Entrance Slip Nov 23 - Math Textbooks

How you respond to the examples given here -- as a teacher and as a former student?

I responded to the initial example of the average relationship between femur length and overall height for men and women with curiousity and more questions. For example, I thought about why there was a greater coefficient for females than males, and what this might say about average upper-lower body proportions. I also thought about where they collected this data from (what ethnicities, age groups etc.) and what sort of variance was present or what the correlation coefficient of this linear regression was.

The examples of using more impersonal pronouns is something I never really thought about and honestly does not bother me very much at all. However, it did make me think more about how I subconsciously use the pronoun "we" frequently when teaching or writing out solutions, as it was modelled to me in university lectures and course notes.

What are your thoughts about the reasons for using/ not using textbooks, and the changing role of math textbooks in schools?

Reasons for using textbooks include: they can be an effective and logistically simple resource for learning outside of the classroom, many schools already have access to them, and there are many problems already created that teachers can draw from for efficient lesson/assessment planning.

Reasons for not using textbooks: they are extremely boring, they can make math impersonal (though I think this has a lot more to do with the act of reading a textbook than it does with the choice of pronouns or drawings), and they often have mistakes, over-simplifications, or over-generalizations. Another issue could be inconsistencies between a teacher's preferred notation and the textbooks' notation.

I think (and hope) that textbooks will become increasingly more obsolete as teachers are realizing the power of using and creating open-source educational material. We could have some incredible shared resources for everyone if only we would allocate the money that we give annually to the major textbook publishers to spearhead some open source projects instead. I think that with a solid bank of quality resources available to them, engaged teachers can then select what they need from this available material to compile their own lessons and assessments to create relevant, customized coursework for their students without having to make everything from scratch. This would be my ideal model.