So much education content is so very poor. And even the best of it... A first-tier physics professor at a munch was delighted - he regaled believing he had found an error in a highly-regarded introductory textbook! But, upon many day's of thought, and several close reads of the text, he had realized it had been very carefully worded so as to be not incorrect. And so he was so delighted - yay! He thought of this as a good state of affairs, reflecting well on the text, and associated instruction. I... afterwards wished I'd pointed out that the target audience for an intro textbook, was perhaps not well modeled as first-tier experts with a week to wrestle with and closely ponder a paragraph in order to avoid being misled.
I'm unclear on how we get better at this. I've seen OER texts with open errata databases still struggle. Perhaps a github-like fine-grain (Xanadu-like transclusion) wikipedia? Or "nLab all the fields"? Or... ??
I tried to report an open calculus textbook from Rice University’s talking about relativistic mass as an error (It’s pretty well-established as a bad concept in physics education at this point as opposed to the momentum energy 4 vector) and they wouldn’t accept my feedback.
Yeah - I've seen "but it's on lists of most common misconceptions" closed wontfix. Errata are good for "author:oops,tnx", but work much less well for confused authors and bad calls, and not at all for judgment calls and alternate approaches. Some other mechanisms are needed.
I don't know the solution either. My stats professor religiously attended and espoused these "teaching stats" conventions. But the end result was him always deferring to how the committee did things. The entire pedagogy including how he answered questions. I really didn't like this solution and it made me hate stats until some reacquaintance with it in discrete math.
But then if you're at the mercy of a professor who does things their own way, you can have cases like you give.
One thing that helped was getting syllabi from future potential classes and comparing which textbooks they used. My advisor helped me do this and I credit it with making my senior year more tolerable.
I'm unclear on how we get better at this. I've seen OER texts with open errata databases still struggle. Perhaps a github-like fine-grain (Xanadu-like transclusion) wikipedia? Or "nLab all the fields"? Or... ??