Quotes About Textbooks

Education is dominated by creationist thinking. The curriculum is too prescriptive and slow to change, teachers are encouraged to teach to the exam rather than to the pupils' or their own strengths, the textbooks are infused with instructions about what to think instead of how to think, teaching methods are more about instructing than learning

The picture of the software designer deriving his design in a rational, error-free way from a statement of requirements is quite unrealistic. No system has ever been developed in that way, and probably none ever will. Even the small program developments shown in textbooks and papers are unreal. They have been revised and polished until the author has shown us what he wishes he had done, not what actually did happen. — David Parnas Paul Clements

I learned many things from Professor Brown, including his philosophy toward research, but there is one thing he said that I recall with particular clarity: 'Do research that will be in the textbooks.' It is not easy to do such work, but this has remained my motto.

It's one of my favorite seasons of the year: Back to School. As a kid, I loved fresh school supplies, new outfits, the change of seasons, and the chance to crack open a new textbook.

The physics of undergraduate text-books is 90% true.

Textbooks in economics, which explain the economic purpose of money (a unit of account, a store of value, and a means of exchange), usually neglect to mention the chief role of money in America: a source of entertainment.

There seemed to be a mystifying universal conspiracy among textbook authors to make certain the material they dealt with never strayed too near the realm of the mildly interesting and was always at least a long-distance phone call from the frankly interesting.

Although there was no reliable way of dating periods, there was no shortage of people willing to try. The most well known early attempt30 was made in 1650, when Archbishop James Ussher of the Church of Ireland made a careful study of the Bible and other historical sources and concluded, in a hefty tome called Annals of the Old Testament, that the Earth had been created at midday on 23 October 4004 BC, an assertion that has amused historians and textbook writers ever since.

There seemed to be a mystifying universal conspiracy among textbook authors to make certain the material they dealt with never strayed too near the realm of the mildly interesting

Their textbooks would show me in grim illustration, The most hideous thing even seen in creation! The museum would commission a model in plaster Of ME, to be called, Evolution's Disaster!

For correct writing, the cultivation of patience and mental accuracy is essential. Throughout the young author's period of apprenticeship, he must keep reliable dictionaries and textbooks at his elbow; eschewing as far as possible that hasty extemporaneous manner of writing which is the privilege of more advanced students.

Codex Magica is the first book ever to crack the Illuminati code. It is a fully documented, authoritative reference source, as you'll see from its lengthy index and footnotes sections. Now they won't be able to dodge and duck, because, in addition to my exclusive investigative materials, Codex Magica also heavily quotes and relies on the Illuminati's own, most touted textbooks and manuals.

During the postwar occupation, many of MacArthur's policies reinforced and abetted the collective amnesia of the Japanese. By order of the supreme commander, there was no concerted public effort to preserve the history or memory of the war—no monuments, no references in school textbooks, no national museum.

For the price of a couple of Happy Meals, you can buy a digital textbook and stop your child from having to carry around a six-pound book.

When dictators feel their support slipping among adults, it is not unusual for them to alter school textbooks in the hope of enlisting impressionable youths in their cause.

Calculus is the mathematics of change. It describes everything from the spread of epidemics to the zigs and zags of a well-thrown curveball. The subject is gargantuan—and so are its textbooks. Many exceed a thousand pages and work nicely as doorstops.

Indeed, all books, each and every book ever written, could be said to be said to be offered to the reader as a form of self-help. Textbooks, those whores, as particularly explicit in acknowledging this, and it is with a textbook that you, at this moment, after several years in the city, are walking down the street.

you sit inside the soundproofed cocoon, hoping you aren't missing the footsteps of something coming at your back, and read textbooks or work on exercise sheets while disembodied voices whisper to you in whatever language you're studying that day. Usually they tell me horrible gory stories or describe my death in loving detail.

Because Texas is the nation's largest purchaser of textbooks, publishers have historically written to the Texas standards.)

How absurd that our students tuck their cell phones, BlackBerrys, iPads, and iPods into their backpacks when they enter a classroom and pull out a tattered textbook.

When I went to high school in Australia, I was exposed to textbooks that outlined evolutionary ideas - such as ape-like creatures turning into people. I recognized the conflict between evolutionary ideas and a literal reading of the book of Genesis.

they would not buy my ideas on robust risk management because "everyone uses these textbooks.

The alliance Massasoit negotiated with Plymouth was successful from the Wampanoag perspective, for it helped to hold off the Narragansett. But it was a disaster from the point of view of New England Indian society as a whole, for the alliance ensured the survival of Plymouth colony, which spearheaded the great wave of British immigration to Nee England. All of this was absent not only from my high school textbooks, but from the academic accounts they were based on.

But the flu was expunged from newspapers, magazines, textbooks, and society's collective memory. Crosby calls the 1918 flu "America's forgotten pandemic," noting: