My sister went to high school in the US for a year some time in the early nineties - we are Norwegian. She got perfect grades and some kind of award for American history. She explained it by saying, US textbooks wanted you to succeed. Whereas she was used to the Norwegian ones which were only out to rank you (on a bell curve - the grading guidelines didn't have set requirement, but instead told teachers to only give 5% the top grade), and if that meant being obtuse and reader-hostile, that was fine. If you were a really dedicated student you'd push through, right? So she thought it was ridiculously easy, but she didn't necessarily learn less.

I can't speak for the US textbooks at that level, but I can confirm that the Norwegian ones were pretty lousy, especially in history. I particularly remember they loved to hide crucial details in margin notes or image texts.

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kccqzy 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

The U.S. textbooks are so much better than textbooks in many other countries. They are thick and heavy, but then that is because they tend to explain the same concept in multiple different ways so students with different thinking modes can find their own explanation that clicks.

Furthermore, having good textbooks papers over the fact that in the U.S. the qualification and ability of teachers vary so much across poorer and richer school districts. A smart student in a poor school district can use the textbooks to a greater advantage.

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59percentmore 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

When you get new textbooks. You still have the "new books every year or so" vs "we finally got hand-me-downs from our neighbor district after 10 years" divide.

I'd also push back against the idea that district wealth necessarily determines instructor quality. There's a lot that goes into surviving a wealthier area, and it isn't necessarily a matter of skill or experience. How well you navigate the interpersonal gamut also plays in (e.g., are you willing to compromise your ethics to keep happy the over-involved parents who care more about the grade than academic progress?).

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dfdydx 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Coming from somewhere else, US textbooks feel super watery - low signal to noise ratio, too much hand holding.

	▲	lo_zamoyski an hour ago \| parent [-]
		I would tend to agree with this. A combination between low-info fluff and childish presentation. It feels like being bombarded with a technicolor fireworks display of obfuscation and mystification. Maybe it's the gimmick of "edutainment" and the goofy idea that you need to inject fanfare and folderol into education to appeal to students that created this mess. If you look at older textbooks, before education publishing became the extortionist big business it is today (like, say, Pauling's book on general chemistry[0] - which you can still get from Dover - to name one), you will find many that are lucid and intellectually satisfying. Heck, look at scholastic pedagogic texts (like the Summa[1]) and you can follow exactly what's being said. Even if you don't grasp something, or grasp it correctly, it isn't because the writing or presentation are shit. It's because you need to keep going, but you know how to keep going. You have handles on the content and not just some huge, impenetrable, and slippery orb looming over you. It's eye-opening, because our entire media regime, and the sensibilities it entrenches, seems to suggest that education used to be dull, mindless, and joyless before the great "progressive" innovators blessed us with their wisdom, forgetting the origins of the artes liberales and some of the 19th and 20th century turns[2] that did actually debase education into something vulgar by comparison, something convenient for industry and the state. [0] https://archive.org/details/generalchemistry00paulrich [1] https://aquinas.cc/la/en/~ST.I.Q1 [2] I am not claiming everything was perfect centuries ago, or that there were no good pedagogical developments since then.

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eigencoder 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Back when they had textbooks. Increasingly the curriculum is online and restricts exploration

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kccqzy 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Textbooks don’t need a lot of revisions though. Basic math has not really changed that much. One of my favorite textbooks I used as a kid was written ten years before I was born.

	▲	wombatpm an hour ago \| parent [-]
		When I started Chemistry in college, Professor Zumdahl said to by a copy of the CRC Press Handbook of Chemistry and Physics. Whether it was new or used didn’t really matter - it’s not like Boltzmann’s constant is changing all that often.

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59percentmore 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I had a minor experience with what sounds like this style of pedagogy in my high school physics and calculus courses. The lecture and grading styles effectively pitted students against one another. I suppose this works for confident and competitive students, particularly if you can get in the instructor's good graces, but I was merely curious and dealing with self-esteem issues (physical late/never bloomer) and stereotype threat. I continued excelling in my other classes and just switched off in those.

Without getting too into the weeds, I did a lot better in classes where the teacher was some category of "votes blue", identity-wise (race, gender, sexuality, even height).

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sota_pop an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

Always interesting to revisit the idea of the theoretical role “education” plays in society. One might view the primary objective of school as a sorting machine or one that imparts knowledge for its own sake. These two things aren’t specifically mutually exclusive, but you can have only one “primary objective”.

Only having experience within the US myself, I have always found the idea of “forced ranking” for grades a little odd. Though admittedly, I do skew towards being (perhaps a bit too) idealistic in that sense.