The Case for Textbooks
I've been a teacher for fifteen years and at about a third of the way into my teaching career, I began to notice more and more teachers veering away from using textbooks. Around the same time the use of technology in the classroom started to rise. In that moment the use of technology in the classroom wasn't required but when I worked in Austin, there was a carousel for tablets that we never used.
One time a lady from the district came to give us a presentation about how to incorporate them into learning but she spent the entire time troubleshooting, and ran out of time before she could get anything done. Thus began the frustration of waiting for the tech to work before learning could start. Admittedly this has gotten better but the problems with tech in the classroom have just shifted and evolved. At this point, since the usage of the iPads was still optional, I chose to stick to traditional teaching methods.
At the time, I was the ESL specialist in my school and I was quite serious about making sure my students learned something. Living in America as an immigrant is difficult, and not being able to speak English further complicates things, so waiting for the tech to work was not an option, and excluding textbooks from the curriculum felt like a dereliction of duty to me. Especially since these very same children were required to take the STAAR test, a state issued exam for native level English speakers, and they were expected to pass it.
Textbooks are rich resources with tons of stories by giants in literature and in my experience, the best way to connect with language is through the stories of it's people. Two examples stand out to me as times when I witnessed students really connect with the literature as a group. The first was when I taught my kids Flowers for Algernon. Charly, the protagonist suffers from learning difficulties and as a result gets bullied at work and struggles with building meaningful relationships. His so-called friends bully him and intimate relationships are not really an option for him, although he has a crush on his teacher.
The second time was when I taught The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, to a group of 11th grade ESL students. Many of them had made it all the way to the 11th grade never having read an entire book before. So the first thing that touched me was the sense of accomplishment these students felt from completing the book. Indeed I caught one boy clutching the book to his chest before class began, it was moving. The protagonist in this book has autism, and again struggles to connect with people because he sees things in a rather black and white manner. There is no grey area for him so what is right is right and what is wrong is wrong.
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These themes of isolation and doing the right thing are ideas that most students really connect with. Their minds are less influenced by the world, and being a teenager and coming of age is a time when many people feel misunderstood and alone.
Now that I'm thinking about it other examples come to mind like when I read The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka with a large group of tenth graders. In this story the protagonist is transformed into a human sized bug over night in his family home! Talk about feelings of isolation and sadness! And again, many of the children had not experienced this type of literature before, and again they really connected to it. There are salient reasons why Daniel Keyes, Mark Haddon and Franz Kafka are considered some of the greatest writers of all time. Indeed people began to reach out to Haddon because they thought he was an expert on autism. He was not, he was just a writer who does what good writers do, which is research and tons of revision.
My last example is when I read Fahrenheit 451 with a very small group of 11th grade boys. That was actually a really fun class, but I digress. I mention the small class size because it's important when you want to get deep into literary analysis. We were four in total which meant that we could deep dive into the text, read slowly, explicate excerpts and do intensive vocabulary studies. All of this was key because teaching them how to look up words, esearch details in the text, and write and respond to it helped them to become critical thinkers.
And that's really the thing. We want students to become literate critical thinkers and reading literature is one of the best ways to do this. Literature is layered and covers a wealth of situations and topics. So, the more literature students encounter the more they learn to think.
But teaching literature takes patience, and planning. You have to pour over the book, curate what you will teach and how you will teach it. You also need to consider what's best for the students based on their level and what will be interesting to them. Which is not to mention that often times classrooms contain students of varying levels of ability so differentiation is important too.
So this made me wonder did people move away from textbooks and novels because they are hard to teach? Or are there other more nefarious or more reasonable explanations for the switch? What I know is that at least in America children are in a literacy crisis, and I wonder if it's time to make a return to strategies that have already proven that they work.
