[dehrmann]

I have no idea how commercial textbooks for anything up to specialized, college-level classes are viable. You'd think that enough states (and countries) would put the work into the Wikibooks calculus book so it meets their standards and just use that.

[WalterBright]

I don't get it, either. I laugh when schools complain their textbooks are "old and outdated". So what? Has there been a revolution in algebra I didn't hear about?

I also laugh when teachers say they expend all this effort making "lesson plans". There are 3.7 million teachers just in the U.S. You'd think they could share them?

[jdshaffer]

English teacher here, working in Japan teaching English as a Foreign Language.

I would LOVE to use free textbooks and older books. I try to do so as much as possible. But the real problem (for me at least), is how can I get a copy for all of my students? I can't afford to print them all a copy of old stuff, and after about 5-10 years, the publishers stop printing the older books!

I came across this problem big time this school year -- planned on using a book I love and have been using for 10 years old to be told last minute it's now OUT OF PRINT. (It was in print just 6 months ago). sigh

Old is OK in many places, but only if you can get 50-100 copies of it each semester / year...

[_tom_]

Open source textbooks are available and usable online for free. Why do you need printed copies?

Frequently, open source textbooks can also be printed on demand for much less than the cost of a new textbook, in any quantity. If you can afford new books, you can certainly afford printed old books.

“Out of print” is largely an outdated term, except for small print run books. If they sold well new, they should be available used, in quantity. Especially if you are only replacing lost or damaged books.

Project Gutenberg has many old books online and you can get them printed.

[burkaman]

Have you ever talked to any of these people you're laughing at? Maybe there is some nuance or background you're not aware of.

I'm not a teacher, but I think often when they talk about old textbooks, the issue is that they are physically falling apart, not just that they were published a long time ago. These books are in continuous use by children, so you can't compare it to a book you've had on your shelf for 40 years. As for lesson plans, most teachers don't have the luxury to just pick a plan they think is best. Every state, district, individual school might have its own rules about what can and must be taught, and teachers often aren't given much say in that.

[WalterBright]

I understand that textbooks fall apart and need replacement. I'm just talking about the complaints that they are outdated.

The complaint I constantly hear from teachers is they work their fingers to the bone preparing lesson plans. I ask why are they making them from scratch, why not share? and don't get a response.

> Every state, district, individual school might have its own rules about what can and must be taught, and teachers often aren't given much say in that.

Then why do they say they spend all this effort creating lesson plans, not even re-using what they used last year? One teacher told me she spent her summer writing lesson plans for next year. I asked why she didn't re-use the ones she wrote for last year? She said they had to be custom made for each student. I asked how could she custom make them in the summer, when she didn't know which students she'd be getting in the fall?

That was the end of that discussion.

[coryrc]

The teachers I know do reuse their lesson plans when they teach the same class. One of the biggest values of seniority is being able to teach the same class every year.

Why they don't standardize has everything to do with the kind of people who become teachers and what they want to be doing with their time.

[WalterBright]

> The teachers I know do reuse their lesson plans when they teach the same class.

Of course they do. I knew I was being buffaloed.

Though the point stands that why don't they share lesson plans? Why do we need 3.7 million unique lesson plans? There ought to be plenty of off-the-shelf plans to use.

[mattkrause]

The reused lesson plans still often need to be updated, either in light of curriculum changes or just because something “didn’t work” (too hard, too easy, messes up a dependency, want to emphasize something else, etc).

As for why there aren’t off-the-shelf plans:

You might want to adapt the curriculum to the current class of students or the broader community. The College Board does distribute a syllabus for AP US History classes, but it’s deliberately sparse so that teachers can plug in people and events that are “locally valued” (their words, not mine). A class in Alaska might spend more time on Native events and statehood; one in Boston might up the emphasis on the Revolutionary War events that happened nearby; Texas is going to go crazy with the Alamo. This is true for other subjects too. A science class might spend more time on local ecosystems that they can visit. A few of my literature class read a play and then went to see a production of it; that part presumably had to change every year, based on what was being performed nearby.

