Our textbooks are crap. I hate them. And it’s not like it’s an indiscriminate prejudice against all textbooks, it’s only a prejudice against all new public school textbooks. I’ve noticed that in recent years, there has been an alarming increase in the crap to content ratio of our textbooks.

In all of my courses this year, we never use the textbook in any of the science courses and we use about half of the math textbooks. By half I mean we have the homework questions and maybe part of the lesson. Have you noticed that all of those innovations that are supposed to enhance our learning are never used? I mean, isn’t that the reason the Ontario government made us switch from perfectly good textbooks to these crappy blocks? Who actually uses those TECHNOLOGY APPLICATIONS, and RICH LEARNING LINKS, or POSSIBLE CAREER things? I have only heard of one teacher using those retarded chapter opener things regularly.

A great comparison is the contrast between the two generations of calc textbooks. The OAC textbook is McGraw-Hill Ryerson’s Calculus: A First Course and our textbook is McGraw-Hill Ryerson’s Calculus and Advanced Functions. I’ve been using both because the new one is really a load of crap. It’s by the same publisher and it has pretty much the same content and examples. The difference is that the OAC textbook is a lot easier to understand and simply navigate because there isn’t cutesy crap lining the pages and random bright colours and photographs that are supposed to enlighten us. Rather, it uses words (which, as we know are old fashioned and obsolete) to impart knowledge upon us.

Even in elementary school, I remember those MathQuest books that were just giant books filled to the brim with questions. I would go through it and just do all of the questions and I felt real good about myself. But then they replaced the textbooks with something newer and crappier. The most amazing thing was that they destroyed all of the drilling homework questions and replaced them with about three introspective-like questions per section. And I thought that was crap.

Thank you Mike Harris and Conservatives for ruining our lives in yet another way.

Tags: Books, School, textbooks

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 19th, 2006 at 7:34 pm and is filed under Books, School. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.