Farewell Companions

With classes finally at an end for the class of 2026, the textbooks shown here have also come to what I hope is a dignified end (though one of them has managed to reinvent itself very stylishly for the new era).

As some of you will know, I had a part to play in one of these (for Edco) and these are my scattered thoughts from my experience with that book, in no particular order:

First off, publishing a book is a big undertaking, that involves a very significant investment from the publishing company. From my recollection, the text went through several layers of editing, including in-house copy editing, specialist science editing and a final tidying up, to make it fit the pages etc. That all has to be paid for, as do all of the images: photos have to bought through one or more of the big photo libraries, and diagrams have to commissioned from graphic artists. The to-and-fro from the writers pencil sketch to the artist and back to the writer and back to the artist can go on for months.

Also, paper costs money - and that means the word count has to be restrained. A typical text book has maybe 175,00 words - twice the length of many novels. And another novel's worth of words are probably edited out. In my case, this probably made the book more focussed - but it sadly meant the loss of almost all jokes: I remember spending a very enjoyable afternoon penning the thoughts of a physicist trapped in an elevator as it fell under gravity to the ground. But those thoughts didn't even make it past the first edit. Sigh. (the only slightly humorous survivor, I think was a line about krypton, kryptonite and Superman.)

Another issue was the representation of women in science. From the beginning, I was on board to try to address this as an issue. We carefully crafted questions to include a healthy mix of he and she etc, and tried to select photos that showed women working in tech. But research by Karen Pillion and Shane Bergin showed that we still fell short (as did all our competitors.)

It would be easy to be defensive about that, pointing to the history of science and how to some extent we are simply reporting on the results of historical prejudice. But that won't matter to a teenager who struggles to imagine a role for herself in the world of science as depicted on our pages. Similarly, any kid who is not white and of European heritage would struggle to see themselves represented in our books.

What is the hardest bit of writing a textbook? For me, definitely not the text. I thoroughly enjoyed that. And not the questions: I think they are the most important aspect of the book to many users, and I quite enjoyed writing them, particularly the broader revision questions that covered a range of topics and had multiple parts. The editing was much more challenging than I anticipated: I found having to work through page after page of text looking for small errors and/or misplaced labels on diagrams to be exhausting.

But truly the most challenging part was what came at the very end: writing solutions to questions. I was well aware of the frustration that comes from mistakes in proposed solutions and final answers, so I worked through them carefully, and we had another teacher double check all my work, before I triple checked. And there are still a few errors in there. Sorry about that, everybody!

Another unforeseen issue was that, having written the book, I found it very hard to use the text itself in class. Hearing my own words read back to me was a torture and I was constantly fighting to urge to get out a marker and start re-writing. On the other hand, at least the approach in the book was my approach, so it cut down on 'but that's what it says in the book' arguments.

The most surprising thing? Surely, the books alternative existence in Kazakhstan! It was adapted by an international publisher for use in schools there and seemed to be on sale for three or four years. I never even saw a copy, but it was good to know it was out there, and the occasional royalty cheque was welcome!