Re: Middle School Physical Science Texts: dishonesty

[Jack Uretsky <jlu@HEP.ANL.GOV>]

Hi all-
        1. The one middle-school science teacher I've talked to said,
emphatically, "You can't teach a science course from a textbook."
She was aware of newspaper publicity concerning the purported errors.
        2. I have glanced through the report at www.aapt.org.  It does
list some errors such as, for example, a map with the equator too far
north.  It also seems to contain of nit-picking and opinions concerning
sound teaching practices.  There seems to be a lot of highly subjective
material in the report.  In other words, it seems straight out
misleading to characterize the report as a listing of textbook errors,
because that is only a part of the report. It is a pity that the report
was not refereed before being unloosed on the public.
                                        Regards,
                                                Jack


On Mon, 26 Feb 2001, Robert A Cohen wrote:

> One thing that seems to have been implied by recent posts is that teachers
> are unaware of the errors.  It seems to me that many of the teachers I
> speak with are, indeed, aware of the errors and, as a result, hardly use
> the textbooks.  Is that an accurate reflection of the state of things?
>
> ----------------------------------------------------------
> | Robert Cohen               Department of Physics       |
> |                            East Stroudsburg University |
> | bbq@esu.edu                East Stroudsburg, PA  18301 |
> | http://www.esu.edu/~bbq/   (570) 422-3428              |
> ----------------------------------------------------------

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