from the Jan. 15 AP wire:
"Twelve of the most popular science textbooks used in middle schools across the nation are riddled with errors, a two-year study led by a North Carolina State University researcher has found.
"The errors include maps that show the Equator passing through the southern United States and a photo of the singer Linda Ronstadt labeled as a silicon crystal."
…just thought I’d share. (No, it’s NOT THE ONION or anything like that. It’s a real Associated Press article.)
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?threadid=55484
sorry Ike… maybe yours will do better. 
I saw that! Not just the article, but I actually saw the picture in my daughter’s science book! Stillwater Public Scools use the Prentice-Hall series. Once I stopped laughing (which was awhile, I admit) I sat down and read the kid’s book. I found 5 errors in that one edition that I could identif off the top of my head. Very, VERY sad.
Well, it was freido’s own god damn fault.
First he picks a lame-o subject title like “The world is doomed,” and then he links to the whole article instead of excerpting the juicy parts!
I got five bucks here says more folks open this thread.
Just a thought…Is this a cause of our poor educational system or a symptom?
hmmmm…makes you think, don’t it?
I always knew my history and science teachers were wrong and I was right!!! :mad:
:eek:
Oh well, shit happens. 
I stumble across errors in college textbooks here and there, but they’re not as bad as the equator passing through the US!
The content of my junior year history books was OK, but aparently the teacher’s version had pathetically wrong answers for the in-book quizzes. So our teachers would grade our quizzes strictly according to the book’s answers, then we would have a class session where we had to argue that our answers were right, and give supporting documentation. It was a great lesson, actually. Too bad the book publishers didn’t intend it that way.
Well, Uke, I suspect the logic there was that they both can sound a note if they feel the right vibrations. Of course, so can catgut.
AerynSun, did it ever occur to you that you got a better education than people with good textbooks – you had to learn how to do the science, in order to prove the spastic textbook/teacher’s guide wrong and your own work right.
Hmmm…mebbe Prentice Hall ain’t quite so dumb as it looks? :rolleyes:
I’m an editor.
Last year I had an author who was writing an ultrasound book. At one point in the text, she mentioned (out of the blue) smallpox. I queried her on it by saying “Should we include this? This disease has been eradicated with the exception of some samples in laboratories in the US and Russia and the like.”
Her reply? “Yes, we should include it since it has not yet been eradicated worldwide.”
It ended up in the book. A small point, but sometimes even editors who know better can’t keep errors out. I shudder to think of what editors of science textbooks go through. Still, there’s no excuse for some of those glaring errors.
One vivid memory from the 3rd grade science is that they classified plants as green plants and fungi as non-green plants. Granted, it’s a small gripe, but proper taxonomy should be taught at a young age, damn it!
This would be a lot more amusing if I didn’t have a child who’ll be going into middle school next year.
S-Terry Dan:
Well, I don’t know how old you are, S-Terry Dan, but wasn’t it not that long ago that fungi were assigned to the plant kingdom?
I can’t remember any terrible science teachers when I was in grade school, but I did once have a social studies teacher who thought Bonn was in Communist East Germany, and who hadn’t heard of Horace Greeley.
I had a maths teacher who didn’t know what QED stood for.
The day I corrected her made the rest of the year with her rather tough.
I had a prof in college for one of my graphic design courses, and he couldn’t get the color wheel right once. The few of us in class that actually stood up to correct or help him did not have an easy semester with him at all.
He wasn’t colorblind, just stupid.
R-O-Y-G-B-I-V, He’d never heard of it before, didn’t believe us that red and yellow make orange, he swore indigo and violet was the same damn thing, and blue and green made yellow…?!?
Your thread may just get more hits Uke, but if education in America is this bad all over, the world may indeed be doomed :rolleyes:
A filmstrip I saw in 6th grade (or was it 7th?) described Brontosaurus as the largest dinosaur ever.
Nevermind that it wasn’t, or that Brontosaurus wasn’t even a real dinosaur (should be apatosaurus; screw-up with a skull, IIRC, made scientists think they had a new species).
Nevermind that I brought materials from outside of class to the teacher and showed him that the film was incorrect.
I still got the question, “What dinosaur was the largest?” counted wrong on my quiz.
sigh
My grade eleven bio text had an amusing error. On one page was a picture of a chipmunk eating a nut and on the next page was a lion eating a zebra.
The text under the chipmunk photo said, “The chipmunk ingests protein from the zebra.” I love the mental picture that conjures up, of the chipmunk taking down a zebra.
I can’t recall what the text under the lion said.
Well, I’ll confess my ignorance here. There’s no such thing as the brontosaurus? Interesting. Maybe we watched the same film in our class.
Suo Na,
How about “The lion, on the other hand, gathers most of his energy from chewing on his nuts.”
Well, brontosaurus is just another name for the apatosaurus, it’s not “unreal” in any way. Paleontologists kept finding skeletons without skulls so they fabricated a cranium based on that of the camarasaurus (sp?). They found the real skull for this creature in the '70s, and by then it transpired that this animal had been described prior to its supposed original discovery, and at that time it had been named “apatosaurus”. Taxonomy is pretty rigid about what names attach to what creatures, and in this case the “first thought best thought” rule (the one that says the original name is the true scientific one) applied, and the name “brontosaurus” was removed from museums and textbooks and replaced by “apatosaurus”. It had nothing to do with the aforementioned skullduggery.
The master’s words: http://www.straightdope.com/classics/a2_011.html