Blatant mistakes found in chemistry textbooks for 9th grade
Wednesday, January 4th, 2012 1:04:04 by Fayyaz Yaseen
Blatant mistakes found in chemistry textbooks for 9th grade
Lahore: (Tuesday, January 03, 2012) Education has never been a serious issue for those at the helm of affairs in Pakistan, perhaps that is the reason that no one could take notice of the blunders made in chemistry textbooks being
taught both in private and public schools of Punjab.
One wonders that how the review and selection committees and senior officials of the Punjab Textbook Board (PTB), which outsourced the book development to the private sector, approved it without noticing the mistakes.
The third impression of the textbook’s first edition is available in the market these days which means the mistakes could not be noticed and rectified after its first and second impressions.
The statement on page 31 of Chapter 1, “Calculate the mass of 5.5 million molecules of water. It is nearly equal to the population on the earth” is sufficient to understand the glaring mistakes in the textbook being taught to hundreds of thousands of students
across the province.
According to a retired teacher, Zafar Mehdi Zafar, who had taught the subject of Chemistry for decades, the statement on page 9 of the textbook “The relative atomic mass is a pure number and hence it has no unit” is wrong. He says the correct statement is,
“The relative atomic mass is a ratio, hence it has no units.”
Zafar Mehdi had raised the issue of mistakes in the book of Chemistry through a letter to Chief Minister Shahbaz Sharif in May 2011 but to no avail.
“It is unfortunate that no-one bothered to look into the serious issue,” Zafar states. He also claims that he had informed PTB Chairman Izhar Ahmed too about the mistakes but nothing happened and the book containing mistakes is being taught at schools.
Mr. Mehdi further claims that the whole paragraph on page 12, titled “Empirical formula of diamond” is wrong as, according to him, elements do not have empirical formula.
Similarly, he says, the Multiple Choice Questions (MCQs) No 1 and 3 on page 28 of the textbook are wrong, pointing out that a number of figures mentioned in the book such as Fig 1.2 on page 12 and Fig 3.3 on page 65 are wrong.
Explaining this aspect he says, in Fig 3.1 on page 53 element B and K are missing while on the last peak instead of Ca, it should be Cs. Academic circles are of the view that the Punjab government should constitute a high-powered review committee to find out
mistakes and rectify them in textbooks and suggest action against those responsible for playing with future of students.
Short URL: https://www.newspakistan.pk/?p=8123
Posted by Fayyaz Yaseen
on Jan 4 2012. Filed under Pakistan.
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