I was taught the N pole of a magnet was short for "N seeking pole".
Yes, that was the terminology in many textbooks years ago. I believe it
was an unsuccessful attempt to help students with their misconceptions.
By that terminology the pole in Canada would be a S seeking pole, hmmm.
Actually that terminology was probably even more confusing. Students
often do not have a firm grasp of the meaning North or South. The
problem comes in when they fail to make the distinction between the
usage of that term for magnets and the very different, but related,
usage in geography. In addition there are a number of students who
label up as North if you have used the compass coordinates in class.
Perhaps they even label N as up in geography classes.
Looking at the World Book encyclopedia, that terminology is not used at
all. It actually has a number of good observations but the first
sentence is extremely bad. "Magnetism is a force that acts between
certain objects called magnets."
It is actually very useful to use the terms N, S, E, W in teaching
position, and also when teaching vectors. However it makes student's
lack of understanding of the distinctions between coordinate references,
graphs, and world maps painfully obvious. Part of this problem probably
stems from books and teachers which consistently use certain terminology
in very limited rigid senses. For example math books always having X
point to the right the page. In math students always see the
coordinates laid out with equal spacing with the origin in the middle.
Science books tend to arrange straight line graphs with the line always
going at a 45 degree angle through the corners of the grid squares, and
students seldom see graphs which do not go through zero. Just flipping
through some of these books confirms this. Then of course math
introduces X as THE variable rather than starting students out with a
more natural system of using words as variables, then shortening them to
single letters as an easy to write nickname for the original words.
Students are often not required to take geography, and then it is
treated as a memorization subject.
There is an allied problem to the N, S problem for magnets vs.
geography. That is the +, - problem for charges. Again students tend
to confuse this terminology with the usage of + and - in math. The fact
that they do not really understand the number line and proper usage of +
or - compounds this problem. Ben Franklin could very well have labeled
the charges fur and silk. The idea that - is the absence of something
is a very big problem for students when it comes to - indicating an
excess of electrons (ignoring other - particles in elementary classes).
These problems are also indicative of an overall pattern of lack of
thinking skills. The ability to make these distinctions is high on the
Bloom taxonomy, but I am not sure which of the Piagetian tasks it
correlates with.