The other reason is that the teachers need to review the lesson plan anyway: no one can remember a thousand hours of material! While doing so, it makes sense to “refactor” them into something that matches your own mental model of the content. Teaching off someone else’s materials feels weird and often goes a little more poorly.

[mkingston]

Curriculum change is relatively frequent in some places. Different classes take to different material at different paces. Different resources are available to different schools and different classrooms (think science experiments). In the UK there are online platforms for purchasing and selling lesson plans. My partner has saved much time purchasing lesson plans from these platforms. They are available.

Teachers aren't paid very well in many places and, at least here, funds aren't made specifically available for purchase of lesson plans; teachers spend their own money buying lesson plans. It's easily worth it when there's a second income in your household. Perhaps not in places where teachers are very poorly paid and for those who are on a single income.

[coryrc]

The teachers I know do start with standard lesson plans, but for reasons I don't understand they feel the need to customize them.

[burkaman]

Obviously they do, here's one popular example from the national teachers union: https://sharemylesson.com/about-us

And of course teachers within any school will generally share whatever they can.

[mattkrause]

Were they IEPs?

In the US, public school students with disabilities (learning and otherwise) are legally entitled to “Individualized Educational Programs”, which is supposed to be tailored to their particular needs and abilities. For example, a student with a speech impairment might be allowed to pre-record a presentation, or do it in private, rather than live in front of the whole class. There are a lot of requirements, and putting together something that passes legal muster and really tries to support the student seems like a lot of work.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Individualized_Education_Progr...

[WalterBright]

No, they weren't special ed teachers.

[treeman79]

Yes. My wife had dealt with this nonsense for years. She was ready to quit her school and the major negotiation point was reusing lessons from prior year. School finally relented.

[coryrc]

You're absolutely correct on your second point.

But for the first point, as poor as research in education is, there have been improvements in educational methods. I read some examples about the Common Core mathematics pedagogy, prepared to be as angry as Feynman, but they were actually teaching kids how to do arithmetic the way I do (which is way better than New Math or brute force methods): 99x5 is 500-5 not 5+(4+5)*10+400. Are their changes more likely to be improvements rather than demerits? I do not know.

[WalterBright]

There have certainly been changes in educational methods, but I doubt there are improvements. Math achievement has been flat for the last 50 years. The "new math" and "look-say" methods were largely invented to drive new textbook sales.

[coryrc]

I think you should look into the complaints about common core; I think, if you're good at arithmetic (like I assume most of us programmers are), that you'll find the current methods an improvement over those and about as good as can be done by our grade-segregated, "no-child-left-behind", Prussian educational system.

[WalterBright]

Like I said, no measurable aggregate improvement in the last 50 years.

[coryrc]

So many other factors have gone down, that might actually be an achievement.

[kwhitefoot]

I learnt arithmetic in the early sixties. 99x5 would be 9x5x10+9x5 = 450+45 = 495

Perhaps it helped that we all knew the 12 times tables.

Is there some new magical way of doing long multiplication that is more effective and easier to understand?

[coryrc]

999999*5 is far easier as 5000000-5 than 45+450+4500+...

Are you really arguing that the latter is faster and more effective to do in your head?

[kwhitefoot]

Not at all. I didn't know we were discussing mental arithmetic.

[coryrc]

Even on paper it's far simpler

(1000000-1)*5 => 5000000-5 => 4999995

Learning to find these patterns early sets up students for having an easier time with algebra later. Algebra is just rearranging equations. I don't understand, but students do struggle with going from "12/3=?" to "3*X=12 solve for X". We can't keep failing so many students every year and expect our country to hold together.

[Breza]

Agreed! My copies of Calculus Made Easy and Calculus & Statistics are wonderful references even though they were written before I was born.

