Return-Path: <nifl-4eff@literacy.nifl.gov> Received: from literacy (localhost [127.0.0.1]) by literacy.nifl.gov (8.10.2/8.10.2) with SMTP id i13FZTI21314; Tue, 3 Feb 2004 10:35:29 -0500 (EST) Date: Tue, 3 Feb 2004 10:35:29 -0500 (EST) Message-Id: <41F61930.65E7B691.0A349A3F@aol.com> Errors-To: listowner@literacy.nifl.gov Reply-To: nifl-4eff@literacy.nifl.gov Originator: nifl-4eff@literacy.nifl.gov Sender: nifl-4eff@literacy.nifl.gov Precedence: bulk From: AWilder106@aol.com To: Multiple recipients of list <nifl-4eff@literacy.nifl.gov> Subject: [NIFL-4EFF:2671] Re: Amy's post on aaace list X-Listprocessor-Version: 6.0c -- ListProcessor by Anastasios Kotsikonas Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1 X-Mailer: Atlas Mailer 2.0 Status: O Content-Length: 3703 Lines: 30 Dear Meta, On textbooks: companies gotta sell 'em. On adult literacy textbooks: I'd rather put the knowledge in the teacher. If I were an adult lit educator I would send a batch of teachers to school to learn about English, its structure, its grammar, its usage. However--suppose I were a Latin teacher, I would perhaps want some Latin selections from important authors put together, kind of a bird's-eye view of the topic, for the kids, not for me, I'm supposed to know the stuff already. I once had a school position where I ordered textbooks for a middle school of 700+ children. I got deluged with brochures about products/textbooks. True: the next fall one of the textbook orders duplicated,for the second year, the first half of an American history text--2 vols, second year simply repeated the first year book order. As I recall, this was for a class of developmentally delayed children. Teacher just used the new texts over again. I didn't know about the problem until well into the year, and the Director of Instruction had other things on her mind...as did I. A teacher with time, gumption, in another type of school, would have found one copy of second vol and xeroxed handouts. The text wasn't great, anyway. I taught social studies and English, never used a textbook, went and got training in structure of English, though, and I was able to be successful with many more kids. We used literature, primary source documents. Another story: I made it my business to clean out the school storeroom of used and outdated textbooks. You get rid of textbooks by dumping them into barrels and having the janitors haul them to the dumpster. I got to hear a lot of stories from janitors, some liked me, some resented me because I gave them more work to do. Anyway, one janitor told me that before the day of the dumpster, they would just haul the textbooks off to the side of the parking lot, maybe into the woods, and burn them. I investigated sending old textbooks to other schools, abroad, a logistics nightmare. For my own teaching, I used to look over brochures, buy the teacher's edition, cull ideas. I'm sure others have done this. As to your second question and EFF--from my limited knowledge of EFF I am a fan, even though I dislike anything programmed. I'll go into my probable reasons when I look more closely at how EFF is structured. In brief, I think it comes from a respectable lineage of American educational efforts, and I would be really interested in looking at any texts it generates. The story of how it happened needs to be told. Textbooks can be extremely useful if they are done with integrity, and if I were a teacher new to ESL or adult literacy I would crave one, or two or three, just to get ME started. Somewhere else I wrote that there is at least a 40/1 boil down rate for maple sap to maple syrup, and that goes for teacher knowledge, too. If all you have is a textbook, you are in trouble, but if you have nothing else but a textbook you have something to grow on. To the second point--I remember in a labor negotiations class the teacher saying something about "What is not forbidden in the contract you are allowed to do." Something like that. There are millions of possibilities in education, I think if we get tied up in knots over a couple of issues we are completely dismissing what can be done. By the way, my grandfather sold textbooks for Ginn and Co at one point in his life, and I still have some of his school visit records. My grandmother wrote in Latin to her children--I read American educational history, it's a very American story. Good to her from you, too, thanks for priming this pump. Andrea
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