English book full of spelling mistakes [Title edited by MNHQ <ironic grin>]

[BerylStreep]

DD is Year 5. Her school has purchased new English books (Collins English Skills 5), but the problem is they are absolutely full of spelling mistakes.

For example, on last night's homework alone, there was

Gibralter
Captian
interupted

Over the last 2 weeks we have also had

Burgler
Calender
The worlds oceans

I have raised it with the teacher, but she seems uninterested. If I were the head teacher, I would be sending the books back to the publisher demanding a refund or corrected texts. It just seems unacceptable to have an English textbook that contains so many basic spelling mistakes.

What do you think?

Have emailed this thread to HarperCollins - I want to know what is going on.

I think you should raise it with the HT.

As you say, even of they can't send them back, they should at the very least send out a letter to all parents and tell the dc that the book contains numerous mistakes.

LOL at the "You're so over-demanding!" response.
Would you be like that with a surgeon who takes out the wrong ovary? Or even if you were served the wrong meal in a restaurant?

Of course you can expect them to be replaced on the next lorry. It's appalling. They are wrong, unfit to be used. Chances are Collins already know about the errors, but don't necessarily know who's got them. School only has to ring Collins or their supplier to get replacements. Unless they did get them from a dodgy supplier, but whether they did or not, they can't continue to use them.

Google Collins Skills 5 answers - I just downloaded the whole book, which looks fine but boring. Lots of the exercises are proofreading, where children have to spot deliberate errors....can you tell what I'm going to ask next, OP?!

But the class teacher can do something about it. She can go to the head or the Literacy co-ordinator and complain that the books are unusable and they need to complain to Collins.

The OP shouldn't have to do that because the teacher has fobbed her off with 'there's nothing we can do about that.' TBH I'm not sure the OP should have had to complain at all. It should already have been spotted by the school.

Feenie, I think the OP already answered that earlier in the thread.

i have experience of working in this industry, and agree with CocktailQueen - books like this go through a lot of checks and edits and there's no way all the editors and proofers involved would fail to notice all these errors. Either it's an act of sabotage by someone involved in the process, or somehow the wrong, unedited file was sent to print instead of the finalised version.

Collins would want to know ASAP and recall the books and pulp them I would think.

Or if they are fakes, Collins need to know about it and start a legal process.

You MUST find out who is purchasing the books and where from? Are you sure that the whole lot of books bought by the school is not actually fake? If I were you, I would raise the alarm with the head of school. Imagine how many schools might pay for this type of books. This is definitely something should not be ignored.

That's horrifying. I work in publishing (not educational). Once we sent the in corrected proof file to the printer with scores of errors. We pulped the entire run. I would imagine that HC would be horrified to hear there's an edition out there with this level of error - it's bad news for their reputation.

I wonder if the school has (mistakenly) bought pirated copies? In fact I've just heard from a librarian who has had a pile of pirated copies of our book turn up after someone thought they had a great deal and ordered from Russia .

My technical abilities are letting me down. I have taken photos of examples of the mistakes, have tried to upload them here, but they aren't working.

I can pretty much guarantee I will end up with multiple posts with photos when I finally get it working.

Damn autocorrect. That's 'uncorrected proof'

Will try doing one at a time.

Ok. You must have a pirated batch or something. But they must not be used in class under any circumstances. Let us know what happens OP. Will be interested to see what HarperCollins say when they see this thread.

Another

Can't read that - old lady eyes

I could go on and on.

Omg - can see 'burgler' there. Shocking!

Don't think it's ever good to ask children to replace the word 'then' with 'almost immediatly'.

This is not uncommon unfortunately. It often happens with text books that are produced after the govt has changed the curriculum. Every big curriculum change is always done on a ridiculous timescale ( with the latest new curriculum the roll out date was Sept 2014 and they hadn't finished writing it at Easter!) and then publishers rush to get out their 'new curriculum' compliant books. These are often riddled with errors - when the last govt bought out the the 'new' numeracy curriculum, my pupils & I had hours of fun finding all the mistakes in a well known education publishers new numeracy scheme - impossible calculations, wrongly numbered questions, page numbers that went backwards, misspelt words etc. Are these 'new' national curriculum books? Publishers usually print a second run and sort it out - the school should ask for replacements ASAP

Effic I can't see anywhere that suggests it is a new revision. It says inside the cover that it was published in 2011, first published in 2006.

You may also want to tell the HT that research has shown that exposure (ie, reading, seeing) to misspellings increases the likelihood of using the wrong spelling. As the children are young, those misspellings will get locked in their heads and they will find it hard to get them right in the future. I still have problems with 'millennium' as a result of taking part in a replication of that research!

At dd's primary, they worked almost entirely from photocopied sheets. I wonder if they'd had a similar problem and one of the secretaries had to go through one of the books correcting everything, and then making multiple photocopies of the corrected pages.

I do remember absent mindedly writing "tautological" and underlining a phrase in one of dd's books. I don't know who was more embarrassed, me or dd's teacher!

How about underlining all the errors in pencil, then showing the HT? You can rub it it afterwards if necessary.

That's astonishing. I used to edit literacy books, and while it's true that the odd mistake might slip through, the number you've found is completely unacceptable. I'd definitely raise it with the head if the teacher won't. If the books have been around since 2006 then it's highly unlikely that Collins aren't aware of the problem, and I can't understand how they can possibly still be selling them.

They sell this book on Amazon and the pages that they show there to advertise the book on look inside indeed have spelling mistakes!