Subjects Matter Chapters 3 & 4: Are textbooks worth it?

What are textbooks good for? Well, with a simply yet provocative word: nothing.

The general argument I found Daniels and Zemelman to make in Chapters 3 and 4 of Subjects Matter felt to me that they love, love, love avoiding textbooks. For the most part, the textbook syndrome involves a few key conditions:

Our High School Curriculum

My colleagues and I were given the activity to design a high school curriculum. Our class was split into content subject and into groups of four. Each of our professional readings and studies in the field were pooled together to create the below. For what we included we did so based on our own experience as students but also as their major importance (both in our personal lives and what we believe students will need in order to be prepared for college/the work force). What we left out we decided would either only be necessary for those who continued into higher education and/or was not necessary for those who would have been disinterested in continuing our area of studies in higher education.

9th Grade

UbD + Module's A&F = Just a complex way of saying "Indirect Teaching Method" ?

Professional performance require very specific personal management: everything is scripted, everything is rehearsed, everything is intentional, and everything is purposeful. Of course that doesn’t mean that the professional (in our case Educators) do not have the ability to be spontaneous and adaptive to progressive accidents. But even in the unforeseen events—a student completely misreading instructions or a student understanding and moving ahead too quickly—we should be able to recourse our performance to align with the situation at hand. At its core this is what UbD aims to get across to us.

Subjects Matter Critique on Chapters 1 & 2

What we as teachers see in our students are peerless embodiment's of knowledge. How we convey that knowledge oftentimes involves us lecturing them, but what we all want at the end of the day is for the students themselves to attain whatever knowledge they need through their own means.  Thusly, it is only conclusive and through consideration that we, as educators, push and pull our students to learn what to read, how to read it¸ and why they are reading what they read.