Me Vs. The Textbook Vs. Me
I’m going to do a more extended reflection of my experiences at EduCon over the next few days – I’m letting the weekend stew a little bit, plus I want to gather some of the links and resources I found out about into something that might be vaguely useful. But one thing that I know EduCon did is give me the motivation to confront the gap between the teacher I am right now and the teacher I want to be. And I am never going to make as much progress as I want on that front until I come to terms with the three-way battle between me, myself, and the textbook I’ve been assigned to teach.
I feel like I need to apologize for the possibility that I might, at some point in this post, say something positive about a textbook. I feel like I spend much of my day banging my head against the thing, and it’s a 1300 page world history text, so you can just imagine how much fun that is. Reading and answering questions out of a textbook is so disconnected from building something that addresses a real challenge in your own life that the ghost of John Dewey should start warning me that I’m about to get a visit from the Spirit of Education Past. I’ve spent a lot of my time as a high school teacher looking for ways to help my students put some personality into the events of history, and there’s not a lot of personality in a textbook.
So why do I also spend a lot of time trying to figure out how to help my students get more out of this thing?
There’s one obvious answer – it’s what I have to do. I have a planning timeline and a city-wide curriculum to follow. I can try to stretch, but I can’t invent my own wheel. So if I have to use the textbook, I need to put some effort into making the best of it.
And if I’m honest, if you told me that tomorrow I could drop the textbook and do whatever I want, there’d me several moments of panic while I tried to find, organize and distribute the information I’d want my students to have. There is an efficiency that comes from having a collection of articles, maps, primary source excerpts, and reference materials in one package. Now, if you tell me that you’re going to give me the time to work with my students to search for resources together, and that therefore it’s OK if we don’t cover as much material as a prepackaged textbook does, the panic will subside a lot faster. But that’s another post.
But like I said, this is a three-way battle. And there’s a defender of the textbook in me; I think it’s the part that’s taught college courses for the last 10 years. I think that reading an academic textbook is an important skill. It’s not the be-all and end-all of education, but it’s not irrelevant. If I want a college freshman to be able to read Descartes talk about skepticism or Locke talk about natural rights, that student needs some background with the kind of complex sentences, abstract ideas, and – let’s be honest – fairly dry writing that you find in those texts. And if the textbook will give my students a short introduction to Locke and Descartes so that the names ring a bell when they get to college, so much the better.
Textbooks don’t have a monopoly on that kind of writing. I have my ethics students read parts of Mark Rowlands’ Sci-Phi, which is shorter, has better writing, and mixes the academic talk with a more conversational tone and plenty of personality. But not every writer is as good as Rowlands, and I doubt the school district can afford to find and pay for separate books on all of the topics I teach in world history. (Wait, I said I wasn’t going to talk about that.) So a textbook brings some positives, and I’m trying to make sure I don’t forget them.
I do think this is something that strongly favors a book over web texts. There is a lot of great writing on the web, but I don’t think that screens are the best place for the long form reading and reflecting I’m talking about. Maybe this will change as we make better e-readers, or maybe I’ve reached the point where I’m too old to adapt and younger folks are already prepared to read full academic texts on a screen. But there is no way on Earth that I could read something like James McPherson’s Battle Cry of Freedom on a screen, and I found that to be a very enriching experience. Again, I’m not equating reading a textbook with reading a great writer like McPherson. But there are some skills that can carry over, so I’m trying to tailor my textbook use to help my students build those skills.
The worksheets and writing exercises that I give my students don’t always look like the kind of inquiry-driven, project-based learning that progressive educators like Dewey championed and that we celebrated at EduCon. But I do believe that reading and research are tools of inquiry. Reading a text for understanding – not just skimming it to find a factoid to answer a standardized question – can help set the stage for all kinds of deeper thought and creation. It can help students learn to categorize and organize the deluge of information on the web, and learn to evaluate the competing claims they’ll find people making about the world. I’m not going to stop looking for ways to help my students be creative. I’m not going to stop looking for better texts. I’m not going to stop searching for the real stories of people’s lives to inject into history. But I’m also not going to stop trying to help my students make sense of that behemoth of a textbook. And I think I can be OK with that while I work on being better at everything I want to do as a teacher.
About Dave Thomer
Born and raised in Philadelphia. Studied philosophy at Fordham University in the Bronx, where I made many great friends and met my wonderful wife. We moved back to Philadelphia, where I studied philosophy some more and became a teacher. Online and off, I'm looking for ways that we can be better citizens and build stronger communities.