[voldacar]

The amount of churn in (American) math education is bizarre. New hip curricula, textbooks, etc every few years, and yet the average high school graduate cannot prove the pythagorean theorem.

[detaro]

Not all subjects have the luxury of being so isolated from changes in the real world.

[WalterBright]

Let's see. Science? Nope. History? Nope. Exercise? Nope. Reading? Nope. Writing? Nope. Foreign languages? Nope.

Current events? Yup. Just bring a newspaper to class.

[detaro]

> History?

Modern perspective on it is constantly evolving, especially on more recent bits, and there's plenty topics I'd rather have my kids being taught with a perspective from this century (E.g. to take my local German perspective, events surrounding WW2 and post-war development). Also, plenty things that happened while you were alive are History now. (remember, kids finishing high school now weren't born when 9/11 happened)

> Reading? Nope. Writing? Nope. Foreign languages? Nope.

Languages: Languages change (German literally added a letter in the past decade, new words are created, how people speak changes, ...). Language studies tend to be steeped in cultural aspects too, both for native and foreign languages (e.g. media literacy should probably cover internet material differently than it did when I was in high school, explaining the US media landscape in the English books probably also should look differently now). Being somewhat up-to-date with topics also helps students being interested.

> Science?

More stable, but also not frozen. Especially in biology and with medical topics you'll have changes, but other sciences too especially where discussing applications, but that's not as critical.

Some more examples:

Geography: If you'd given me 10 years old material in my first geography lessons even which country the lesson took place in would have been wrong.

Any kind of thing that deals with law/demographics/economics/politics (how exactly that's divided up into different subjects very much depends on where you are, it often comes up in material for other subjects) will benefit from regular review and updates.

A textbook being outdated doesn't mean the entire thing is useless now, often its just small sections that will stand out badly if not updated.

[kwhitefoot]

> Languages: Languages change (German literally added a letter in the past decade, new words are created, how people speak changes, ...).

If one learned German from a forty year old textbook the only problem related to that that you would experience in Germany would be that some people would think you were speaking rather more formally than expected. Learning it from an up to date text book isn't going to make you noticeably better at communicating with actual Germans in real life, that takes actual immersion in the language as it is really spoken.

And the German language authorities might well have added a new letter or changed the spelling of the word spagetti but that doesn't mean that every German has.

Textbooks are of very limited use in the real world.

[detaro]

Using a textbook with spellings that disagree with the dictionary in K-12 language education is going to be ... interesting. Not something you'd do if you can avoid it. And the bits talking about the GDR are going to be a bit out of place...

Can you use outdated material? Sure, but that's different than pretending it isn't outdated or that outdated material can't get in the way.

[WalterBright]

For small sections, a pamphlet supplement would be all that's necessary, if that. The teacher can just say "that sentence is outdated, today we're pretty sure the dinosaurs were wiped out by an asteroid."

[pgalvin]

It is laughable to suggest that history does not change. Even studying history at the equivalent of high school had me comparing secondary sources from the 1960s, to the 1990s, to just a couple years prior. History, or rather our interpretation of it, is constantly evolving.

I expect it is the same for most of the humanities.

[WalterBright]

> is constantly evolving

Being an amateur historian myself, most of that smacks of political fashion. The (very) shallow view of history taught by K-12 doesn't need to change. The War of 1812 hasn't moved to 1814 yet. Hitler still lost WW2. Edison still invented the first practical lightbulb, despite all the attempts to dethrone him :-)

[mhh__]

Studying history formally isn't about memorising stuff you are interested in. I have a lot of sovietology books now, that doesn't make me a sovietologist because I don't consider myself able to really analyze the sources properly.

[TchoBeer]

The war of 1812 ended in 1815

[mhh__]

I have a bunch of EM textbooks from the 40s and 50s on my bookshelves, the field has changed quite a lot i.e. I understand what they are saying, but the mathematical formalism is very obtuse and the applications are often irrelevant outside of the very basics.

