I know I can/do teach better than what the book has to offer. In most ways I don’t like the order in which the book presents material. Also, since we do benchmark testing at our school, I do have to follow what every other teacher is teaching and in that same order.

Though this doesn’t force me to use the text’s approach, I often wonder, are we doing our students an injustice by not using the book? I can’t remember too many college classes were I didn’t teach myself most of the material needed to pass with an above average grade. On top of that, a lot of my learning after college comes from books, articles, or the internet.

Unfortunately, we can’t rely on our students to use the book other than for the aforementioned. I do like using the book in class on a regular basis. We use it for a lot of different things, but just being able to read and understand math from a text is a very good skill to have.

Though I agree with a lot of statements here, I won’t part from using the text in class. Though my class is in no way centered around the text. It’s more of an approach of getting my students ready for moments that are beyond my class.

I have to remind myself, I am more influential to my students than my lessons. I can’t remember too many lessons from high school, but I do remember the way I was treated. I can remember individual acts of kindness or unfairnesses my teachers acted upon me. I don’t want to seem lazy, as I am no where near that. I use every means possible to me, this website is usually the first stop, to get my students to pass my class for the year.

I think all Mathematicians would agree that math is more than just manipulating symbols and finding out what “x” is or just a set of discrete symbolic ideas that have no relation to anything else in life.

Math is a way to model our universe to help us answer questions about observable or hypothetical phenomena. It is sad that some “curricula” traditionally strays away from the truer essence of Mathematics in an effort to “objectify” the standardized tests and student knowlege. This, as we currently see, causes more problems than the “curriculum” solves.

I think a *good* textbook is a valuable tool in a mathematics class. “Good” meaning explains stuff well. And to a lesser extent, provides adequately varied practice problems. Unfortunately, many of them are not good, and many teachers have to make due.

Arlington school district in downstate NY wrote their own Algebra 1 textbook, and put it online. I’m a fan.

We picked a certain national company a couple years ago basically because of the ancillaries. We did not find any commercially available books with which we were happy with the text itself. Kids have online access to the book and they have a jillion worksheets you can print out, which can be convenient, especially for remediation. I used to be excited about their test generator, but their question bank sucks. Also on their website they have selected gizmos (from explorelearning) available, which is nice because gizmos are useful if deployed appropriately, and a school subscription to explorelearning is crazy expensive. I pretty much tell the kids to take them home and leave them there for the times I assign practice problems out of them.

Some have nonsensical ordering. Some are ordered quite well.

Some are chock full of good application problems. Some think “application problem” means rewriting the calculation practice in the form of a word problem.

Some are written in a fashion that students can actually read. Some are written in a fashion that even the teacher can’t read.

This still means that teachers must be ready to compensate for any one of the three issues when necessary. (And yes, unfortunately some can’t.)

Having another person’s explanation of the topic, having (often) convenient banks of exam questions, having extension sheets to cut down your workload if one pesky foreign child has done it all before…

As a teaching bible, textbooks are sorely lacking: I think of mine as a resource folder. As that, it’s handy.

I’ll let the others kick the textbook scarecrow around a bit more while I’m just going to enjoy basking in the glow of Dan’s ironic footnote:

“# I swear I don’t even sound like myself sometimes.”

Beyond the BoSox taking the Series tonight, it is this semantic moment that will cap my day.

I also need to point out that I teach two classes that operate without textbooks and that’s tough going. Textbooks are not without their good points, y’all. Copying everything from scratch makes you weary. Using the textbook as a base, at least, relieves a lot of that stress. It’s the ancillary materials that are often horribly lacking. All the TE stuff needs to be online, constantly being modified, updated, moderated, and evaluated.

THAT needs to be the warehouse where we all kick in our good ideas, kept alive on the textbook companies’ servers as a breathing, virtual ATE.

THAT is how the textbook companies have managed to blow this all these years: not allowing teachers to expand upon the sometimes mediocre, regularly low-level ideas presented in the textbook box set you received when your district adopted that book you’re glaring at.

And greed.

While I might not all need the pick axe, shovel, and map, if I know there’s a goldmine somewhere I want to have something more than my bare hands and the memory of what I’ve used to dig in the past.