Do We Really Need Textbooks?

In Chapter Four: Real Rigor, Tovani states that textbooks are “too hard, too long, and too boring” (page 37).  She points out that the problem with textbooks is that they try to cram to much information into the curriculum despite the fact that for many of the students the text is too difficult, with too many concepts, and a lot of new vocabulary without much chance to use it. 

Despite the many problems with textbooks, it appears they aren’t going anywhere anytime soon.  She quotes Richard Strong, and I found it pretty interesting as well:

“Like it or not, textbooks are here to stay.  Even as technology changes the nature of nonfiction reading into a multisensory, multitext experience, the textbook—that single, hardbound, seemingly complete container of a year’s worth of content—remains constant…  Even if we choose to reject textbooks completely—it turns out that we would be doing our students a disservice in preparing them for college, where the first-year student is asked to read, on average, eighty pages per class per week, with most of the load coming from textbooks.”

That’s a good point.  Despite all of the flaws with textbooks, they should still be used in the classroom.  However, Tovani believes that including supplemental text, or what she calls “accessible text”, can do wonders in helping the student grasp the material from the textbooks.  Now what she is referring to are texts that are easier to digest such as magazine and newspapers articles.  She believes that this isn’t “dumbing down” the text, but rather articles that are pleasant to the eyes, and a lot friendlier to read.

I agree.  Teaching biology, I’ve discovered that the textbooks cover way too much information that is almost impossible for a freshman, let alone an adult, to digest.  And after what I’ve discovered the End of Course exams considers important, it makes sense to focus on broader ideas of the content, while focusing on a few specifics. And to do that, one of the obvious choices are bringing outside content (non-textbook) material to the class that help drive home the content while making it more interesting to the reader.  Because let’s face it, textbooks are boring.