I have fond memories of a visit to a children’s hostel in Hyderabad, India in 2006, and a rote answer they were taught in their textbooks:
“Why is a computer called a number cruncher?”
“A computer is called a number cruncher because it crunches numbers with its teeth.”
Dad took the children to the office where there was a computer and showed them that it had no teeth.
I’m glad to say that the children don’t go to that school any more, and that I haven’t found such egregious errors in textbooks for any subject more recently (I’m over there again at present), and there is less rote in their education than there was, though still more than is ideal as it’s hard when the teachers and students are all used to that method.
There are well designed, carefully planned and high quality textbooks by NCERT, which is part of the school board.
But many students and parents don't prefer them. There is a proliferation of 'cut-to-the-chase' guidebooks (similar to Cliffnotes but much much worse) that they use to cram before the exam. What you describe is very likely one of these.
OT, so briefly: I'm interested in the possibility of applying much greater than usual domain expertise to create science education content which is more correct and insightful, focused on integrated transferable understanding. An unresolved challenge is how to make such available in a form and setting that actually gets it used. A quick check of the NCERT science textbooks turns up error and opportunity for improvement. So, is there some setting in which one might say "for NCERT class foo, book Science, chapter bar, here is a free correcting-and-extending supplement", and potentially see significant use? Tnx...
Sure, this will be great. Please do not assume that NCERT textbook writers are careless tyros - they include some of the best educators in India who have spent time in improving presentation of material - of course, there may be errors and gaps, and there is always scope for improvement. (For example, Fields Medallists like Manjul Bharghava are at least peripherally interested (1))
If you are earnest, you can contact people in the math and science community in India. This will mean substantially thorough vetting, because the corrections will themselves have to be checked across multiple sources for consistency. (The worst examples are in Chemistry. As you keep digging, you will start finding that B.Sc. material contradicts High School material, and M.Sc. material confirms the High School material. None of these are "incorrect", it is a matter of how deep one wants to go.)
A good place to start will be to look at the list of editors listed inside the textbook, look up their webpages and try them one after the other.
Thanks! Less briefly (the front page having moved on)...
> tyros [...] best educators
How to explain... The publisher of a cell biology tome of a textbook, praised their hundred-ish authors, and I half-seriously quipped, "Great! And how many for the second page?" Or... It seems every decade or so, some astronomy professor emeritus goes around suggesting it's embarrassing that in a field with an unusual focus on introductory textbooks, mostly authored by astronomy professors, the coverage of what color the Sun is, is so incoherent, that even most first-tier astronomy graduate students have it wrong. Despite being trivially explainable to a 5-year old. Hasn't changed yet. I chatted with a leading astronomy education researcher and educator, and my impression was they'd given up on near-term large-scale change. Or... Can one see an atomic nucleus with naked eye? To get the correct, rather than the 'almost always correct but not here' answer, and learn of a photo, you need someone with a research focus on nucleus dynamics. It's a small subfield, and if MIT has anyone, I didn't easily find them. So my quip is "MIT in isolation lacks the physics domain expertise to easily create an awesome childrens' picture book about atoms".
My suggestion is that transformatively better science education content is possible, but creating it would seemingly require collaboration on a scope more similar to that of the original science research, than of current informal artisanal handicraft authorship with a smattering of science education research.
And that's before hitting bottlenecks like a "yeah, that would be an insightful way to teach this topic... but my students are taking the medical school entrance exam soon, and it only tests for superficial understanding here, and our time together is limited, so I'd be doing my students a disservice if I didn't focus on the what they need for the test, lest they're years of dreams and effort go for naught".
> try them [editors] one after the other
A (US) OER astronomy text has a nice online ticket database for errata. The text did the usual getting the color of the Sun wrong. Folks pointed that out. It received a common remedy - just enough of a tweak that if you already know the correct answer, you can closely read the unclear text as not being wrong. But with no hope at all that students are getting it. Last I saw, the ticket was, despite criticism, tagged 'good enough, WONTFIX'.
