Are Textbooks Trash?

(How I feel when I read science text books)

       After the first day of class, the UGA bookstore is flooded with students who are rushing to get their "required text books" for the semester.  Thousands of pages, hundreds of dollars, and tens of pounds (I weighed all of my textbooks freshman year and they were a whopping 33 lbs total), but how much do we actually benefit from these dense textbooks?  Well, according to Subjects Matter, not much!  Textbooks can be a great tool for teachers to use to SUPPLEMENT their lessons and help prepare students before class.  However, many teachers today use textbooks to replace their own lectures, activities, and lessons-- this is neither an effective nor an efficient way to teach students.  
      
     In order to use a textbook practically, teachers cannot assign the 30+ pages that have become customary.  Honestly, in high school (and college as well) when a teacher assigns reading in a textbook, I rarely read the entire chapter.  I skim, read bolded terms, and the summaries that tend to follow each chapter.  It is virtually impossible for any student, no matter how good their reading skills are, to both comprehend and remember the magnitude of information in just a single chapter of a textbook.   
     The main issue with textbooks is addressed in this chapter-- teachers are struggling to cover the sheer magnitude of information they have to cover in their classrooms, so they are assigning chapters to read at home.  Unfortunately we cannot change the curriculum (usually); so an important factor in solving this problem would be using the time we DO have in the classroom with our students more effectively so we do not feel the need to cram information through at home reading of textbooks… this is obviously easier said than done! 

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Reading for Meaning

     Every summer (until I was a Senior in High School) I dreaded summer reading.  Reading was never my strong suit, and each summer I was given a stack of books to read and I was expected to be able to ace a test my first day back.  I remember one summer in particular, I was a rising 8th grader and the entire class had to read To Kill a Mockingbird.  Although now it's one of my favorite books, I spent my entire summer struggling, stressing, even crying over the novel and what seemed to me like my inability to read.  I would read a chapter and not have any idea what happened.   
      Chapter 2 of Subjects Matter addresses this problem head on; my phonics were good, but I was unable to "actively build and construct meaning from [the] text" (29).  It was my comprehension that was keeping me stuck.  My mom, being a teacher herself, recognized that I was struggling, and provided the academic support that my teacher should have provided me.  After each chapter, my mom would make a list of questions that we would talk about.  It was from these "book discussions" that she and I could see where my comprehension was good, and where I misunderstood or was confused.
     I had no previous knowledge or understanding of 1930's Alabama; colloquialisms and slang kept me confused in my reading.  Had my teacher provided a packet titled "important things to know before diving head first into To Kill a Mockingbird", perhaps my summer going into 8th grade wouldn't be as scarring as I now remember it to be.  My teacher needed to "develop, build upon and add to [my] prior knowledge" in order to help me get through a pretty hard novel (or at least to an 8th grader). 

Struggling Through To Kill a Mockingbird  (circa 2008)

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Making Students Better IN and OUT of the Classroom

The opening chapter of Subjects Matter describes a school assignment related to fast food. This assignment reveals how engaging school can be when it appeal’s to the students interests and captures their attention.  When students are intrigued, or shocked, by information, they are compelled to learn more about it. So often, students lose interest in school because the subject material has NO relevance in their life or their interests.  The teachers at BPHS chose a subject that was both relevant to the lives of their students, and also academic in nature

This school project crossed content area lines and combined ELA (students had to read Fast Food Nation), Science (students also learned about health effects that fast food has on its consumers) as well as critical thinking skills that are helpful across all subject areas.  Reading primary articles and documents is a skill often taught in History/Social Studies classes; however reading about McDonald's is probably more interesting to a teenage student than primary documents from the Civil War era-- both are utilizing the same skill.      

Proficient literacy is vital to the success of any person who hopes to be a functioning member of society.  Through the fast food project, students were able to practice their literacy skills as well as critical thinking skills which allowed them to advocate for something that they found interesting.  This is a prime example of how literate students are probably more likely to go on to be valuable members of society-- they have a higher potential of being changemakers compared to those people who may be illiterate or who did not learn the importance of literacy at a younger age.  Literacy across content areas is necessary not only just in a classroom setting, but in students’ future careers, and in everyday life.     

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