The Feynman lectures were recorded prior to the standard model for example, still excellent but hopelessly out of date as an introduction to undergraduate physics in that particular area.

Also, old textbooks that didn't make it to still being in print today may not be out of date but they may be bad pedagogy. A certain percent of everything is crap, textbooks are no different.

[troupe]

> A certain percent of everything is crap, textbooks are no different.

When it comes to classic literature, if you randomly choose a book that is still around after 100 years and randomly choose a book that was written in the last 5 years, odds are the older book will be a better book.

[WalterBright]

My high school didn't teach EM, nothing remotely that advanced.

[mhh__]

I thought you meant all textbooks, my bad. If this is just about high school then I mostly agree wrt to the amount of waste.

I think the solution would have to come down from the top however, in the UK at least the way our exams are marked means using an old textbook could be a fairly dangerous affair without an astute teacher (due to the ridiculously anal markschemes and philistine syllabus, this does bite people)

[dehrmann]

> Foreign languages

This reminds me of how Wheelock's Latin is the introductory Latin textbook. It's 65 years old and still in use.

[Koshkin]

Well, Latin is an exception, being one of the “dead” languages (which no longer evolve).

[WalterBright]

I kept nearly all of my textbooks from college 40 years ago. None of them are outdated. They still fetch high prices used on Amazon.

[jimbob45]

Here’s a terrible example.

Old textbooks used to use white names. Now, many schools are required to throw out prospective textbooks that don’t have names representing multiple minorities.

[InitialLastName]

> Now, many schools are required to [x]

In my experience, this is the sort of thing that, when un-cited often means "a school district somewhere had a proposed or implemented policy that, at its least in its least sympathetic interpretation, would require the school to do [x]" interpreted through a few layers of the outrage commentary telephone game.

[anigbrowl]

In other countries textbooks are cheap because (as you say) the subject matter is more or less agreed-upon so there are just a few different textbooks largely distinguished by the quality of the writing and presentation.

In the US students are treated as a captive audience and publishers work hard to get professors and education authorities to specify particular books, which are then sold at a very high mark-up. The incentives ought to be purely academic but in practice are often material or financial.

[nicoburns]

Yeah. I'm not quite sure how it works in the US, but here in the UK we have strong student unions that often have a good relationship with the university whose students they represent. I think any professor attempting this would get shut down pretty quickly.

[kwhitefoot]

The word union is anathema to many in the US.

[wrycoder]

And they make sure to publish new editions with relatively minor changes every few years. Then they sell a Chem 101 text for $175. It's like the price is inverse to the number of readers.

[mananaysiempre]

While there are certainly incentive problems and simple cruft in that regard[1]...

Generally, writing textbooks is just hard and nobody really knows how to do it. Textbooks as they are usually understood[2] are, above all, books[3], that is, large flowing pieces of prose that tell a story about an area of knowledge in a generally linear manner.

This is not how knowledge works. At least the way I feel my knowledge is organized when I try to explain things is that I have a sprawling weighted (on a scale from “vague association” to “hard prerequisite”) graph with rather compact ideas as vertices of absolutely enormous degree (at least in regions I feel I have a decent understanding of). Only by several iterations of merciless pruning around the desired generating set can I get a subgraph that is concise enough that I have some hope of explaining it in the available time, parsimonious enough that I can toposort it onto the time axis without people’s heads spinning and stacks overflowing, and comprehensive enough that I don’t feel I’ve given people a horribly skewed impression and don’t risk choosing a perspective so narrow that would fail to engage some of them. Then comes the actual work of (choosing a) linearization, which I can kind of do in my head for stories of no more than a couple hours at the cost of something like 15 minutes of confusion-inducing backtracking per hour, but it gets exponentially harder as you go past these limits, and you have to go pretty far past them to reach good writing. All of these decisions are kind of like those in an optimizing compiler in that they really want to feed into each other, but actually letting them do so would cause the process to come to a grinding halt, so you interate and order and apply vague heuristics and make arbitrary choices and your inner perfectionist hates you the whole time you’re doing it. And you get to do this practically from scratch every single time because the given context and the desired focus are virtually never the same.

