The Textbooks Tablets Debate
As my brain continues to forget the details of life (see my blog post, Recoiling at the Lack of Recalling) it worked hard the other day to recall the name of the black cat in Edgar Allan Poe’s short story, “The Black Cat.” This was bothering me because Poe’s second Principle of Composition cites “every word must contribute to the emotional effect” the author is attempting to create. The name of the cat was significant and it was on the tip of my tongue. We have several bookcases and our attic is stuffed with texts (including my college textbooks—want to borrow “Engineering Calculus?” Drop an email.) Somewhere in the house were at least three collections of Poe’s short stories and poetry, and the search became a quest—a frustrating one.
I went online. There I found the complete short story and the name of the cat. I was even able to do a search routine on how many times the name is used in the story. Now, I love books. I love the smell and the feel of them, and I appreciate the weight of a good text when it rests on my chest as I lie in bed, ending my day by reading a few enlightening words.
I bring up my love of books because Polley (the most avid reader I know) showed me a newspaper article about school districts abandoning textbooks in favor of online texts. I am in favor of this, and here are the reasons why:
I taught high school language arts for almost four decades. Every year we assigned anthologies, large textbooks with short stories, poetry, and one or two plays. Ninety percent of the selections in these books were not used by teachers, simply because what the publishers thought were the best selections by certain authors and what former English majors, now teachers, thought were the most teachable and valuable literary works was not congruent. There was also the “censor factor.” Believe it or not, a very small group of extremely narrow-minded people had an irrational but powerful influence on what textbook publishers should include in their anthologies. Their thinking prevented excellent literature from being included in the textbooks.
I followed an online debate between supporters of textbooks and supporters of textbook replacement, namely tablets. One consistency seemed to be the supporters of textbooks claim that textbooks were much cheaper than tablets ($25 instead of $100). These textbook advocates might be citing prices from the 1950’s. When I left teaching our anthology ran close to $70, and that was just for the English textbook.
And publishing companies began doing what I consider to be not nice things. Kids lose books. No matter how much a teacher emphasizes that a lost book will cost the parents $70, students still lose books (someone has to pay for it—either the parent or the other taxpayers). So imagine the English department is minus 100 American Lit Rejuvenated textbooks, $70 a crack or $700. In an ideal world, all owners of lost books pay up, and the English department chairperson orders from the publisher, Textbooks Are Us, 100 replacement anthologies. But wait! Textbooks Are Us no longer print that edition of American Lit Rejuvenated. The department chairperson will have to order the second edition of American Lit Rejuvenated at $90 a book. What choice does the department chairperson have? So she orders 100 copies of American Lit Rejuvenated Second Edition and her budget is down an extra $200 she did not count on.
Nor are the English teachers happy. In the first edition of American Lit Rejuvenated the Poe selection was “The Black Cat.” In the second edition, the selection is “The Fall of the House of Usher.” So half my class might have one story and the other half the second story. The students would spend considerable time arguing who had the more difficult reading assignment. In other courses, the science problems in one textbook edition might differ from the problems in another edition. As the years go by and the school has multiple editions of the textbook, congruency in planning and assessment becomes a casualty. My point is that this tendency by publishers to not replace the editions educators need is costly in both money and wasted energy.
As a teacher I argued against textbooks for two reasons: 1) for $70 we could purchase a collection of short stories, several plays and a couple of novels. If a student loses a paperback then he is more likely to shell out $7 than $70. 2) Textbooks should not drive instruction. Two of my daughters graduated from Mount Holyoke College. As a parent and as an educator, I was enamored of that institution. Mount Holyoke, noted for its science instruction, decided that textbooks should not drive teaching, so they banned them. Professors would have to develop their own resources and lessons, resulting in better teaching. I agree. I had many conversations with teachers, unhappy with student progress who asked me for advice. I would suggest a few projects, and the response was often, “That sounds good. I would like to try that, but I do not have the time—I have to get through the thirty two chapters of the math textbook.” And the teacher, by the end of the year, would “get through” those thirty two chapters even if their students were still mired in chapter one. Too often textbooks become a crutch and excuse for less-than-stellar teaching.
