From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on polar.synack.me X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-1.9 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00 autolearn=ham autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit X-Google-Thread: 103376,83242c369c5dc9b0 X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public From: ok@goanna.cs.rmit.EDU.AU (Richard A. O'Keefe) Subject: Re: Book REview Date: 1996/05/13 Message-ID: <4n6h3o$ig1@goanna.cs.rmit.EDU.AU> X-Deja-AN: 154524752 references: <4mk0vc$opp@goanna.cs.rmit.edu.au> <3190CEC1.5799@io.com> <4mu2v7$7s1@fang.dsto.defence.gov.au> <319576AC.32DD@gte.net> organization: Comp Sci, RMIT, Melbourne, Australia nntp-posting-user: ok newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Date: 1996-05-13T00:00:00+00:00 List-Id: dave@gte.net writes: >Agreed, but like Feldman said in one of his posts, the first edition >has been out for several years, and no-one has complained until now. It would >seem that his Americanisms do not bother most people. Take 500 lines: Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. (a) How do you know that "no-one has complained until now"? For all you or I know to the contrary, _every_ Asian student might have complained to his or her lecturer. All you know is that no-one has told _you_ about any complaints. (b) Nobody *at RMIT* has complained up till now because nobody here has used the first edition of the book, or Koffman's Turbo Pascal book from which it derives. Some people don't complain, they just refrain from buying the book. (c) With all of my complaints about Feldman's book, it is head and shoulders above *every* C textbook I have seen, and I've seen a lot of them. That I spent time raving on about Americanisms instead of gross errors in the code and radical misunderstandings about Ada is *good*; in NONE of the roughly a score of C textbooks I have looked at did I ever get as far as complaining about the index or about cultural bias! If lecturers have been using Feldman's books, and not passing on such student complaints about cultural bias as they may perhaps have had, it could just be an overwhelming relief at being able to use a book written by somebody who actually knows what he is talking about and can get his basic facts straight that makes them feel it would be ungrateful to pass the complaints on. Let me quote the October 1992 issue of Scientific American, quoting William J. Bennetta, editor of "The Textbook Letter": with the exception of some books for advanced placement courses, most [US school] textbooks are "wretched junk" written by "clowns who know nothing about the subject matter". In my view, this opinion could be applied with equal force to most of the programming language textbooks I've seen. (The record is held by a small Prolog textbook I once saw in a university bookshop, which had an example on nearly every page, and EVERY SINGLE one was syntactically illegal.) For some reason, Ada books seem to be the pick of the bunch. (d) The US has a "culture of dissent"; shared by New Zealand, Australia, Canada, and the UK, and some European countries. In the educational context, it seems to be strongest in the US. The students who are worst affected by cultural bias are the very same students raised in "cultures of conformity" where it would be *extremely* rude for a student to question a teacher or a textbook. The more affected a student is by the issue, the *less* likely he or she is to raise it. For example, it is not without signifance that I belong to a church which refuses to have an official creed (so I share the "culture of dissent") and once memorised the words to "Deck the Halls with Boston Charlie" and was planning to use "Rackey Coon Chile" as the nickname of my new daughter if she had been a son (so I am pretty much Americanised) and had a _great_ time working in California. (1) I know which things in the book are "American" and which are "Western". My students don't. One reason why overseas students in Australia might not care to complain is that they don't know which things are "host country" matters they would look stupid for not knowing, and which things are "foreign" to the host country. (2) The points which I identified as puzzling are points which puzzle someone *friendly towards* US culture and exposed to it from childhood up. If E. D. Hirsch is right, I probably understand more of the entries in "Cultural Literacy" than most US high school students. This means that what I have found is probably just the tip of the iceberg. (For what it's worth, "GPA" and "sophomore" are not in "Cultural Literacy".) (3) I am willing to challenge authority. I can believe at one and the same time the ideas "Feldman is a vastly better teacher than me and knows a lot more than I do" and "on a particular point, I can be right and Feldman wrong". I gave a concrete example of what the "culture of conformity" can do to a student when I mentioned an Asian student who was having great difficulty with an assignment because he didn't know what the word "descendants" meant, and didn't dare to ask his lecturer face to face or to raise the issue in the "public" newsgroup for that subject. (The lecturer in question is one of the most approachable people in the department who has shown great willingness to explain and clarify this very assignment.) Because I had the label "tutor" for this subject, because he and I were alone, and *because I asked* him why his code had a particular form, he reluctantly explained the problem. >Nevertheless, I do partially agree with you and Richard: Either Addison-Wesley >should publish special non-American editions or Feldman should add some >footnotes for the international editions explaining the Americanisms. However, >I do *not* think that he should alter the editions being sold in the U.S. (except, >of course, the errors should be corrected). There are two separable issues here. - What ought to be done for Feldman's book in the short term? In the short term, reprinting with corrections that don't affect pagination is economically feasible; revision is not. - What ought to be done about CS textbooks in general? With all due respect, the idea of having separate US/international editions is less sensible than it might at first appear. What are just some of the major problems with the idea? * Just because a class is geographically located in the US does not mean that the students in it would not benefit from an international edition. I am told that US classes often include a high proportion of overseas students or comparatively recent immigrants. Don't forget the US citizens raised in Spanish-speaking families. * Having two versions of a book puts up production costs. Book prices in Australia are already high, except for the ones that are very high. The last thing we need is any practice that will put the prices up higher. It's no use having the perfect book if the students can't afford it. * Having two versions of a book puts up MAINTENANCE costs. There are two versions to revise for the next edition. This has got to increase the cost, or the likelihood of letting proofreading errors slip through, or more likely both. * Nobody has yet presented _evidence_ that the _accidental_ Americanisms in this book provide any advantage to anyone. Will someone have the goodness to explain to me precisely how leaving Konrad Zuse and Alan Turing out of a history of milestones in computing does anything to help US students? Let's face it, if the Americanisms in this particular book were deliberate, surely the colour name translation example (program 3.5) would translate between English and _Spanish_ colour names, not English and French. (By the way, my French teachers would have had a fit at the idea that "yellow" and "jaune" could be identified.) -- Fifty years of programming language research, and we end up with C++ ??? Richard A. O'Keefe; http://www.cs.rmit.edu.au/~ok; RMIT Comp.Sci.