Some of this has happened before but will not happen again

A few months ago in a used book store I came across a copy of Max Planck's textbook on thermodynamics.  I am amused by this description on the inside cover:

"...meeting the needs of both students and research workers..."

The text is dense, terse, and requires effort of the reader.  I neither agree nor disagree with the idea that it can meet the needs of students, because the concept of a student's "needs" must be unpacked.  What are those "needs"?  By what criteria do we distinguish between what we might properly call a "need" and what might be better framed as a student's mere "desire" or "wish"?  Which wishes are reasonable for a textbook author to comply with?  And who are the students that we have in mind?

While I offer no firm conclusion on whether this textbook meets the needs of students as I might wish to frame the concept, I can say with great confidence that most of my colleagues would denounce this book as inappropriate for the needs of the modern student.  And so we see how the world has changed.

The Sacred Scrolls are not inerrant.  While some of the the textbooks of the past are similar to the present, it's clear that Planck's idea of appropriate pedagogy is not a good match to the modern understanding.  But don't worry:  While we might not uphold Planck's intellectual standards, we do allow trash TV stars to become President, and we do everything in our power to make college degrees more attainable.

This was the dawning of the text of our lives, of Halliday

I went and got a 1962 printing of the first edition of the classic physics textbook by Halliday and Resnick. I only got the first volume, but the topics in that volume are the ones that I have the most experience teaching. In many ways I actually feel better about the present, because the end-of-chapter problems are actually not so different from today.  They are harder, but only slightly harder, and the amount of calculus used is actually not much greater than in today's books.  All of this has happened before and has happened again.

On the other hand, the first edition is actually readable, not being overloaded with side-bars and graphics and other distractions.  It's hard to blame Kids These Days for not reading the books when we've worked so hard to make them unreadable.

Some heroes look better in close view rather than worse

Many of our heroes turn out to look worse when examined close-up, because they are flawed humans.  However, Galileo is starting to look better and better.  What do we really learn about him in science classes?  We learn that he got in trouble for saying that the earth goes around the sun, that he discovered some satellites of Jupiter, dropped balls from the Leaning Tower of Pisa (except he probably didn't), and then in more advanced classes we learn that he enunciated a principle of relativity that was simpler than Einstein's (and eventually supplanted by Einstein).  We also learn, as we go on, that the politics surrounding his trial were a bit more subtle than the popular accounts, that he didn't actually invent the telescope (just made really good use of it), and that he didn't drop balls from a tower.

So what's left?  Mostly just the principle that x'=x-vt.  Which seems...trivial.

Of course, when you start reading his work you find out that making and properly using a good telescope was no easier then than it is now, and that interpreting the images required very subtle reasoning.  You learn that elucidating principles of relativity that we brush past in a page or two took a great deal of careful thought to cut through the conceptual fog of his time.  You learn that besides the handful of things for which he was most famous he also worked on many other questions, and had to do careful work and cut through a great deal of conceptual fog and rule out a great many competing theories, not living in an era where the right answers are known and taken for granted.

In other words, you learn that he was pretty smart.

All too often we take a principle or discovery that required years of careful work by some of the greatest thinkers in human history, and we reduce them to a few pages.  In more traditional lecture classes, you might spend half a class session on somebody's most important discovery before moving to the next topic.  In the more reformed, interactive classes, you might spend A WHOLE CLASS!!! on somebody's most famous discovery.  This means that you spend an entire 50 minutes on something that took a genius and his/her collaborators several years to work out.  50 minutes!  (Even worse, in the reformed, interactive classes you spend 30 of those minutes discussing a hero's life's work with a semi-literate 18 year-old who graduated from the same lousy education system that miseducated you.  That seems like an underwhelming way to encounter the fruit of years of intellectual effort.

I have no easy answer for what to do about this, but it just feels wrong to reduce this work to "Here's two  pages and an apocryphal tale about some eccentricity of this scientist."  I know that if we spent weeks reading Galileo and then several more weeks reading Newton and so forth we would never get anywhere in freshman physics.  Still, I wish we could do our heroes more justice than quick treatment and urban legends.

The hour is very, very late

I'll step away from blogging about books that I'm reading, and instead blog about an article.  Today in the Chronicle they published a press release (dolled up to look like journalism) about a company called zyBooks.  They apparently produce interactive online activities and presentations.  I think that such things are fine in many contexts, and can be a useful component of many sorts of classes.  So far, so good.

What bothers me is that the thrust of the sales pitch is not simply "These are great activities that make people think."  Rather, the thrust is that students don't like books, don't like lots of text, and so we should adapt.  It is one thing to believe that reading and activities are both important parts of a college-level science class.  I believe that such a stance is referred to as "common sense" or even "consensus."  It is quite another thing to disparage text and reading.  It is a sign of just how deeply-rooted the anti-intellectualism really is.

What's funny about this is that the physics profession already tried replacing a "wall of text" with graphics and activities. Introductory textbooks don't have a whole lot of plain text.  Instead, there are lots of sidebars with definitions and questions and color pictures and diagrams, and lots of section breaks and examples and checkpoints.  This style is commonly mocked for its sensory overload, and few students seem enamored of it.  Honestly, I can't blame them for not reading.  I've had students tell me how much they like Moore's Six Ideas-Unit R (which I use to teach relativity) or Eisberg and Resnick's Quantum Physics of Atoms, Molecules, Solids, Nuclei, and Particles (which I use to teach sophomore-level quantum physics).  Both books have a certain amount of diagrams, and Moore definitely has more bells and whistles than Eisberg, but they have far more text than the standard freshman books (and I've never had a student praise the freshman books).  My own experience is consistent with the student feedback: I can't say that my standard freshman books made much of an impression on me, but Feynman, Landau, and Purcell (all of which had far more text) certainly did.

The rot runs deep and the hour is late.  Reading is openly disparaged in marketing to faculty.  I know a person who has openly published articles bragging about how his general education class (ostensibly in a "science and society" category) requires no reading and is graded entirely on multiple-choice questions.  (It is only the thinnest pretext of civility that keeps me from naming names.)

I don't know what will happen next, but I think I'll take a break and read a book.