You might say at this point that this is what I get for choosing a wire representation (books and more generally stories) so unlike the in-memory representation (graphs of associations). That may be true to some extent[4], but it’s also important to realize that what is best for knowledge storage doesn’t have to be any good for knowledge acquisition[5]. In fact, the omission that bothers me most of the ones I made in the book-writing rant above is that I know of some things that are just so cute and smol sitting in my head, but when I try to get them out I either assume so many prerequisites that there’s nothing to get out or end up staring at a plan for what is at best a terse twenty-page essay I’m never going to write. I wish hard for viable alternatives to linear narrative, but I also realize I haven’t encountered any that were nearly as good or universally applicable. You can certainly point people at a pile of short-form hypertext, but that misses the issue of pruning: doing it effectively requires you to already know things you decide to prune and the general layout of the subject on a level that is, in classroom terms, several years beyond what you are trying to isolate; a learner is incapable of doing this or at the very least is going to waste tremendous amounts of time doing a mediocre job of it. (I certainly did when I was learning maths from Wikipedia.) I don’t mean to denigrate anyone’s intellectual capability here, or even dissuade them from literature surfing. Surfing in moderation is useful and efficient. I’m only saying that the apparently obvious solution of switching out books for a hyperlinked card catalogue fails and fails hard.

Teaching and books are hard and nobody really knows the secret to doing them well, even those who are brilliant at them. There are a lot of arbitrary choices (not really, but heavily reader-dependent, including factors unknowable to the writer or even the reader) involved in making a book. We solve that problem by throwing a lot of them at the audience and seeing what sticks to whom. But that means a perfect book is impossible—not “drink the ocean” impossible, but “draw a round square” impossible[6]. The problem doesn’t even make sense; what’s a perfect book to you can be a hideous book to me, and what’s a perfect book for me right now was an impenetrable book for me ten years ago. There are objectively good books and objectively bad books, but objectively perfect is something a book cannot be.

[1]: Nobody is going to count your Wikibooks contributions towards your tenure; also, Wikibooks and MediaWiki in general managed to find that sweet spot where they’re simultaneously so expressive you can’t reliably process them automatically and so limited they don’t make good self-contained books, neither fixed nor reflowable.

[2]: Let’s say pre-1970—I find modern trends in English-language secondary and basic undergrad texts positively cringeworthy, but I haven’t ever had to use them in either capacity.

[3]: Can’t help but be reminded here of Michele Audin’s deliciously snarky Tautology 2.3.1 from “Conseils aux auteurs des textes mathématiques”, <http://irma.math.unistra.fr/~maudin/newhowto.ps>.

[4]: The only tool or process I’ve found which is even remotely adapted to this data model is TiddlyWiki <https://tiddlywiki.com/>, which I tried, but never could get over its many quirks and primitive organizational features to make it useful even for notes to myself, let alone as an interface with others.

[5]: For example, fluent readers of Latin/Greek/Cyrillic-script languages generally work by recognizing shapes of words on a page, often for several words in parallel, but teaching children or non-Latin/Greek/Cyrillic-literate adults to read this way is a famously useless affair.

[6]: This also means mandatory texts for students and even mandated curricula for teachers are an atrocity which sacrifices a whole lot of adaptation capability for a modest bit of ease in detecting incompetence and bad faith. The more often a curriculum is nailed down to the time axis with tests and metrics the worse it is.

[mananaysiempre]

Finally, re high-school or undergrad “calculus”, I’m tempted to just quote Halmos (one of the foremost expositors of “higher mathematics”—that is, mathematics—of the 20th century) from his classic “How to write mathematics”[1] ...

