on textbooks
8.24.09 by CypyI agonize over the types of textbooks found in high school. Most of them seem to be filled with fluff: a whole lot of sidebars, special sections, extra-enlightenment pages, goal-lists, and so on. Not only that, but most textbooks seem to go out of their way to alert the reader of the wonderful opportunities of the web-powered-empowerment super content that contributes to the learning experience. I don’t need a website to go along with my textbook; I don’t need figures on every page; I don’t need exceptional(ly ugly) colored graphics; I would, on the other hand, like a textbook that is descriptive and well written. I would like something that is insightful, captivates me, and nudges me into thinking about the topic in greater depth.
Given any subject, I would rather have a thirty-page textbook that brings up profound questions about the subject than a thousand-page textbook with a half-ton of data and a half-ton of fluff. My opinions unfortunately contrast with the basic measurements of success for a textbook publisher in the public school setting. A school will buy a textbook that contains all the required material for the course, and if different schools have different required material, a textbook publisher must meet all those needs in order for their book to be popular. Thus, the most popular textbooks are the ones that satisfy the needs of all the schools—those that are bloated and unwieldy.
Textbooks that conform to these school’s demands, also fit well with any teacher’s style. Some teachers may assign readings from the textbooks. Some may only use the problem sets and questions from the textbooks. Some may go off-road with lectures, while others may comfortably rest their entire class schedule and teachings on the textbook’s format.
In short, we have textbooks that are never optimal but always sufficient. I can only think of two ways around this. Students could select their own textbooks based on reviews and ratings from other students (this would empower the people who are learning the material). If students selected their own textbooks, some students might select different textbooks from their classmates. Some might prefer more compendious textbooks, others might enjoy those with a ton of practice problems and examples, while others might prefer textbooks with deep, detailed explanations and less information. This would present a different problem for teachers: they wouldn’t have a unified curriculum. The only way around this problem would be to have students teach themselves from their textbooks. The other option would be to have all the teachers write their own textbooks. A textbook written by the instructor would eliminate all extra fluff from the textbook, and insure that everything taught would be covered in detail in the text. Unfortunately, having all teachers write their own textbooks is also highly impractical.
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Interesting tidbit: I was searched Google for both “textbook ratings” and “textbook reviews” and the same website appeared at the top of the list for both. http://www.textbookreviews.org The URI is not conspicuous, but upon visiting the site, one is presented with a conservative christian organization that acts as a filter for school textbooks in Texas and (they claim) the rest of the nation. I’ll let their website speak for themselves
they’re set up as coherent, comprehensive lesson plans. another way around the bloated-ness might be to cut out the lessons from the books altogether, leaving students a good resource while leaving teachers free to work out their own lesson plans that still use a common book.
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