Teacherscribe’s Teaching Tip #36
The Trouble with textbooks.
I’m stealing this from a book I read this summer for a graduate course on teaching reading in the content areas: Subjects Matter by Harvey “Smokey” Daniels and Steven Zemelman.
Trouble #7 – textbooks cost too much.
In a world where massive amounts of info are available for free thanks to Google, textbooks are insanely expensive.
Daniels and Zemelman put the cost of a textbook at $300 per copy. If you have 25 students in your class, that amounts to $7,500. What could you do with that money on your own for your students? Now, I understand that money has to last 8 years, but still!
Even if they are not that expensive at all – and the authors do acknowledge that some textbooks come as cheap as $70 – where is there room in the budget for other things that enrich the curriculum and boost student learning? What about buying free reading novels? Or subscriptions to the paper? Or magazine subscriptions?
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