So there are a lot of needles I can't move, or are not worth my pushing on.
Now maybe there's some part of the Indian education community with a greater emphasis than these, on non-rote non-test deep transferable understanding of the physical world? I'd love to hear of it.
But my current thought is to target early primary with supplemental material. Teaching things far earlier than they're usually taught (escaping teaching to tests), and better enough that the misconceptions avoided can pay for the effort cost.
In the US, parts of the homeschooling community might be receptive. One tactic might be to create a supplement for a text already in widespread use. The mention of NCERT texts, had me wondering if there was somewhere one might say fruitfully drop a pdf, "Oh, you're using NCERT's solar system intro? Yeah, it has the color of the Sun wrong. It will be easier for you to understand light and color if we fix that - here you go... Oh, and that bit about planetary heat coming from the Sun? Well, ok, but it's more understandable if we explicitly mention cold space, and here's a nice example of ...".
> Chemistry [...] contradicts
Yeah. Chemistry education research describes chemistry education content using adjectives like "incoherent", and as leaving both students and teachers steeped in misconceptions. A fun US state curriculum spec required teaching both "atoms are conserved by chemical reactions" and "atoms are electrically neutral - when charged, they become instead ions" - two historical threads of definition, presented together for the entanglement and drowning of students. Years back, there was a fun letter from the editor of a chem ed journal, that was a plea "yes it needs to be gutted, but there's value too here which we should preserve...". Sigh.
Given the severely challenging constraints and incentives around textbooks, it seems to me unlikely that "talk to the textbook authors" can be a path towards transformative improvement in science education content. In any country. All the existing Sun diagrams might be revised perhaps, but adding helpful examples, or a treatment of scale, simply won't fit there. So I wondered what opportunities for workarounds might exist in an Indian context? Perhaps analogous to some homeschooling mailinglists in the US? (And if anyone has favorites, I'd love to hear of them). Thanks again.
a major problem is that teachers are using these "crambooks" too when setting exam questions so basically you get a leg up when you study from them vs the official coursebooks.
you'll literally see the same questions there so obv it's easier to study from that than from the coursebooks
source: experienced this in my math classes in the CBSE board of education from india
a friend of my parents in Bombay changed his kid's school because not only did the teacher set homework and tests from the guidebooks, but would not accept any other answer than what the book supplied. original work was marked wrong.
Third grade textbooks in late 90s in Kochi, India teach us that a CPU has an Arithemetic Logic Unit and a Control Unit. A light pen is an input device that can be held againt a Video Display Unit. They repeat this for a few years.
Huh, until now I've only ever thought of "number cruncher" as a euphemism for "processes numbers rapidly like a creature crunching through food".
But, now you say this ... early 'computers' (eg adding machines) of course did have teeth (they used mechanical gears) and would literally be 'number crunchers' and so would fit a description of "crunches numbers with it's teeth" as a literal term.
Now, a number cruncher in UK English is used to refer to a person, like an accountant: I suppose in the past they crunched numbers using mathematical machines (analogue calculators).
Also, of note is that originally a 'computer' was a job role of someone operating a mathematical machine.
Obviously then a 'computer' became the machine, and it still 'crunched numbers' except it did it silently using transistors.
It sounds like that textbook was not wrong but perhaps just needed explanation.
I have fond memories of a visit to a children’s hostel in Hyderabad, India in 2006, and a rote answer they were taught in their textbooks:
“Why is a computer called a number cruncher?”
“A computer is called a number cruncher because it crunches numbers with its teeth.”
Dad took the children to the office where there was a computer and showed them that it had no teeth.
I’m glad to say that the children don’t go to that school any more, and that I haven’t found such egregious errors in textbooks for any subject more recently (I’m over there again at present), and there is less rote in their education than there was, though still more than is ideal as it’s hard when the teachers and students are all used to that method.