Subjects Matter Chapter 6 and 7

When textbooks do not provide enough we as the educator are not allowed to simply write them off and utilize that as the excuse to our inadequate lessons or materials. As the most advanced student in the classroom, it is our duty to educate the younger students in the methods, techniques, and concepts of our discipline. After all, it is that liberty which catapults us into the performance and role of the educator.

To begin this continued discussion on why textbooks are bad, I extend my own opinion through Physical Science teacher Jeff James:

“Honestly, I hate textbooks,” he says. “They’re full of mistakes. They’re boring to the kids, and they’re too simplistic. They don’t go deep enough, and they include a lot of stuff that 95 percent of my students will never need to know, even if they go into a science career. I mean, quantum physics for ninth grades?” Jeff is also concerned because the textbook adopted by his department doesn’t even match well with the Illinois state assessment, which changes every year as let’s-get-tough legislators pile mandates on the schools.

….

“I do issue the textbooks to the kids. I say ‘Use this as a reference, use the glossary if you need it.’” (Daniels 198)

Our job has always, first and foremost, been to teach, cultivate, and motivate our students to think for themselves. While it would be most ideal to mold our students into teasing out every nook and cranny of our subject area and continue in the future as ELA, Science, Mathematics, Historic, or Foreign Language scholars, what we really usher and mandate is that our students are able to read, understand, decipher, analyze, and synthesize their own means in the real world. Chapter 6 of our reading makes full circle from this idea that textbooks hinder our teaching instructions to textbooks are but another resource for our discipline.

In ELA, the concept of the right textbook is, in my opinion, not too high-stakes or important for a curriculum. Now I am not saying that there isn’t a good or bad piece of writing for students to read, but the important aspect of an ELA textbook is the diversity of writing within them. Ironically, for the ELA curriculum, the students are who are made to judge whether a text is appropriate or useful. The literary canon, while it can be debated whether they are appropriate for student engagement and understudy, are the standard “textbooks” we ELA educators utilize. When we have our students read critical reviews and scholarly journals/articles on these readings do we start to consider the question “What textbooks are appropriate and useful to our lessons and units?” But even to this extend, I still believe it is always the duty of the educator to decipher readings for their students through supplementing outside resources and readings to the curriculum “textbooks.” But I suppose the point of this chapter of Subjects Matter is to point our educator minds towards different methods in aiding our students if (and they will) they happen upon struggles in their readings.