Sunday, May 4, 2008
The Textbooks
For my last blog post I wanted to talk about the textbooks that we just finished reading. When I first started reading Making the Journey, I was pretty excited to read a textbook written by a real teacher with real advice. Then I realized that Deeper Reading was essentially the same book as Making the Journey. What I didn't like about tehse books is that neither one had much in regards to controversy. As I trudged along with tehse two books I never felt inspired by the anecdotes provided. Each chapter started to feel like a chore. I'm not saying that there wasn't value in the texts, but I am saying that when I'm sure this class is over I will be selling them. I can't see myself referencing these texts when I start teaching. I wasn't expecting them to reinvent the wheel (gotta love the cliche) , I was just hoping that these would be books that I could use when I felt like I was in a bind in my first years of teaching. Instead I got two books full of common sense advice.
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2 comments:
Again, I agree with you. Sort of. I'm probably going to keep these books to reference back to during my first years of teaching, but I agree with what you said about most of it being common sense. And most of it is what we read in every other book in our methods classes. I've heard a lot of the same stuff for a year now, and while it's good knowledge to have, I think there has to be more information that can be given to future teachers.
You might hold off on selling Deeper Reading. This is the second semester I've used this book, and what I've found is that pre-service teachers thought it was okay, but the student teachers used it extensively. In the future, it will be a book that I assign during student teaching as opposed to a methods course.
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