Reply to My kids never know what to study, information in too many differnt places

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]
Scientific researcher again.

Teachers are not adequately trained in this country. Despite their love of children and enthusiasm, they are unfortunately often the bottom of the barrel academically. That's why we rank so low in international rankings of reading and math, while spending so much on education. We should invest in hiring smarter teachers (select only the best, design more rigorous education programs, pay much better), who will be able to understand and adapt to the multiple changes in curriculae they will experience over their teaching career, and implement them intelligently, always putting the students' development first.
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I think that's only part of the problem.  What has caused this trend away from textbooks?   It seems clear that it does not improve the learning environment and in fact harms it. I would think a moderately skilled teacher would do better with a text to teach from, instead of having to start from scratch gathering materials. [/quote]

PP you responded to. Textbooks are bloody expensive and have to be constantly updated. I taught in a state college, and the price of books was exorbitant. I think if one state had the courage to unify a curriculum for all its public school systems, and order textbooks for all, it might get a reasonable price. But at a time when people expect everything to be new and shiny and disposable, we would also have to understand that books have to be taken care of, handed back in at the end of the year in reasonable condition (perhaps with a fee for damage), and used for next year's class, to keep costs down.

And the lure of technology is just too great. I volunteered for years in my kids' elementary, which pioneered the use of Promethean boards and laptops for each student, and it's ridiculous. Children are not taught how to write with good form, under the belief that they will only need to type as adults. Yet research shows that learning and memorization is enhanced by physically writing down information, NOT typing it. And using cursive might even be better, learning-wise, than block letters. Only a small handful of public school students know how to write well in cursive, which allows for swift and comfortable writing - pushing them to type even earlier. Looking at screens all day strains the eyes more than looking at a sheet of paper.
Yet people are so convinced that more tech is better that it's hard for school systems to appear to "regress" in that regard.

Anyway. One of my pet peeves.
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I teach at an online university that now requires all classes to use only FREE electronic resources. This can include items owned by the library, so it's not all blogs or anything, but boy do I miss textbooks. When you teach a basic level class in anything, nothing beats a textbook for organizing that foundational information in a clear way that leads from one idea logically to the next. It's ridiculous, for example, that when I teach Introduction to Women's Studies, there's no comprehensive reading on the history of the women's movement in the US anymore with graphics and a timeline. It's the kind of thing a textbook does so well, but the online textbooks are either not that good (the open source, free ones) or expensive, so the school won't assign them.

So I put together powerpoint shows that basically reproduce the old textbooks. Yes, I cite them, but no, I am not updating them with the latest findings every term.[/quote]

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