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Re: [Phys-L] critical thinking exercise : DC circuits



But....Students don't read their text books anymore. Many don't even buy them. Higher level courses may require the books to get the problems sets and some worked examples, but unless you specifically and continuously test reading assignments from the main text, few will read, and fewer will comprehend what they've read. So what does it really matter? ;-(

rwt

On 12/9/2013 3:06 PM, John Clement wrote:
Well Feynman couldn't get textbooks to be accurate, so how can you? He was
on the California textbook committee and even with a Nobel and the committee
authority he couldn't get publisers to change the texts. One publiser even
submitted a textbook with a nice cover but blank pages inside as a sample of
the new edition. But textbooks may be preferable to the web as the web
contains more wrong information that right. The Wikipedia is actually very
accurate, as are most university sites.

There was the school web site that had some outrageous misconceptions being
promulgated, so I wrote them, and the reply was that the text was for
students, not experts. I think the same attitude is taken by publishers.
Fortunately the whole website is gone, and is replaced by one with no
science info. But it happened due to reorganization and not my efforts.

Then I was a mentor to another teacher. When I pointed out that the book
had some very bad errors, he didn't listen, and continued to use the bad
info. So teachers are just as guilty as publishers. They have very rigid
paradigms that are difficult to challenge and change.

Also errors not only propagate to later editions, the publishers are cheap
so they lift erroneous pictures and graphs from one textbook and put them in
others. So the error propagate to other texts supposedly by other authors.

John M. Clement
Houston, TX




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Richard Tarara
Professor of Physics
Saint Mary's College

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www.saintmarys.edu/~rtarara/software.html