Textbooks and Assignments

Textbooks and Assignments

 

            The first chapter for this week was chapter 3.  It reminded me of a day a professor told me about his class.  He stated it was like a lake that was 10 miles long but only an inch deep.  The textbooks according to the reading just have too much in them and they do not go into enough.  It states that “…the really key concepts, the big ideas of the field, don’t stand out clearly, aren’t giving enough time and depth for students to grasp them.  Two pages on slavery, a paragraph on Hiroshima, or a sidebar on Einstein’s theory of relativity, just doesn’t get the job done.”  (Daniels and Zemelman, p.59).  The textbooks just don’t get into the important details, the reasons, the implications or the what if’s.  I remember a high school history class when I was a junior I think.  We covered all of World War I in half a period and the book only had at the most three pages, probably closer to two.  We have all seen it the whole of world history in one thousand pages.  Image that one thousand pages when you have The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon in six volumes and about 4100 pages.  I’m not saying that school have to go out and get it, though it is a great history, but the schools and teachers have to realize that the textbooks are not the be all and end all that there are proper uses for the textbook, which leads us to the next reading.  It follows the reading from Understanding by Design by stating we need to ask just what are the “:..big ideas.” (p. 146) of the textbook and have to do those have to “…slow down, dig in, and ‘uncover’ ideas, not just cover them[.]” (p. 146).  The chapter then goes into different ways to use the textbook differently and more effectively.  They are all very good suggestions, especially to supplement the textbook with other and different sources. (p. 148).  I also found that using other resources besides the textbook was a great help.  As I said in an earlier post the book Red Badge of Courage just made that part of history come alive, and then to compare it to an actual battle really made me think and got be interested.  So the point I really think from both of these readings is that the textbook shouldn’t be relied on as the sole source of info, but it should be used in conjunction with other sources and used in different ways.

            I found the designing assignments reading a fun read.  The sarcasm at the start with Darth Vader, since I grew up on Star Wars, yes the originals, was great and just plain fun to read.  Using Vader the authors were showing that assignments that were just given to fill time, to do them just to make it look good, to have tests that do not really challenge the students, to not work together so they don’t share their interests and so on will not help them learn and think, they will just turn out “…lackluster prose.”  (Strong, Assignments by Design, pp. 94-96).  He sets forth ten design principles to make sure that we as teachers are making assignments, and assessments, which actually have meaning and which actually test what the students know.  All of them make sense; they all go beyond just the restatement of facts.  The one about being a Lawyer arguing in front of the U.S. Supreme Court on the “Separate but equal” case in 1892 (p. 100) is just an amazing idea.  The assignments are interesting, pointed, specific and even fun.  In these ways the students actually know what the teacher is looking for, the assignment servers a purpose, it is meaningful, it provokes thought and again it is fun.   All of the readings have something in common, using the old ways just will not work anymore, but they can be a starting point to make something, whether it be a textbook or an assignment, better.