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Katy Citizen Watchdog$ |
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We’re Taxpayers. It’s Our Money. |
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Disappearing Textbooks |
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When you as parents went to school, probably the source for the curriculum in your classes was a textbook. That still seems like a reasonable source to me, but things have changed.
One of the first things to check out after school starts each semester is your child’s textbooks. Ask your child, K-12, to bring his books home, one at a time, for you to peruse. In asking him to do this, you will discover whether or not he has his own texts and whether he is allowed to bring them home.
The first surprising thing that your child may say to you is “I didn’t get a book for that class.” Chances are your child is telling you the truth.
There may be legitimate reasons why this is the situation. Perhaps the administrator in charge of ordering books failed to order the books in time or to order enough of them. (Not ordering happened one year.) Perhaps the school is following the current fad of eliminating the text in favor of something else.
For example, spelling books no longer exist. They were phased out over ten years ago, and instead, your child is asked to learn from lists of words. If you want to see the lists, they are conveniently placed on the Katy ISD web site (http://www.katyisd.org/curriculum/curriculum/spelling.htm).
You can even view last year’s spelling list words if you‘d like.
If you read the material on the site, you will see phrases that are probably meaningless to you but with which you should become acquainted. Things like “estimated spelling,” “visual markers,” and “mature spelling” may not mean anything to you, but they are a part of your child’s spelling lesson.
Let me refresh your memory regarding your own spelling lessons. First of all you had a book, so you could take it home and look at it, and your Mom could help you read through the directions and the explanations and the words. The words were usually grouped by letter or the same sounding vowels or some other logical method of tying certain words together, so that when you learned them there was something to hang on to that made sense. Usually you had a pre-test after you had looked at the words, wrote sentences using the words, maybe had a Spelling Bee using the words, and then you took the test on Friday.
No one ever came up with any empirical evidence that this method didn’t work. Everyone I knew at my school could spell unless they just didn’t have the mental capacity. Someone, probably an out of work administrator, decided that what worked did not earn him any money, so he made up, out of the blue, another method to learn to spell. He toured the offices of his employed administrator friends with a sales pitch, and VOILA! he made a sale to one school district, and soon there were others that fell for the scam. The spelling guru became rich, and your child and mine have had to suffer because they’ve never ever really learned how to spell.
Ever notice how many foreign born students or home schooled students win the National Spelling Bee? There’s a reason. Their parents are at home teaching them how to spell the old-fashioned way!
But back to my textbook advice.
Look at each text that your child DOES have. Look at the people who wrote it. Google them to see what else they do. Look at the book. Is it mostly pictures? What is the content of the pictures? Is it colorful? Is it TOO colorful? Did the publisher spend more time making it pretty as opposed to putting good content in it?
You probably took all the same courses your child is taking so you can judge his texts. Read the text. Does it make sense? Are there factual errors? Read the questions at the end of the chapter. Are they about the factual material within the text? They should be. Perhaps you will see some other kinds of questions that ask your child to do some activity, or interview some person, or do something else of which you may not approve. The questions might also be directed toward you the parent. Sometimes the questions are very personal, and one wonders what it is the school is trying to find out about the child’s home life. The questions should be about the subject matter, and they should elicit from your child the knowledge that he acquired by reading the text.
A little effort on the part of parents might open a lot of eyes about what students are being asked to read. Maybe I will be wrong about your child‘s situation, and you will find that he has accurate, well written texts.
I hope you do. |
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Mary McGarr, Katy Citizen Watchdog$ |
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Date: 09/08/2005 |
