Textbooks

I was sort of perplexed in our initial discussions surrounding math textbooks because as long as I can remember, math textbooks were only used for questions and answers. I'm doing this blogpost several days after our discussion and even as I was beginning to read Herbel-Eisenmann and Wagner's paper, I was still thinking "but I've only ever used them for questions." My use of them also reflects all my teachers uses of them as well; they were used to assign questions for homework or test review and use the back of the textbook to confirm your answers. Therefore, in my own experience, a linguistic analysis of how a textbook may influence the students reading it are not relevant except in the word problem portions. I make note of this point because I believe that may be a common experience amongst many learners - I expect there are very few students that read math textbooks and teachers that ask their students to read them. I believe the teacher teaches, and uses the math textbook for questions/practice. 

Having said that, I do believe both author's have merit in their argument. I had never thought about how a student reading examples will have different experiences based on it saying "we", "I" or "you". The statement "we" can work in both positive and negative ways - the positive is obvious however if the student is not able to keep up then they might feel alienated in the learning process. It is truly interesting how impactful language is. When they discuss modality, I immediately put myself in the reader's shoes and thought about how I would feel reading "that function is linear" versus reading "that function may be linear." The first would be a sentence I glaze over and the second would be one that makes me stop, think and analyze. Herbel-Eisenmann and Wagner say that linguists use the term hedging and although for me as a student it seems to have a positive effect I may say differently as a teacher. If there are students lacking the knowledge to be able to make those deductions on their own, hedging words may lead to confusion, uncertainty and have them read the textbook with no interest. This notion can be further examined in Rotman's (1988) use of the terms "inclusive" and "exclusive" imperatives; the former challenging students to be thinkers and the latter influencing students to be "scribblers." As free-spirited as I would like to be as a teacher, there is at some point that students have to be "scribblers" - some math requires practice. 

One line that stood out to me as I read the last bit of their article was "yet, the authors cannot really know who their readers are." I think this is the most important point and one that should guide textbook use in future math classrooms. A math classroom in a school in West Point Grey and one in North Surrey will look, and feel very different. Likewise, a math classroom in midtown Toronto and east Scarborough will look and feel very different as well. This fact, I believe shows that the use of math textbooks to deliver curriculum are always going to miss many students. It is impossible to reach every student that will maximize their learning through one generic textbook; students all come from different backgrounds with different experiences. 

There is one constant in every classroom and that is the presence of a teacher. Committed teachers will know their classes and can do a much more effective job in creating content and materials that will meet the needs of their students. I personally do not plan on using any textbooks. It seems that textbooks have already been phased out in the school I am observing - they have switched over to workbooks. I believe this is the right move; the teacher teaches and uses the workbook to assign questions to aid in the students learning.