No Texbooks To Take Home

One odd thing about my daughter Jane's school classes this year here in Portland is the absence of textbooks for student use at home. That includes no electronic texts as well. Jane has eight classes (four meet each day, then the other four the next day, and so on), yet only one textbook was issued to her (The Shakespeare class). How can a student reference something taught in class that he or she does not understand if there is not a text to refer to?

She had a math homework assignment the other day on the computer. The teacher assigns all homework from a program there and the student does ti on line and prints out a survey result to take to class the next day.. The problem is that the teacher did not explain all of it before assigning it. One segment asked questions about sequences that neither she nor I could understand how to complete. Since there was no reference book or explanation on the homework program, Jane could not answer those two questions.

There are two reasons why so many American schools are no longer using student copies of texts. The first is budgetary. Those books cost so much money the systems are now only purchasing them as classroom sets. The second reason schools are ditching take home copies of textbooks is mostly expressed as educational jargon... "personal learning resources" (both face to face and online) are a replacement because text books are too broad anyway. This means the kid is supposed to search for alternatives to his or her text and use those, or that teachers are supposed to use their spare time to search for alternative materials.

How idiotic to expect that. Kids are not responsible enough, not interested enough to find their own resources and teachers have not the time to locate all the alternatives a textbook offers. This indicates that some schools are dumbing down to teach toward "mandated standardized tests". They are designing the curriculum with a narrow view toward standardized tests as being evidence of learning. They teach only what is "tested".

In education today, teaching to the tests and throwing text books out the window has replaced knowledge and learning to think for self as the goal of education. I do not think it is the case, but I hope this is not the view of Jane's school.