Math Forum Discussions

Gideon

Posts: 13
Registered: 1/25/05

Re: Geometry Textbook Suggestions for Gifted Math Program?
Posted: Jan 7, 2005 6:56 PM

Plain Text

Wow.

Do you realize the additional cost for current, politically correct, textbooks
with 1000+ gloss pages of multi-colored pretty pictures? My relatively tiny
high school geometry textbook (A First Course in Geometry - Mallory, Meserve,
Skeen) was a compact book with 90% black ink and 10% blue ink. The
book weighed 2 1/2 pounds. My son's contemporary high school geometry
text book weighed 8 pounds and 80% of the book was multi-colored tangential
garbage. I found it painful to attempt to plow through this 8 pound textbook
in search of the few hidden bits of intellectual content that were so well
hidden in a "USA Today" style wasteland of multicolored micro-distractions.

What are the downsides? For one, in my high school math classes, a
"bonus" was offered to any student who found an error in the textbook.
If was often very difficult to find an error even in a first addition. Today,
fourth and fifth additions are still loaded with errors because the books
are so much bigger and the authors are so much less competent.

Also, even when inflationary factors are discounted, modern textbooks
are unbelievably expensive. Why? Because the books weigh 3-4 times
as much, have glossy paper, and have a multi-color format on every page.
Simple linear logic would indicate that a textbook may cost 8 times as
much as it should. There are fixed costs associated with publication,
but I'm still confident that the books are overpriced by at least a factor
of 5 in order to satisfy the contemporary love affair with fluff.

Let's invest textbook money where it is needed - intellectual content.

==========================

Sky Rookie wrote in message ...
FWIW this is the book that was used in every school I've had a preclinical
in. I've taught out of it for an honors class, and have found it to be a
great book. The only problem I may have with it is the format of pages, it's
all in black and red. To me that is pretty boring, I like colorful
textbooks. However, content wise it's a great book.

John

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