It's August 15th!

Ahh, where has my precious August gone?


Today I responded to a blog post by Shelly Blake-Plock on edutopia.org. In this post, Blake-Plock proposes the idea of getting rid of textbooks in the classrooms. On the whole, I would agree with his logic. Textbooks generally do not inspire motivation or imagination in students, because, quoting Blake-Plock, if they were, "they'd be at the top of the New York Times' best seller list." While textbooks do make life easier for teachers, as they organize material well and help those teaching different sections of the same class stay on the same page, they do not allow students to engage in active learning. Students are force-fed the text and don't always engage in the same higher-order thinking about the material as they would if they had the option of interacting with the material in another way, like responding to a relevant blog post by the teacher or finding their own, reliable, up-to-date texts about the material on the Internet.

Here's my take on the matter (I'm sorry if I'm basically reiterating what I wrote in my comment): textbooks are BULKY. Textbooks are EXPENSIVE. Textbooks need to be REPLACED every few years. Textbooks place too much emphasis on MEMORIZATION. Now let's explore everything I just said in a little more detail:

Textbooks are BULKY

Once upon a 2002, I was in eighth grade. I was short, thin, and not that much different looking than I am now (which I guess would mean more to you if you actually know me in person. Additionally, if you don't: hi! ) At the time, I weighed about 90 lbs. Like most kids, I had a textbook for every academic class, and I brought home every book with me every night for the sake of doing my homework.

Stephanie the camel has one hump...

I tell friends, foes, and acquaintances that I was a camel at that point in my life. Why? Because that heavy backpack of mine weighed me down tremendously. I remember my mom plopping my backpack down on a scale once that year. That darn backpack weighed almost 30 lbs., which was one third of my body weight at the time. Can you imagine what life for these poor students with heavy backpacks is like? Pre-teens have enough to worry about without being a camel thrown into the mix! But alas, with textbooks in the picture, this is a situation that can't be avoided.

Textbooks are EXPENSIVE and need to be REPLACED

You know what's great about the human race? We're always doing silly things. We can never just sit still and do nothing. The silly things we do have a name: history. Yes, the subject of history is basically the study of all our silly and never-ending shenanigans. Never-ending shenanigans, as the name implies, never end. The problem with textbooks is that the only way to add the most current information to them is to buy new ones. In a subject like history, there is always a need for updated textbooks. And English? People are always writing new and brilliant pieces of literature. Is it right to leave somebody's great work out of a curriculum because their piece wasn't published before the literature book went into print? What about science? Pluto was suddenly stripped of its planet status in 2006; too bad all those textbooks in the classrooms still had Pluto listed as a planet. It must have cost a lot of money for the schools to replace all those outdated textbooks...




Textbooks place too much emphasis on MEMORIZATION

This one is from my personal experience. I remember in fourth grade, my dad used to stress the importance of memorizing material to me, so when I studied for science quizzes, he made sure that I had every definition of every bold word in the book memorized. During a conference with my fourth grade teacher, I proudly demonstrated my knowledge of the material by spewing out definitions of every key word in the chapter. She gave me a look of great concern and asked me if I truly understood what I had just said. It was then that I first learned the difference between knowing material and understanding it.

Textbooks, in my opinion, are set up to encourage learning by memorization. Most of them have key words and concepts in bold. It is easy, then, to extract the definition of these words. A simple definition goes very well on a notecard, which can then be memorized in a short period of time. Sure, I can know that a cat is a small, furry mammal with pointy ears, a tail and whiskers, but does that mean I can point one out on the street? Sure, I know the method I am supposed to use to solve this math problem, but does that mean I can apply it to another problem? How about a real-world situation?

Textbooks are AFTER YOUR BLOOD

Okay, this one is a lie. I just wanted to see if you were still paying attention.

So...
Most of these issues can be resolved by replacing textbooks with either the Internet or some other form of technology (iBooks, anyone?) With technology, the schools don't have to throw away a lot of money to buy the most up-to-date textbooks; the Internet is constantly updated with new information for free! Also, students wouldn't have to lug textbooks around to and from school, which reduces the camel population. Plus, utilizing these new mediums encourages students to engage in a different kind of thinking with the material, especially if the teacher decides to set up a class blog or Twitter page or somewhere that allows students to engage in the material in ways other than simply reading it from a book.

This assumes, of course, that acquiring this technology is within the school's budget, but that's an issue entirely of its own.

Anyway, I'm off to move my stuff out of my current apartment. Now there's a situation in which being a camel would be useful...