EdObserver

We don’t use textbooks very much in our high school. I don’t know why. Teachers don’t like to talk about it. Maybe some of them think that they are outdated, or too politically correct, or too restricting. It doesn’t matter what the reasons are; we don’t use them.

In some classes, they aren’t even assigned. In others they are given out, with instructions to take them home and leave them there, because there are classroom copies that will be used. Or the students are told to leave them in their lockers, waiting for the few times that they will be told to bring them to class. In any case, I have been in no class, in this school, where students have been required to bring a textbook to class regularly. The lessons are never coordinated to the assigned textbook.
This is almost always the case in math and science, where it can create a big problem. It’s a problem for any student who would like to read ahead and come in prepared for the next day’s class, or a student who left class thinking he knew the lesson later to realize that he is still a bit confused, or a student who was absent and would like to read about the missed lesson in detail. It also hurts the parents who would like to see what their child is learning, possibly hoping to help. This last one is important because if parents can’t help, they lose a little bit of the connection between their child and the child’s education.

The textbooks are awful.

I have my own objections to today’s math texts. Our daughter was probably among the last students to use math texts (without four-color pictures that have nothing to do with the math process) which stepped you through the lesson. When she missed a geometry lesson on angles, I couldn’t remember all of the rules. But once you see an illustration of parallel lines with a transverse line and corresponding angles clearly labeled, you can come around pretty quickly. I’ve even helped Kathy with some topics I wasn’t familiar with, just by reading the textbook.

Look at the most recent math texts to see what I am talking about. They begin with applications, and then introduce the math process. There are four-color pictures of mathematicians, or track and field performances. There is sometimes a little PC philosophy tagged on: “Women in Science” (Their numbers are increasing.) or “the future with global warming” (If the temperature rises 0.01% every year… )  In the two districts in which I have worked, no math class has used a text, though both have recently purchased new texts for every grade level. By the way, there’s still a text for every student and they cost $75 – $100 each.