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:

o   They have to be imbalanced in the information to and from which they are teaching

o   They have to be outdated in their context

o   They must be hard to decode and decipher (even for the teacher)

o   They have to be text heavy (both physically and metaphorically)

o   They should be as inaccurate as possible to a school’s curriculum

o   And they must be incredibly expensive to produce, manufacture, purchase, and distribute

Of course, this is not true for all textbooks. But for the mass majority of materials, subjects, and discussions, textbooks more often than not not the central piece of discussions or lesson plans. They serve as an aide, but even to that extent they are only utilized in seldom. In my own experience, especially, textbooks hardly won trophies in their excellence and performance during my secondary education years. In higher education (college) textbooks proved to be more useful as the information was highly selective in its study, and more time was spent going into depth in specific key areas in the textbooks.

As Daniels and Zemelman have already come to the conclusion of, outside materials should accompany textbooks are much as possible. Outside resources, in my opinion, serve two very essential purposes: they give students a guide in with to approach their (often time mandatory) textbooks, and they (sometimes) give students expose to real life situations. The purpose for the first reason is readily obvious, students are receiving the much needed help in deciphering and decoding the information in textbooks. The latter of the two reasons is the more important reason as it potentially allows students to make a connection between what they learn in class to what they may come to experience as life outside the classroom. Outside resources combined with textbook readings could potentially make-or-break the confused student on how Shakespeare’s Hamlet is a timeless entertainment play which also shows the various stages of grief, depression, and guilt.

That isn’t to say, however, that textbooks are wholly horrible. Textbooks, in my opinion, are great to utilize as a kickstarter to a unit. As long as the unit makes the correct decision to deviate from the textbook and into outside resources of actual context. I personally refuse to fully believe that these gigantic books, which have accumulated endless streams of knowledge and information, are just heaps of junk. Their purpose, while seemingly minuscule and minute, is to provide a kick start into units (and maybe essential key ideas/concepts) which are then meant to be elaborated and explored in other venues. Textbooks aren’t horrible, but the idea in how we have come to use them is.