re: #981 Bubbaman

I’ll be happy to. First members of the committee were given several textbooks for consideration. They were scored on a variety of factors including cost, content, presentation, language, accompaning materials etc. Members were assigned to review different facets of the books and report to the committee at large. The photographs and depictions were part of the analysis. During the discussions of a particular text it might have been dismissed for any number of reasons including lack of teacher support, complexity, lack of appropriate depictions etc. If you would care to know more in detail I would be happy to discuss it off line.

Let me give you a few examples of the inane questions that appear in the Chemistry workbook (and I’ll only extract a couple from one chapter), How does insulation help conserve energy? What are two ways that chemist work to protect the environment? Define a pollutant.

Obviously, these aren’t the only questions but they do offer a glimpse of what is being taught.

None of those questions are inane.

The first of those questions is a great math/science application question, which puts what a student is learning in two different classes in to a context they can understand.

Again, the second question is an interesting applications question, and also puts in to context some of the real-life problems that working scientists tackle. That sounds like a question that might get a few kids to consider careers in the sciences, which is undoubtedly a good thing.

The third question is also relevant, since pollution is something that doesn’t only affect the environment. Any experiment can be tainted by pollutant substances (pollutant: a substance that contaminates; a substance that adversely altars the physical, chemical or biological properties of an environment). Pollution isn’t something that doesn’t exist - any hiker knows that you should carry water purification tablets because a lot of natural water sources have pollutants in the which you don’t want to drink - most of which aren’t human caused. In this example, bacteria, urine or feces are pollutants.

In terms of how people are depicted in books, yes it does matter. I’m a woman that works in technology, and I don’t apply for jobs where the job description is filled with “he will”;”he does”; and “he is responsible for” - I assume that if they can’t figure out that women might possibly be qualified for the job, they’re not worth my time.

There are a lot of reasons that women are under-represented in scientific and technological fields and one of the main reason is that girls simply aren’t encouraged to consider those fields, to study how women have impacted those fields, nor do they see women working in those fields to approach as mentors and teachers.

All things being equal, a book that shows kids as much diversity as possible and encourages all kids to consider careers in the sciences should be chosen over another book that only shows white guys.