Posted on 06/10/2011 4:04:36 PM PDT by TruthHound
School is winding down and my 3rd-grader just came home with a math textbook. "It's mine to keep,'" she said. The teachers were handing out "obsolete" textbooks to the kids. How nice of them.
I looked at the copyright and the book is less than 10 years old. It's in great shape. No torn pages. No markings other than a big stamp on the inside that reads "OBSOLETE."
Can you see where I'm going with this? Does 3rd grade math change? If they're so damned strapped for cash, why are they dumping perfectly good math textbooks? It's hard to find out exactly how much they're paying for replacements, but from what I've found, it's between $30 and $100 PER BOOK.
I can see the need to change over Social Studies and Science books fairly regularly. But Math and English and probably several other subject should be able to use some books 20 years or more if they're taken good care of.
I'm getting more and more frustrated and angry with our Public School system with each passing year. They need to stop WHINING, stop INDOCTRINATING and TEACH THE KIDS!
It’s always seemed like a racket to me too, for the same reason. My physics textbook in college had pictures in it that must have been licensed from the NBA, etc. How much does that add? And it’s adding things like that to keep them current which ‘justifies’ the new editions of what is basically a very stable core text which, if ever needed, could be updated with supplements.
The Chinese have been doing just fine on translations of English language textbooks from the late 1800’s.
The schools get perks for buying texts. Publishers are the ones who make the standardized tests the kids take, so the schools have to buy the books from them.
$$$$ makes the world go around.
You make a good point, but there could be a valid reason...
Let’s say that the school system has grown or they have had some books lost or destroyed and they no longer have enough of the old book and can’t get new copies.
In the 70s they replaced them to write in new social teachings, replacing the boy examples with girls, baseballs with apples,etc.
“Yes, I know we’re flat broke darling. But we’ve lost a couple of forks and spoons from our cutlery. The solution should be to throw this set away and spend money we don’t have on a new, complete set.”
Is this the logic?
I hope that this happens around here. They are teaching the “investigations” math crap, but it is rumured to be getting tossed in favor of traditional math in the next few years.
BTW - the new high school being built for my kids is rumored to not have lockers! I asked my son - what about books!? He said they might all have the text books on a tablet or whatever. Or, a set of books in the classroom, and then a set for each kid to keep at home!
You sell textbooks with new sets of problems in them every year or so because students pass their “correct” answers to younger siblings.
Rather like fraternities, or perhaps the college fraternities have some of the characteristics of large families.
Where are you located? I’m in L.A. and of the 5 different schools my kids have attended in the past 10 years, 3 of them have awesome lockers that the schools REFUSE to let the students use. They say it’s because they could hide contraband in them. In such a case, they now have to give each student TWO of each textbook - one for class and one for home. Plus, they have to carry EVERYTHING for EVERY CLASS around in their backpacks ALL DAY LONG. We go through about 3-4 backpacks per kid each school year. Not to mention the physical damage it’s probably doing to them with 30 pounds of books and supplies all day long. STUPID!
That’s a little different... If I’m teaching a class I would think all the students should have the same textbook. When I instruct them to go to page 180, It needs to be the same...
I’ve gone through two rounds of one kid a year behind another (often with the same teachers) and this has never been an issue.
Seattle. But it seems that all the lousy ideas from California end up finding their way up here! My younger daughters have so little time between classes they keep all their stuff with them anyway - and yes their packs are heavy!
That is so true. They tell you that you can sell them the next semester, but they change the book, so that is not something that a new student is going to buy. And why aren’t these “obsolete” in six months book in paperback? They could be printed like magazines at 90 percent of the cost. And people scream about the cost of education.
No, there is no valid reason. New textbooks get published by publishers, ordered by districts. Lots of money changes hands. Math hasn’t changed since Euclid.
I often use the old math textbooks when I tutor — they are very straight-forward, fact-based, no PC junk thrown into the word problems, no ‘make it apply to real life’ blather about the trajectory of a swallow with a head-wind. Just learn how to do math til you can do it in your sleep.
One of the fancy districts in our area is now using an older Algebra text. It is terrific, much better than the new one, and you can get it online for $10. Perhaps this is a breath of fresh air, a new trend.
What you’re seeing is a scam that makes the old “payola” seem like chump change. Kickbacks to the textbook purchase decision makers are the normal way of business. Often the “changes” amount to little more than correcting proof errors in spelling, syntax ect. IOW “the factual concept data”ain’t changed, as you noted. >PS
Not all the books are in good shape. Many are badly abused by the kids and you cannot get exact replacements.
No, the facts of mathematics won't have changed over the last ten years. But the way math is taught should have. And that can change the way problems are laid out in a text book.
Just a couple of potential issues that may have lead to change for a good reason - changes do also occur for bad reasons at times, but not always.
Most math textbooks written during the 1980s and 1990s use an approach to mathematics teaching that was identified as 'superior' during the 1970s and 1980s, because it lead to an improvement in the performance of girls in mathematics classrooms - and at the time this research was done, girls were underperforming in mathematics compared to boys. Mathematics textbooks were redesigned to address this issue - 'story problems' ("If David had five apples and Sarah gives him three apples, how many apples will David have?") started to be reintroduced earlier as opposed to algorithmic problems ("5 + 3 =") because that approach tended to work better for girls. However, after this change was made, it was realised that it actually worked worse for boys, and so newer textbooks are written to balance the two approaches. The facts of mathematics haven't changed, but the way and order teachers are expected to teach it in has.
Secondly - the use of calculators has affected the teaching of mathematics and requires changes in textbooks. In the 1980s and 1990s, calculators tended to be used very badly in classrooms - kids started using them instead of actually learning how to solve arithmetic problems, so most textbooks were rewritten in the 1990s to try and address that problem. The thing is, if used properly calculators can actually improve mathematics lessons, and a lot of work has been done on that in the 1990s and 2000s, and newer textbooks tend to include lessons that use the strengths of calculators in classes, without introducing their weaknesses. Mathematics hasn't changed - but the tools available to teach it have changed. A lot of textbooks will now start including examples of how to use MS Excel even at upper elementary levels, which is allowing things to be taught that didn't used to be.
It's not about mathematics changing - but about teaching changing and about the tools changing. Yes, there are also bad reasons for change - there's a lot of money involved in this area and that can lead to graft and corruption at times - but there are also good reasons.
My subject is actually history, but just as another example - I have 'class sets' of particular textbooks - 25 copies in a class set. I'm looking at my budget for next year at the moment, and one of my class sets has diminished from 25 copies to 14 copies over the last ten years. Buying 25 new textbooks will cost about $312.50 ($12.50 per book - I think I'll be able to get them for $300, in fact). Buying 11 copies of the twenty year old textbook we are currently using looks like it would cost more like $500 (based on second hand prices). Sometimes continuing to use the same book is actually a false economy.
I'm not saying these decisions are always sensible ones - I know that they're not. Just that they can be.
Valid reason? How naive. The publishers maintain sales by funding bogus “research” by the bogus “professors” in schools of education, and the research always points the way to “new strategies” for teaching that require new textbooks. This is true in every subject, not just math. McGuffey’s Readers could easily be used to teaching reading today, but because they are out of copyright, they must be deemed “obsolete.”
Sorry to see so many Freepers with children in the intellect and soul destroying government schools.
You can make dinner work with non-matching silverware. Kinda hard to teach a class with non-matching text books.
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