Teaching Tip #37

Teacherscribe’s Teaching Tip #37

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.

Solution #1 – don’t buy one textbook for every single student.  Go with classroom sets.

This is a feasible solution.  Yet, the negatives are clear: they can’t take the textbook home when they need it, for if they forget it, then you are out on textbook the next day.  This is obviously problematic if you have several sections of the class over the course of the day.

On the other hand, even if kids DO happen to bring their textbook home, do they open it and actually do their homework?

That’s a really good topic to debate.