WhiteHat Jr’s founder files $2.6M defamation suit against critic

> tyros [...] best educators

How to explain... The publisher of a cell biology tome of a textbook, praised their hundred-ish authors, and I half-seriously quipped, "Great! And how many for the second page?" Or... It seems every decade or so, some astronomy professor emeritus goes around suggesting it's embarrassing that in a field with an unusual focus on introductory textbooks, mostly authored by astronomy professors, the coverage of what color the Sun is, is so incoherent, that even most first-tier astronomy graduate students have it wrong. Despite being trivially explainable to a 5-year old. Hasn't changed yet. I chatted with a leading astronomy education researcher and educator, and my impression was they'd given up on near-term large-scale change. Or... Can one see an atomic nucleus with naked eye? To get the correct, rather than the 'almost always correct but not here' answer, and learn of a photo, you need someone with a research focus on nucleus dynamics. It's a small subfield, and if MIT has anyone, I didn't easily find them. So my quip is "MIT in isolation lacks the physics domain expertise to easily create an awesome childrens' picture book about atoms".

My suggestion is that transformatively better science education content is possible, but creating it would seemingly require collaboration on a scope more similar to that of the original science research, than of current informal artisanal handicraft authorship with a smattering of science education research.

And that's before hitting bottlenecks like a "yeah, that would be an insightful way to teach this topic... but my students are taking the medical school entrance exam soon, and it only tests for superficial understanding here, and our time together is limited, so I'd be doing my students a disservice if I didn't focus on the what they need for the test, lest they're years of dreams and effort go for naught".

> try them [editors] one after the other

A (US) OER astronomy text has a nice online ticket database for errata. The text did the usual getting the color of the Sun wrong. Folks pointed that out. It received a common remedy - just enough of a tweak that if you already know the correct answer, you can closely read the unclear text as not being wrong. But with no hope at all that students are getting it. Last I saw, the ticket was, despite criticism, tagged 'good enough, WONTFIX'.

So there are a lot of needles I can't move, or are not worth my pushing on.

Now maybe there's some part of the Indian education community with a greater emphasis than these, on non-rote non-test deep transferable understanding of the physical world? I'd love to hear of it.

But my current thought is to target early primary with supplemental material. Teaching things far earlier than they're usually taught (escaping teaching to tests), and better enough that the misconceptions avoided can pay for the effort cost.

In the US, parts of the homeschooling community might be receptive. One tactic might be to create a supplement for a text already in widespread use. The mention of NCERT texts, had me wondering if there was somewhere one might say fruitfully drop a pdf, "Oh, you're using NCERT's solar system intro? Yeah, it has the color of the Sun wrong. It will be easier for you to understand light and color if we fix that - here you go... Oh, and that bit about planetary heat coming from the Sun? Well, ok, but it's more understandable if we explicitly mention cold space, and here's a nice example of ...".

> Chemistry [...] contradicts

Yeah. Chemistry education research describes chemistry education content using adjectives like "incoherent", and as leaving both students and teachers steeped in misconceptions. A fun US state curriculum spec required teaching both "atoms are conserved by chemical reactions" and "atoms are electrically neutral - when charged, they become instead ions" - two historical threads of definition, presented together for the entanglement and drowning of students. Years back, there was a fun letter from the editor of a chem ed journal, that was a plea "yes it needs to be gutted, but there's value too here which we should preserve...". Sigh.

Given the severely challenging constraints and incentives around textbooks, it seems to me unlikely that "talk to the textbook authors" can be a path towards transformative improvement in science education content. In any country. All the existing Sun diagrams might be revised perhaps, but adding helpful examples, or a treatment of scale, simply won't fit there. So I wondered what opportunities for workarounds might exist in an Indian context? Perhaps analogous to some homeschooling mailinglists in the US? (And if anyone has favorites, I'd love to hear of them). Thanks again.

Yes, you shall not be perjuring yourself.

It is indeed lopsided that the counter notice must include "A statement under penalty of perjury that the subscriber has a good faith belief that the material was removed or disabled as a result of mistake or misidentification of the material to be removed or disabled." The initial notice only has "under penalty of perjury, that the complaining party is authorized to act on behalf of the owner of an exclusive right that is allegedly infringed", but everything else like "A statement that the complaining party has a good faith belief that use of the material in the manner complained of is not authorized by the copyright owner, its agent, or the law" has no threat of penalty.

But you don't have to be right about the mistaken removal, just honestly believing you're right about it at the time you file the counter notice.

Oh, and you'd be surprised on how many people perjure themselves in the initial takedown notice, knowing they are not in fact authorized by copyright owners, often even claiming they own the copyright when they know they do not.

The sheer population in competition I guess, gaming the system is almost always the way to win. This is true everywhere but more pronounced in India, because we have very large number of people very eager to game the process. Maybe it's a culture thing, or just the effect of competition and FOMO, idk. (The coaching mania so fierce in North is less aggressive in South)

When I was studying K-12 or PUC or whatever it's called, Byju's (the company that acquired WJR) was doing most aggressive promotions. There were a few similar education startups putting genuine effort but way less aggressive promotion. I liked the content of one of those startups called Toppr. I never went to purchase anything, tbh (I was a rural student), but the quality doesn't necessarily win.

The entire coaching ecosystem is also like this. They teach lot of formulae and shortcuts. These years success in IIT-JEE is a combination of super hard work and having access to highly expensive coaching material. (Tbh, as a rural student, I dropped the dreams of getting into one of these "good" institutes halfway because of this).

Whitehat JR is just misusing FOMO of urban Indian parents. I don't think pushing programming on children of 7-8 years is worth it. Instead it needs to be properly taught at high-school level.

Coincidence?