According to Diana Lambert with The Sacramento Bee, two districts, Sacramento City Unified and Folsom Cordova, have discovered pervasive errors in the adopted Macmillan/McGraw-Hill math series for K-6th. It is not uncommon for textbooks to contain a few typos, but that is not the case this time. Students cannot count the flies in the picture if there is no picture on the page! Five times three does NOT equal five, although it does in the 2nd grade math text. In addition, educators have found that lesson plans and homework assignments do not always match and there are numerous mistakes in the answer keys. According to the news article, 90 errors have been found in the 4th grade text. These texts were definitely not cheap. Prior to being added to the state-approved text list, it had been thoroughly reviewed and the publisher was supposed to make the required corrections.
What happens when a text contains so many errors? "Teachers begin to question themselves," said Folsom Cordova teacher David Chun. "It develops a student mistrust in the program." It also turns math into a Bloopers game in which students have to find the errors!
This issue of textbooks containing errors relates to educators being knowledgeable within the content area—knowledgeable enough to know when the textbook is wrong. What do you think about a published, state-approved textbook having such pervasive errors? Do you see a parallel to asking students to be responsible for revising their work? What do you think about using the errors as a way to engage students with the math concepts and challenging them to be critical of texts?
"Sacramento-area Districts Deal with Problem Math Books" was published April 1, 2010.
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