I loved the chapters we had for reading too much to not share! The authors are head on in their descriptions of textbooks, both in their intention and misguided flaws. The two quotes I liked especially were: "those bodies of knowledge, those big building-blocks of information, need a place to live- and that's what textbooks are for, among other things" and "In the drive to include everything, key ideas fade into the background, or are never successfully communicated, or simply don't stick with students."
I have been feeling this for so long know but have not had a way to put it so succinctly. I knew that I felt textbooks had good intentions and there was something I felt was important about them. As the authors put it, textbooks are reference books. I have long believed that students should be taught skills so that, essentially, they could learn to teach themselves. This is why in elementary school (and again in middle and high school), librarians and teachers and aides all spend hours and weeks teaching students how to use a card catalogue (some schools and libraries still have them!), how to use the library database, how to look up a topic in a encyclopedia (and how wikipedia can be used as a starting point but not necessarily a reliable source!), about indexes and libraries and anything and everything source-y. Teaching students how to use these tools allows them to open worlds of knowledge or simply learn a little about something. But when you take these tools (textbooks **coughcough**) and make them the one and only source. Well, it's too little and too much at the same time.
Confession time: though I have worked very hard to maintain my grades throughout my school career, as a "good student" if you will, I very often struggle with the feeling that I don't have any real basis to actually learn anything. In high school teachers often accused us of not caring about learning and only caring about grades. This bothered myself and my classmates because we couldn't very well not care about grades, could we? It was our grades that would make our teachers and parents and friends call us smart, that would maybe help us get scholarships, get into National Honor Society, and make it so we could wear a cool little sash thing and have an extra tassle and pin at graduation. It wasn't that we didn't want to learn, it was just that learning how to sort of work the system could only be in our favor. We were BS experts, vocab-droppers, and multiple choice test taker extraordinaires. Honestly, I have to admit that these skills have served me doubly in many of my survey courses at college, where we're expected to learn twice as much as high school students in half the time. As a voracious reader since childhood and someone who has spent many hours googling and going from one link to the next to learn more and more, it makes me really sad that in the high school and college levels, it is often the case that "getting through it" is often valued over "getting into it." I think it would be so much more valuable for me to really understand energy conversion than to just know that it involved ATP ... or something?
I am grateful that despite what my teachers thought, I often really wanted to learn about what they were telling me and often they were excellent teachers who really taught me a lot and inspired me to learn more. Unfortunately some of them I could not understand, went to fast, didn't break things down, didn't give us a chance to delve in and explore different sources so that maybe one of them or all of them would trigger that lightbulb, and so I gave up understanding for figuring out how to simply pass. Without all those colorful opportunities, with one skim-able and forgettable textbook, what my teachers feared would happen happens: students give up any chance of understanding for simply passing. That is if they've been lucky enough to acquire those skills because otherwise they might fail, both your class and really having learned anything. And really isn't that you failing your students?
I think you bring up a ton of great points, but think of this even further. Why does everyone care about "passing"? What is the objective for them? Testing. Schools are being structured to teach to the test and its falling hard on the students. "Who cares about writing, I just need a 5 paragraph essay to pass the NECAP". Who decided what is "smart" or "correct"? There are groups of scholars (who have already achieved mastery in certain content areas) who then help create standardized tests. Can students still be smart if they fail these tests? Yes. But does society think so? No. This is a problem that goes further back then we can trace it! I don't think that teachers are failing their students on purpose, but that their hands are tied by specific curriculum guidelines. Or perhaps they have given up on a system that no longer sees the students as intelligent.
ReplyDeleteThanks for the reply Jessica! I think perhaps in my excitement that the chapter fell so closely in line with my own feelings, I forgot to make it clear that I wasn't trying to vilify teachers who teach to the test; to not do so were certainly be a failure on the teacher's part! I understand the need to prepare students for standardized tests and I even understand their value. But if teacher's are only teaching students how to pass the test, how is that not "not so good" teaching? The five paragraph essay you mentioned is often laughed at in our education classes because of the fact that it is rarely used outside of standardized tests but honestly, I understand why it is used on the tests. Students only have so long to write, so naturally it makes sense that they are taught an essay structure that can serve them for shorter writing assignments. Just like the way students are taught a four sentence paragraph in elementary school, it becomes five paragraphs in middle school, and in high school teachers ought to show students how the five paragraph essay format can be extended into a five page paper, still with an intro and two or three points and a conclusion, but lots more paragraphs in between to really delve into their topic. But if a teacher only sticks to the five paragraph because technically that's all students need to know, I think that''s kind of lazy. That being said, even if a teacher feels confined by what they need to teach for the test, then there is no reason not to really make those lessons be meaningful to students. And last things last, I was not trying to insinuate that teachers are failing students because they want to, rather I was rolling my eyes at those teachers who bemoan that their students only care about grades all while ignoring the fact that they have been taught and are being taught that these are one of the only things that really matter.
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