> [T]here are many books that violate the principle of having something to say by trying to say too many things. Teachers of elementary mathematics in the U.S.A. frequently complain that all calculus books are bad. That is a case in point. Calculus books are bad because there is no such subject as calculus; it is not a subject because it is many subjects. What we call calculus nowadays in the union of a dab of logic and set theory, some axiomatic theory of complete ordered fields, analytic geometry and topology, the latter in both the “general” sense (limits and continuous functions) and the algebraic sense (orientation), real-variable theory properly so called (differentiation), the combinatoric symbol manipulation called formal integration, the first steps of low-dimensional measure theory, some differential geometry, the first steps of the classical analysis of the trigonometric, exponential, and logarithmic functions, and, depending on the space available and the personal inclinations of the author, some cook-book differential equations, elementary mechanics, and a small assortment of applied mathematics. Any one of these is hard to write a good book on; the mixture is impossible.

... But I should probably explain the general picture somewhat for the reader who’s unable to follow the deluge of terminology here.

The problem with calculus, in terms of my parent comment, is that it hasn’t been a singular cluster or clique of ideas in any working mathematician’s association graph since the time of Euler; the list of topics that is presented under that name has never been such—it’s both anachronistically rich in trying to include insights from Weierstrass’s rigour to Tychonoff’s point-set topology and anachronistically poor in avoiding Newton’s motivation from algebraic geometry and differential equations or Euler’s motivation from complex analysis and homotopy theory.

So, if we don’t have a justification from either history or state of the art, why do we insist on this low-resolution camrip of Newton and Leibniz’s writings sprinkled with an arbitrary selection of later work? I don’t know, but I suspect that this is simply the best people could fit into the allotted time when they last tried to incorporate actual, live mathematics into the general curriculum at the beginning of the 20th century, after a hundred years of vulgarization erosion and haphazard contradictory pushes for modernization and practicality.

Why should you even care how mathematicians think now or thought in the past? You don’t have to, of course, though in that case I would much prefer that you avoid diluting the brand “mathematics” by attaching it to the result[2]. But a course should be about something; either you’re teaching mathematics as a matter of culture and way of thought (you sure as hell don’t have time to teach it as a field of study), or you’re reaching for a particular application (but you better know which one, because an applied course left adrift soon becomes a patchwork zombie).

Either way those funny mathematicians in their ivory towers can be of use for you, because they haven’t simply spent all these years playing with impractical abstractions: they broke every subject including old-school calculus into patterns, distilled those patterns into their most elementary possible forms in the form of impractical abstractions, then went back and rearranged their understanding of each subject to make the forms they found more evident, then did it again and again. For decades.

Unfortunately for us lovers of simple answers, their conclusion was, “calculus is not a single thing”. Is there a course or two struggling to come out in the general vicinity so labelled? Yes, but while I have some speculations as to what they are, I don’t have a actual plan—that takes years of regular experimentation with and on classes of real students. It probably includes more varied topics compared to the current approach, certainly some formal series and a glimpse beyond dimension one, probably even a bit of linear algebra as a geometric foundation for it all. (Also a pony while we’re at it.) Should we teach them when combinatorics is infinitely more accessible and probability theory is infinitely more practical? I think so, if not for the cultural significance and life wisdom[3], then because any physics worth speaking of is practically inexpressible without it.

Sorry, I don’t have an answer for you; if I had, it would’ve already been one of those many, many books.

(Took me until the middle of the second of my two answers to realize they both essentially say “Your question is ill-posed” from different points of view; hope they are a bit more helpful than just that.)

[1]: https://www.mathematik.uni-marburg.de/~agricola/material/hal...

[2]: https://www.maa.org/external_archive/devlin/devlin_03_08.htm...

[3]: <https://www.basicbooks.com/titles/jason-wilkes/burn-math-cla...>, <https://www.blackdogandleventhal.com/titles/ben-orlin/change...>