[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 I laugh when schools complain their textbooks are "old and outdated".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“Out of print” is largely an outdated term, except for small print run books.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 I'm just talking about the complaints that they are outdated.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.

[WalterBright]

> funds aren't made specifically available for purchase of lesson plans

You mean no teachers set up a github repository where they give away lesson plans just to be helpful? Teachers are unable to pool their resources and help each other? "Hey Mr Hand, I'm teaching science for the first time next year. Can I use your lesson plans?" "Sure, Ms Halsey!"

Besides, teachers complain a lot about spending all their time devising lesson plans. They might do cost-benefit check on whether they might be way ahead taking a second job, using part of the wages to buy plans, and spend the rest on a vacation.

[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.

[caboteria]

NIH is a powerful sentiment in many areas, not just tech.

[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.

[WalterBright]

Teaching history is not about becoming a historian. Being a professional historian comes with it some standard practices and methods, which is irrelevant if you're not a pro. Though I have learned to not trust "history" books written by journalists, who usually write them because they have a political axe to grind.

As for historical facts, you cannot understand history without knowing any facts about it. For example, you cannot understand the American Revolution without knowing who the major players were and some idea of what their roles were.

BTW, I have an interest in Soviet history. I'm interested in your recommendations on the best books on the topic.

[TchoBeer]

The war of 1812 ended in 1815

[WalterBright]

Things are usually named by when they start, not end.

[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)

[WalterBright]

Most undergraduate textbooks are still fine. Though I agree that some topics change fast, like electronics beyond basic circuit analysis. Certainly comp-sci :-) Wow has that changed.

[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.