More Coffee, Please

I shouldn’t be writing. Burning a quiet hole in my bag are more than fifty Macbeth tests that I need to grade, plus an equal number of essays. The masochist in me demands that every test have an essay, and the small cold stone that used to be my heart demands that I provide an objective portion as well. It means that there’s a ton of work to do, and I’ve barely started.

More importantly, there’s a copy of Robert Fitzgerald’s translation of The Aeneid resting in the bag next to those tests, and I know my fingers have more of an itch to turn those pages than they do the Staples-recycled paper where my student’s thoughts and answers reside. No offense to them, but one is pleasure, the other work.

I fell in love with Fitzgerald when I chose to read The Odyssey in my senior year of college. I realized then I was about to graduate and start teaching English and had never read a scrap of Homer. I decided at that point that my vision of an English teacher included someone who knew what The Odyssey was about, as well as The Iliad, and I immediately lost all faith in my college education. To this day I believe that there needs to be a program set aside for English majors who wish to teach, because as useful and important as Southeast Asian writers may be, I ought to know the stuff that will show up in my classroom.

Unfortunately, I wasn’t ambitious enough to learn Greek. So I read Fitzgerald, and fell in love. I have no great fondness for poetry—except for a well turned phrase here and there, I have a hard time with rhythm and meter; anything musical goes over my head. But Fitzgerald worked for me, not only as poetry but as story. I devoured those two works, and have re-read them again and again.

Fitzgerald is good writing. Why are we so reluctant to give it to our students?

Over on The Reflective teacher the author engaged in a (well deserved) stab at textbook manufacturer McDougal Littel. In this case, the workbook that went along with the text only contained a small piece of the play formed from Diary of Anne Frank and then contained a note directing them elsewhere. The author’s final words are gold, and worth reproducing:

That’s my beef with you McDougal Littell. You print one-third of a text word for word and then tell kids to either find it in a library or to pray-to-god their school has a copy of it lying around somewhere, and at the same time you provide a chunk of stories that can be found in the public domain. If I wanted, I could print off, and make copies for my students, the Poe or Henry stories and by doing so would save a good deal of money. Money I’d gladly give you in place of the missing portion of this play.

Not all of my students thought the play ended at the end of Act 1, Scene 3. As a matter of fact, most of them noticed the play just stopped, and came to class and grabbed the full anthology (thank god we have that!). But once that happened, the green floppy book — the ones we’ve been using as personal books; likely the first Language Arts books our students have taken ownership over — became useless. Way to go.

That’s a pretty valid reason to hate a textbook.¹ It was never mine, however. There are many better reasons to hate a textbook—starting with the thought that it was a stupid, idiotic solution to a problem that has ballooned into a multi-billion dollar business that has become so lucrative that those engaged in it are finding themselves incapable of supporting it, at least at the college level.

Here in high school, we’re still wedded to them. We shouldn’t be. Textbooks are (like many things) an attempt to correct for bad teaching. The idea was simple: If teachers taught from the book, then every student would get the same material, and differences in the education children received would disappear. It didn’t work like that, though the idea is still around. There are schools that mandate the same thing—going so far as to script every statement and question a teacher might make. In fact, this was the norm, the idea of textbooks that asked questions and teachers who would merely expect their students to memorize the answers in a letter perfect style:

Because the teachers were relatively untrained, letter perfect memorization without peculiar attention to meaning was the basic method of common, or public, school education. Few teachers outside of the large cities had much education beyond that of the schools in which they were taught…The voice of the teacher and the textbook author were not only in agreement, they were the same!²

We’re obviously not that bad. However, what’s worse is that textbooks are so often “dumbed-down”. Or maybe they’re not. I do know that they’re often abridged, expensive, and frequently out of date. Half the material in them I would never use, and the other half is not the way the author wrote it. There’s a flow to the text, there’s a need for a well-set book, and reading poetry out of a textbook is not the same as reading it out of a book.

That isn’t to say that they’re completely evil. Like anything else, they’re a tool, but I think they’re a tool that robs people—my kids—from the satisfaction of feeling like they’ve actually accomplished something. Nobody every makes it all the way through a textbook, and if hand out a study-guide, I would prefer it was one that I wrote myself, or one that feels like I write it myself. From me, my kids will work harder than they would what comes in the back of the book.

Moreover, textbooks don’t tell us to think, they tell us to memorize. That was always their intent. So often I find students who are unable to look at a sentence and pull out its meaning. “Bring forth men children only, for thine undaunted mettle should compose nothing but males.” What does that mean?

It doesn’t mean, “All men should wear armor.” This is a mind that is not used to thinking about what it is actually seeing in front of it. Maybe because it has been told too much and not invited to think enough.

In English, I’m lucky. History is worse. Plenty of people have already criticized them, but I’m not really equipped to judge. I only love history, I don’t teach it. I do think that a text like Keegan’s

I do know that to understand an artist, you need to look at his work. To understand a time period, we need to read what is actually there. I’m shocked at the number of my students who don’t understand that Americans don’t live in a Democracy—they never bothered to read the Constitution.³ I know that I want to hand them a book, and let them own it, rather than a picture and graphic filled collection with questions at the end.

1 I’m not talking about an anthology, by the way. The Norton Anthology is a completely different beast, and a good friend of mine uses the Norton Anthology of American literature as his text in class. I have one sitting on my desk and I have to beat other English teachers away from it. No you may not borrow it, it’s mine I tell you! In any case, a textbook is a different beast, designed to instruct. An anthology is a collection, together with the occasional introductory piece to provide some background. Pick one up if you haven’t, and feel the difference.

2 Wakefield, John P. “A Brief History of Textbooks: Where Have We Been All These Years?” Paper presented at the Meeting of the Text and Academic Authors. 1998, p 39.

3 Don’t believe me? Go look it up. The United States is a Republic, a completely different animal.

Gregarious

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