So far so good last night helping my son with his science homework about properties of matter on page 63
Well this is newsflash on page 64! Glass does so flow in window panes making them thicker at the bottom. Cecil you lying bastard! Chronos you are a bad physicist! (and not the phat daddy bad=good kind either)
Thank God Prentice Hall textbook publishers and this fine group of contributors was there to save my son from the hellish lies of Cecil and the SDMB!
You missed this:
Prentice Hall textbooks are sponsored in part by the WGMAA (Window Glass Makers Association of America)
I’m not a moderator, but don’t comments on Cecil’s columns have their own forum?
To paraphrase Cecil, who you gonna believe, a paragon of academic excellence with a long history of accuracy and credibility, or some ol’ science textbook?
My brother worked for Prentice Hall in photo research for science books. He was an English Major. He caught tons of science mistakes.
I realize your post is tongue-in-cheek, astro, but I am a science teacher and I find mistakes in textbooks all the time. As a matter of fact, some of you may have seen the report on Dateline a year or two ago about the abundance of mistakes in the Prentice Hall physical science (called integrated physics and chemistry here) textbook. In one area of the country, a group of educators got together and put together a list of corrections (enough to make a small booklet). Under pressure, the publisher published the booklet of corrections and distributed it for free to the schools ONLY IN THAT AREA! They didn’t bother offering the corrections to schools in the rest of the country.
Don’t forget that Linda Ronstadt is a silicon crystal.
http://abcnews.go.com/sections/scitech/DailyNews/scienceerrors010115.html
I used to work for a company that wrote the standardized tests for K-12, and I would find mistakes (I’m just a word processor and proofreader), but the EGOS involved just wouldn’t admit they were wrong sometimes. We would look these tests over months, and something would still slip through.
Another part of the process is getting fairness reviews from a group of minority educators (usually ten or so teachers at different grade levels). They would comment on the racial/economical fairness of each question. Sometimes we’d take their advice, sometimes we wouldn’t.
It was very frustrating to see blatant slights and they’d end up keeping the item in the test. I remember one that had me truly baffled: They removed the word “joy” from a test because it had (I swear I’m not making this up) RELIGIOUS connotations. What??
I hear ya there. I work for a testing company now, and we’ve gotten our share of Mickey Mouse changes like this. There was one in a reading passage that had a Korean grocery store owner. The client wanted his name changed from Mr. Lee to Mr. Smith so as to not cause any undue feelings of stereotyping among Asian-Americans taking the test. The company that originally published the story laughed at us of course.
I’ve heard stories about the textbook publishers that make me think the internet is the most credible source students can find.
Seriously.
In college we rarely use textbooks. Other than my science classes, I haven’t used one yet and it’s my third year (at 6 classes a semester, I’ve taken 30 classes)!!!
I take that back - we used text books and workbooks in both my Spanish and German classes.
[tangent . . .]
** Tangent** are you teaching in Dallas? Is IPC just a Dallas thing or a Texas thing? I ask only because I teach in DISD.
Manda JO,
Hi! I teach in one of the suburb cities north of Fort Worth. I think IPC is a statewide designation, at least. I am basing that on the fact that the science TEKS refer to IPC (IIRC), and during the science textbook adoption process last year I think the list of conforming books used the name IPC. I teach physics so I am not an expert on the IPC situation. I know that different districts treat the IPC course very differently. At my school, it’s generally a class for lower achievers. Other students usually go straight from biology to chemistry to physics.
[… /tangent]
Moving this to Comment’s on Cecil’s Columns.
Maybe I missed something, but what the hell does IPC stand for?
Would this column be one of the links refered to in the OP?
IPC = Integrated Physics and Chemistry
It is basically just a new name for the high school science class that for years has been called Physical Science (at least that is what it used to be called here in Texas). It’s a low-level (9th or 10th grade) course that covers really basic concepts in physics and chemistry.
Stephen Jay Gould has addressed the issue of textbook error several times.
Apparently many writers simply copy what has come before them, propogating these errors for future generations of schoolchildren.