Entrance Slip for Monday, Nov. 23 article on textbooks

 

•How you respond to the examples given here -- as a teacher and as a former student

As a student, I agree language is super important, every text has its own viewpoint so teachers must interrogate texts, and pictures help to impact mathematical experiences. As a student and a teacher, this article made me really think about why math texts are written the way they are. After so much experience with math texts, I can see why math texts could benefit from a more personal touch, such as including personal pronouns. As a teacher, I like what the article mentions about structuring texts to be about 10 – 20% inclusive imperatives such as describe or explain and the rest of the imperatives are exclusive like calculate. Both types have a role to play and both are necessary for a complete understanding. I find oftentimes in math, people read a math text and think they understand what they read but then have trouble when it comes time to apply it to a question. Inclusive questions offer these students an opportunity for their understanding to be demonstrated outside of the typical, numerical setting, (which has validity as well,) and opens up thinking to further possibilities as well.

•What are your thoughts about the reasons for using/ not using textbooks, and the changing role of math textbooks in schools?

I think that textbooks are helpful for learning math and I wouldn’t want to see them removed from their role as a foundation of math class. This is because as a math student, I often learned more from my text than from anywhere else. In math classes and non-math classes without a textbook, I often felt lost or disconnected from the material or that I was being deprived of the opportunity to truly learn anything.

I think the reasons for using math texts are to provide thorough explanations of the material as a resource for students to learn from as well as questions for them to do to develop their own mathematical skills.

I think the reasons for not using math textbooks may be because of the cost of the books, which are often large. They may be seen as unnecessary now that material is available online, which is part of the changing role of math texts. Furthermore, online videos are being used more and more to replace texts as a way of providing students with a resource for mathematical explanations. I feel that videos can be good for showing alternative approaches to solving math problems as well as for slowly, clearly and methodically going through very complex or detail-oriented explanations. Videos also offer unique opportunities for powerfully demonstrating ideas with visuals. However, good videos can be tough to find and making good videos is a lot of work. Therefore, I would say stick with the textbooks for now but maybe down the road when more good videos are available, teachers may be able to compile them to be a sort of video textbook. However, I think it is important that students don’t have to go chasing down their own material.