A short story about the Alberta JH Science textbooks. I’m one of the authors of the Science in Action series, and when we completed the first book, I had the idea to create a support website for it. While every textbook has a support website these days, back in the year 2000 this was pretty radical thinking.
Anyway, the excellent people at Pearson gave me the thumbs up and I built the Science in Action support website. In those days, it was common to present the resource to school boards on the same day as the competition (boards would schedule this for efficiency). When we presented, teachers loved the idea of the support website… much to the chagrin of the McGraw (Science Focus) salespeople.
So the McGraw guys took to planting people in the back of the room during our presentations to fire questions at me about the website. After shooting down their questions, one of their favourites to finish with was “So what happens when you leave and the website goes out of date?” – I always replied simply… “I love teaching science, and I’m not going anywhere.”
Eventually McGraw saw which way the wind was blowing and ended up having to create a support website as well to compete. The funny ending to this story? The McGraw support websites for Science Focus have been offline for some time. And the Pearson support websites? It’s been nearly 20 years, but I still maintain all the Science in Action websites, as well as the websites for Science 10 and Pearson Physics. The links are checked every week and the sites are updated with new content monthly. Big thanks to Pearson for their unwavering support of Alberta teachers.
Like I said… I love teaching science, and I’m not going anywhere.
… and a reminder to Alberta Teachers, you can reach all the Alberta Science support websites (the ones that are still functioning!) via AlbertaScience.com.
