Reflection 4: Textbooks v. Literally (ha!) Anything Else

The Daniels and Zemelman chapters this week were all about putting textbooks in their place. And you know what? I agree. Textbooks are fantastic reference books when you need some quick, basic facts or a general knowledge of a topic; but they're hardly engaging, deep explorations of important ideas. For me, the math book is where I send my students if they ask for a step-by-step algorithmic solution for a problem type or for extra practice problems to drill and kill. It's not what I'm going to use for primary instruction, especially in light of the graphic layout of our current Geometry textbook. "Browser windows" clog up the page and cutesy CGI people pop out of nowhere; it's difficult to establish a flow for reading. Speaking of flow, all the talk of 'narrative' nonfiction made me think of my History of Math textbook; there were some sections written in that style, and I might find them useful in my Geometry courses to give some history and reason to geometric theorems as constructions (as opposed to a rule to be memorized). I also had an interesting discussion after I read these chapters about how these textbook failings don't seem to apply to college texts nearly as often. Why? Because college texts (outside of gen ed courses, usually) are generally written by an expert with a focus in that particular field, and address only that specific topic rather than trying to explain a whole brand of study at once. These texts are written by people who 'discover' the knowledge, not middlemen in the exchange of information.