So why don’t school boards, primarily motivated by their campaign promises to keep school taxes down (good school boards make decisions based on what’s best for their taxpayers; great school boards make decisions based on what’s best for their students), give up the purchase of textbooks in favor of online sources?
Einstein said, “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.” Early in my teaching career, I was frustrated because every week many, too many, were failing my vocabulary tests. I did what every other teacher was doing: introduce a new lesson from the vocabulary textbook, review the words with students, require them to complete the exercises in the vocabulary textbook as well as some generated by me, and tested them at the end of the week. Not only did they not score well on the tests, but they promptly forgot the definitions in a short time. I remember a student passing me in the hall shortly after he took the SAT’s.
“Hey, Mr. Maltese, three of the vocabulary words from our textbook were on the SAT’s. Saturday.”
“Great. So you got at least three questions right.”
“No. I recognized the words, but forgot the definitions.”
So I researched “teaching vocabulary,” and in the pounds of data I studied, the research showed that no one was successful in teaching vocabulary words from a textbook, simply because they were out of context. I tried to remedy the problem by constructing a computer database of vocabulary words that appeared in the literature that my high school listed in the curriculum. Any English teacher could add words from the literary works they taught and generate exercises and tests at a few clicks of the mouse. Goodbye vocabulary textbook. Wait! My superiors nixed the English department database I constructed and continued to buy vocabulary textbooks. Why?
This was the reason given to me: “If the kids don’t walk around with a vocabulary textbook, the parents will think we are not teaching vocabulary.” In discussions with groups of parents this turned out to be a myth, but, as I learned working in Harrisburg, “Given the choice between deciding what was politically expedient and what was best for education, the former always won out.” As Kurt Vonnegut writes in Slaughterhouse Five, “So it goes.”
Teaching is challenging whether we use textbooks or tablets. One problem with tablets involves the equity issue. One of my student teachers assigned the class a visit to a website for background material. I told her, “You cannot assume that every student at home has access to the Internet.” Never occurred to her.
If the school issues the tablets, then we have the same replacement issue as textbooks. One teacher, fighting the use of electronic devices in the classroom argued, “How do we know that the student is visiting the assigned website and not viewing a porn site—or texting?” Fair enough. There are ways to deal with that, however, namely by “crunching assignments,” and critical deadlines. I shared with this teacher the experience of reading aloud a Shakespeare play in class and discovering that one of my students was perusing a copy of Playboy neatly folded in the textbook.
There are advantages to books over tablets. When I drop a book, it is less likely to break, and a book needs no batteries or recharging. But the greatest drawback to online resources is the mistaken belief that students will more likely read something online than in print. Not necessarily true. I helped a student find a critical piece of research for his term paper. His search routine skills needed drastic improvement, but I helped him locate a great resource that supported his thesis. He stared at the page of text on the computer monitor and looked up at me.
“Now what?”
I looked at him, back at the screen and back at him. “What do you mean ‘now what’?”
“What do I do now?”
“You read the article.”
I heard him mumble an expletive under his breath. Some students are so visual that unless they see a screen full of graphics they won’t read a resource no matter how good it is, and this concerns me. Whether we use textbooks or tablets, the emphasis should still be on rigorous, and I mean rigorous, stimulation of high level thinking skills. “Bambi Visits Hawaii” doesn’t cut it. And if the student is to succeed in a good academic collegiate environment, we do him/her a disservice by dumbing down his preparation.
Students have to develop the skills of not only locating good online resources but the skills of summarizing and interpreting the data they find. In future years they can quickly locate the name of Poe’s black cat—-Pluto (no, not the Disney character…the Roman god of the Underworld)