D & Z Reading 4: Textbook Hatred

D & Z Reading 4: Textbook Hatred



What textbooks can feel like. Source: http://xkcd.com/971/ .



 

So, evidently, Daniels and Zemelman don't like textbooks. I think a lot of students aren't very fond of textbooks, either. They're bulky, the information is cluttered, and most of all, they're boring. And while perhaps the teachers today aren't fond of them for their price and supposed authority over information, it seems to me that my teachers were perfectly fine with using them.

To me, textbooks are useful tools for teachers to use and draw from, but not to just hand out to students and assign large portions for reading. There are passages from textbooks (as well as passages from other texts) that can be very useful, and I think D & Z are a bit too harsh on them. However, I think that we need to be extremely critical of textbook authority. This Newsweek article has some good points about some really bad textbooks. http://www.newsweek.com/2014/10/03/textbook-case-bad-textbooking-texas-272351.html

I think it's too easy to just say that textbooks are all bad or mostly bad. For the most part, I think they are generally pretty inefficient, outdated, and occasionally just wrong. But I think it's more useful to look towards what we could be doing with textbooks. Textbooks are, in their purest form, just an organization of a broad range of materials on a few topics that some people decided were important for students to know. This is exactly like what a curriculum is! The problem is that the agenda of a textbook and the agenda of a classroom don't always match up. So we need to be careful not to rely on textbooks, and we have to always be aware that they can be wrong. But they also have a broad range of materials, and this can be beneficial for teachers to increase the repertoire of materials that they are comfortable with and can draw from.

The other major problem I have with textbooks, though, is the fact that they present a version of history, and this version tends to ignore certain people or viewpoints. We have to always remember that textbook does not equal pure and equal truth, and that they tend to revise history in a way that propels only certain viewpoints. I think that educators in History and Social Studies are generally pretty aware of this, but English teachers are not necessarily as aware of this. The texts that editors of textbooks choose to put forth, as well as the commentary they choose to use for these texts, is a version of history, and it may very well be one that is racist, or denies the history of another people.

We need to be cautious with textbooks, but they can be valuable resources.


Backward Design and Understanding by Design

UbD and Backward Design

I found the chapter on UbD to be pretty useful: it fits in perfectly with the way I want to teach, and it also fits in with everything else we've learned so far in our SED courses. Backward design is interesting in that it is both useful for teachers, and also useful for those pesky tests that our society loves so much. If you start with an objective in mind, an ending point, and then work out how to get there, you'll always stay on track, and everything in a lesson will point toward your objective. If you don't, you may end up falling back on bad teaching strategies with no way to catch back up.



Pictured: What happens if you have no plan (Source: xkcd.com/1106)

To me, though, this chapter felt somewhat like review. I don't know if this is because we have already been inadvertently taught backward design, or if this just seems to be an intuitive idea. I have to imagine it's the first one; our lesson plan templates are already set up to work like this. With so much focus in SED 406 on sticking to a clear objective, backward design seems like something we've already learned.

The UbD modules are very useful when it comes to a definition of a seemingly simple word: understanding. At first, "understanding" feels like an easy word to define, but try it yourself: we know the word more through context than we do through actual knowledge of the concept. We know that understanding is different than just knowledge, but it's difficult to fully define such an broad concept. I think that when it comes down to it, "understanding" something is knowing it well enough that you could explain it to someone else, or knowing it well enough that you could do it. And I think this is one of the things we don't expect students to do: actually perform their knowledge. We certainly expect them to perform on a test, but we never actually ask them to do anything with their knowledge except regurgitate it back to us on tests.