Remember those light weighted
books that our parents would buy us at the beginning of the school year? Well,
maybe what I remember from a different country, in a different era, does not apply
to my generation’s experience in the US, but I am sure someone remembers, even here,
a time when a textbook was just that – a text book. Not an artistic creation
with colorful pictures and short sophisticated clips, but just a book with text.
Don’t get me wrong – I am all for enrichment of the mind and the senses, and
teaching with open horizons is more than just a good idea… but…
How many students do you know
that are looking at those additions just because they find them interesting? We
do; the teachers, the parents, the adults who are holding the textbooks, but
most of the children do not. “So what?” you would say – “if only one in a
hundred students looks at the enriching part then it is well worth it…” And you
may be right. However, this enrichment comes with a price… each text book
weighs more than an average person can hold for several minutes… if I need to
move two or three books at a time I really have a problem – and I am a fit
adult who is able to handle more stress than many teachers I know. “Well,
students are younger and stronger” you may claim, and you may be right again,
but what happened when they have to carry five or six books that are just as
heavy? My daughter suffers from backaches for years now, since she was in
middle school. Being the ‘A’ student that she is, she carried all her books
back and forth, as she was told to do, in a backpack that was as heavy as her
skinny early teens figure… I used to watch her with pain as she carried those
torturous heavy books, and I would frantically call the middle school office
begging them to delay the school bus departure for several minutes so that
students would have enough time to get to their lockers and get rid of the
weighty burden at the end of the day, but of course my appeal was never
listened to. Yet, as a parent, I was
quite impressed by the quality and richness of the textbooks, and considered
their weight as a trade-off. I changed my mind when I became a teacher…
I realized that no one of my
students had ever read or paid any attention to the extra information. Few of
them might have found some of the information mildly interesting if I read it
to them, and even that slight interest happened only in the higher-level
classes. I found the over-loaded information too confusing for the average
student, the pages too busy, and the important information too hard to find. My
favorite Algebra and Geometry textbooks were two simple books that were
assigned to me when I was teaching special education class on my first year;
basic, colorless small books, with the learned material simple, clear and easy
to find. I used those books whenever I could do so without risking my career…
One of the hardest and least
effective battle that I had to fight with my students was making them bring textbooks
to class. It was just a losing game. Once you sent the books home with students,
at the beginning of the school year, as you were supposed to do, most probably
you would never see them until the end of the year (usually still brand new and
untouched...) If you allowed students to leave their books in your classroom,
most probably they will soon disappear, and not only that would not be used,
but you, the teacher, will be blamed for their loss. Officially, teachers are
not allowed to store students’ books in their classroom.
So… many schools came up with
a solution – they offer a class set. Sounds like a great idea? (especially for
the books’ publisher…) Not so fast!
These books are not assigned to a specific student since they are being used by
all learners that take the same class, and thus they are subjected to neglect
and abuse… I saw classroom books flying in the air toward unsuspecting student,
being torn, left on the floor and stepped on, being transported to random locations
at the school grounds, and most of all – being an open space for graffiti,
innocent in the better case, but quite often inappropriate and vulgar.
Different teachers have
different solutions for the books dilemma. One of my colleagues, whose
classroom was next to mine, a tough guy who was also a respected coach, did not
give in to the books situation. He did not agree to have a class set and
demanded that students bring their own textbooks. Students that came empty-handed
had to stay standing up for the entire period… It took me a while to figure out
why some of his students would come to my classroom and ask to borrow an
algebra book, with a solemn promise to bring it back (and they did). But, when more
and more students showed up with the same request … I, at last, asked him what
was going on and found out what the reason was…
Other teachers’ answer to
this impossible situation is not using textbooks at all – they use only
worksheets… Imagine the expense that results. Not only that the school spends
hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of dollars on textbooks (and they are
mandated by the district!) it wastes many additional thousands of dollars on
duplications. Most of those papers are just for a one time use and being tossed
(or become flying objects) very soon afterwards. And the worst part of using
worksheets is not even the waste, but its poor value as learning materials.
Students get into a bad habit of just plugging in an answer in the “fill in the
blank” area (makes the job of copying real easy...). I was shocked to discover,
when teaching Algebra II to eleventh graders, that doing homework means for
them just writing the answers on a piece of paper, without even copying the
problems (and in most cases just copying the solution from the back of the book…)
So how did we get ourselves
in such an impossible book situation? The answer is, unfortunately, quite
common in the education business – money! Someone is making money, a lot of
money, out of those textbooks. Think about a large school district that
enforces a certain textbook on all students in its domain. Each of these hard
covered, heavy with hundreds of pages, books, cost the district many tens, if
not hundreds, of dollars. How can the publisher charge so much for its product?
By padding it with very many un-necessary colorful pages so it can justify the
price. This is not a new trick by any means. Restaurants, for example, give us
enormous and unreasonable amount of food just so that they can charge us a lot
more…
Of course, this is not the
only way to get the district pay unbelievable amount of money for textbooks…
Every so often, the school district is committed to buy a new edition of the
same books… well, hard covered books don’t get destroyed very easily so there
must be another way to move and re-vitalize the book business - new edition... They do that also to the
colleges and universities textbooks, although probably not with as much revenue
as in the K-12 industry.
So, here we are again…
Teachers (and students) pay the price for a system that is completely ignoring
their needs. Books that are impractical for use by teachers and don’t fit the
needs of students. A situation where teachers are scrambling to find a way
around the system to supply their students with what they really need. And in
doing so, not only they, quite often, use their own money to supplement a
budget of millions of dollars used inefficiently, but they are also prevented from
doing what they really want to do – teach efficiently…
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