posted 11 years ago
My son is having trouble with high school chemistry. He says his teacher is bad. I told him to read his textbook.
Well, last night I took a look at his textbook, and I've never seen such drivel in a high school textbook. It reads like amateurish computer program documentation. That is, every other sentence is completely unintelligible to anyone who doesn't already know the material it presumes to explain, e.g. by defining concepts in terms of other concepts that it has not yet introduced or explained, and with ambiguous assertions that could be right or wrong depending upon how the unexplained terms (such as "property") are interpreted.
Chapter 1 mentions substances, elements, physical properties, chemical properties -- each term being explained in terms of the others, but before the other terms have been satisfactorily explained.
Can anyone recommend an elementary chemistry text follows good technical writing principles -- so that a smart student with a good memory can read from page 1 to the end without ever being confused or failing to understand what was just said?