This is the physics book that a relative is currently using in his high school, and it is absolutely terrible. I often have to help him, and this book always leaves me scratching my head at how they get from point A to point B. I am no lightweight, either. I got straight A's in physics when I was in high school, and passed the AP exam, and I am a teacher now. If I am struggling so much, that means there is something wrong.
Each section starts out with lots of background text, aka fluff that isn't going to help at all with grasping the concepts. Unfortunately, this background sometimes goes right in to the descriptions of formulae and the concepts of the lesson, so it is difficult to skip. Luckily, the formulae are in bold, so they are at least easy to see on the page. But you have to read through the text to understand what they mean, and the text is so poorly written that you often have to read through over and over again just to wrap your head around the formula and what they are trying to say about it.
This brings me to the example problems. For what they are, they are fine, and they often make the concepts easier to understand than the actual lesson. So I have no real complaints about the examples that are included. They are just sorely inadequate, which I will explain next.
The real glaring problem with this physics course is the problems that students have to do. They take the basic concepts (which students probably didn't even fully grasp in the first place because the lessons are so poorly done), and escalate them to impossible levels. It's fine to ask students to think outside the box, but asking them to think outside the box without anything similar even mentioned in the lesson, almost no information given, and having to combine formulae in crazy ways is just absurd. The book does not prepare them for that in any way. It's like learning to swim in a pool (the lesson) and then being thrown into the middle of the ocean while a storm is raging (the problems). One problem that still sticks out to me asks the student to calculate the Bernoulli forces on a house with a flat roof of given area in a certain speed wind (no information besides flat roof, roof area, and wind speed). The problem was, the lesson had not even gotten close to explaining that kind of thing. It had briefly mentioned Bernoulli forces on airplane wings and spheres, but all of it was about pressure and different flow rates. There wasn't even a suggestion about calculating forces with only one flow rate. And there were lots of other problems with the same problem. I have eventually been able to figure out most of them by careful reading and creative combinations of formulae, but not all. And the amount of effort that these problems required of me, someone who has already learned and understood this stuff and who wrestles with math formulae pretty frequently, is just absurd. If these problems are so difficult for me to do, imagine how much worse they must be for the students who have never done it before.
I do not recommend this book. If you are a teacher, homeschooler, administrator, school board, or anyone else choosing curriculum and trying to do well by their students, do not select this book. It is a horrible excuse for a learning resource, and will only set students up for failure and disillusionment with science. A great teacher may be able to compensate for some of this, but don't rely on that. And if the teaching is great, how much better will students learn if they also have a great book. So go and find that great book. Do not buy this!
ISBN-13: 978-0130606204
ISBN-10: 9780130606204
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in great shape, and arrived quickly without incident
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