Hating on the Textbook School Way of Learning

Thus far my children have avoided school textbooks and that garbage of reading the text and then answering the questions at the back of the chapter.

That day ended today.

My friend gushed over a Biology course being taught at a homeschool co-op and that was the major draw for us to join it. I was told the textbook is "great". I signed my son up for the co-op and the class.

My first letdown was getting the textbook in hand. (The discount price, new was about $100 still, wow. We also had to buy the workbook which replaces those "questions at the back of the chapter" and also a lab workbook.)

When I saw the book it weighed I swear, at least five pounds. I really should weigh this thing. Never in my experience at public school or college did any textbook weigh this much, this is ridiculous. It's huge. So my first thought was there is no way on Earth that schools can get through all this material in one year.

Then I had a homeschool mom friend look at it and she was horrified. She looked at its innards before I did. It is full of all kinds of stuff which I never thought was of the topic of biology. Lots of stuff like global warming and loss of habitats and so forth. There are also current events like should herbs be legal to be sold for use for medical conditions, and in there it has a line of opinion stating it should be legal, so this is not by any means partial or neutral, it tells the students what to think. Even though I personally agree with that opinion the text was trying to get kids to think about the issues and weigh pros and cons and instead the authors snuck in their opinion to tell them what the "right" answer is. Sigh.

The next blow was that after reading the assigned Mystery of the Periodic Table in August, my son has to read and do the workbook pages for 2.5 chapters. This I found out about a week ago. It must be done before the first co-op class. Wow that's a lot of work. He was doing catch-up for the work the group did in the spring when he was not in the class.



So today I went over how the textbook is laid out, the objective points, et cetera. Then I went over the workbook and included the tip my sixth grade social studies teacher gave my class. Read the question first, (one question) then know what you are looking for, start to read, when you find the answer, stop reading, write it down, read the next question, and continue on in that manner until the whole chapter was read and all the answers are answered correctly.

My son was horrified at this manner of working through the text and he instead decided to just answer the workbook questions before reading a single word. He proclaimed he knew the answers. Question one was correct but question two was wrong. I stopped him right there and had to explain that in order to do well at learning the school way he must answer the question correctly. Thus, the easiest way to do this is to perhaps think about the answer you THINK is correct but before writing it, read that section of the book to find out what it says. He may be right or he may be wrong, but once he knows the right answer to then write that out, then move on to the next question.

It took him 35 minutes to do one page. He complained of the length of time. I said I bet kids in school were assigned one workbook page a night at least. This led to a discussion of the typical homework load for an eighth grader. He protested at the hardship of 2-3 hours of homework a night.

He tried to get out of doing the work and complained that I put him in that co-op class. I told him that he should instead feel grateful that his first learning experience like this was for one class in grade eight not earlier as mine was in public school.

Furthermore at this moment this type of learning with a public school textbook is for one class only, he is still doing other atypical learning experiences and using different learning materials than public schools use.

My husband chimed in at that point and we ganged up on him to explain that from grade 8-12 he is going to be doing more and more of that type of work and it is all necessary to do for kids on a college track. After college admissions there is more textbook reading and studying to do. Therefore it's time to learn how to play this game and put his nose to the grindstone to get this work done, no matter how boring or non-entertaining or stupid it may seem.

Just do it.

Update: Upon further inspection I realized:

a. The workbook with fill in the blank (remember this is grade 9 or 10 material) is easier on the student than what I was doing in grade 6 which was to write in complete sentences on notebook paper from the questions in the text. We sixth graders resented the 'write in full sentences' mandate but it helped teach us writing composition. Practice makes perfect. By doing fill in the blank in grade 9 and 10 this may contribute in one way to the erosion of abilities in writing composition.

b. Each group of questions tells the student what page to find the answers on. I didn't notice this on my first skim. Wow. When I was a student I had to hunt for the answers which helped my reading skills. To tell them where to find the answer encourages skipping the written material in between the questions.

c. The text has yello highlight on key words. This makes it even easier to jump and skip to read just portions of the book. For a long time there was bolded text but I'm seeing a correlation that everything highlighted here has a question instead of more things in bold but not a question on each one. This again contributes to reading only what must be read to find the answer to get a right answer to get a good score on the written material (homework workbook pages).

About the book

Biology by Miller and Levine, Prentice Hall, published 2007

From my research into this text it was meant for grade 9 or 10 high school biology. My son is in grade eight homeschool.



Note: I published these books with our own money for our personal use. See the disclosure in my blog's sidebar if you want to know more.