There was a book called “Calculus the EZ way” https://vpl.bibliocommons.com/v2/record/S38C1299093 that I discovered in the summer before Uni. It was so much fun to read I learned it again just for the sheer pleasure of it. Even though they used medieval characters in a magical kingdom to explain calculus that was not the innovation there. The real thing was that they explained the problems they encountered with existing methods before they introduced a new method.

That was novel. That is how research is done…you start with a problem and figure out a way forward.

That is not how textbooks are written. It’s like, why waste our valuable paper to print the wrong way to do something even if it helps people learn? They only print the right way to do it. The student loses the ability to participate in the discovery process and just becomes a dumb initiate who is forced to believe whatever is written down. It’s more like a degenerate religion you’re forced to memorize without the inspiring examples of all the saints and martyrs who showed others the way before you.

I couldn't agree more, by decontextualizing everything you're really robbing students of pretty much everything.

> Most math textbooks contextualize it like that

I'm all but certain mine didn't. For sure there was the odd contextualization and examples of real world applications here and there but definitely not enough and definitely not interesting or fascinating ones.

Eg if there was one for trigonometry it would have been something lame like "Alice is standing in the field some distance from Bob and Billy. Calculate the distance based on <trigon blabla>"

Hardly riveting stuff :P

I think the tricky part is that students during a particular day have to very much crunch or limit the amount of information they take in when jumping between subject to subject.

They don't have the time, attention spans or memory to be able to take in both the contextualization and to understand the formulas. After all it's only the formulas' that really matter in the end when performing the calculations in test/exams when you have to show your working out. I also find that I can understand the contextual quite easily but it's another thing to then apply it through formulas.

This is coming from a non-teacher but past student.

At University I had more time to think about the contextuals during my degree, but not in high school jumping from subject to subject.

Yeah, my run of the mill textbooks tried to invent fun scenarios like that. But alas, we just made of Adam for carrying a hundred apples back home for dinner.

The problem then seems to be tests that are too abstract. The students are optimising for tests that aren't requiring them to solve real-world problems.