal state of US geo-politics.

That was what we where taught, we didn't have a choice, we didn't get a chance to go into more detail. It wasn't till college/uni that I got a chance to actually study people,places, and things in context with Western Civ I, II, Ancient Greek philosophy, Modern philosophy.

The way things are taught in public education is horrible.

[vtwahoo]

That was what we where taught, we didn't have a choice, we didn't get a chance to go into more detail. It wasn't till college/uni that I got a chance to actually study people,places, and things in context with Western Civ I, II, Ancient Greek philosophy, Modern philosophy.

The way things are tought in public education is horrible.

I wasn't disputing that you had a bad experience and I certainly wasn't picking on you. Having been a teacher, I'm not entirely inclined to blame your teachers. A number of school systems have strict guidelines, not only about WHAT they can teach, but also HOW they must teach. I taught for two years and had no plans to stay much longer than that so I pretty much ignored those rules. My kids (who are all grown up now...it's sad) wrote research essays every six-weeks, spent a good deal of their class time debating the moments of history, and (in my own defense) STILL passed the state competency exams. All of them. And I didn't teach the AP/Honors kids...most of mine won't go to a four-year college or any college at all.

But most teachers don't have that kind of latitude. Though they often have the best intentions, they are laregly untrained in their subject matter and focus on the rote memorization necessary, in the minds of most educators and in the vast majority of the pedogogical literature, to pass competency exams.

However, as all of the great philosophers taught us, history, geography, philosophy, and politics are the foundation of a civilized society and the populus. America lacks that foundation and the results are disasterous.

We need to do better. We need to do better in our classrooms and in our government.

[panasonic]

i hear that the american public school system is terrible, thats y most ppl try to get their kids into private schools. is that true?

[Daedelus]

i hear that the american public school system is terrible, thats y most ppl try to get their kids into private schools. is that true?

In some places public schools aren't that great. To say that as a general statement is false. I went to a great public school, IMHO, and had some great teachers.

[vtwahoo]

i hear that the american public school system is terrible, thats y most ppl try to get their kids into private schools. is that true?

In some places public schools aren't that great. To say that as a general statement is false. I went to a great public school, IMHO, and had some great teachers.

Agreed. I also wish to reiterate that even teachers who fall into the educational traps outlined earlier often have the best of intentions. Public schools may have problems but I firmly believe that private schools are not the answer.