I’ve noticed that my 9th grader doesn’t really have all that many text books. It can be kind of annoying when he has questions about his Geometry or something and I go to say “well, what does the book say”, and have to realize there is none. I don’t want to just give him the answer - I want him to learn how to search for answers and figure it out on his own. There is some online material, but it’s not as satisfying to me as having a physical book to refer to.
I may just be biased by what I am used to - and maybe online material is better than a text book, but it seems more difficult without one. I imagine it is a lot cheaper to have everything online.
Is the move away from physical textbooks a general thing, or at least heading that way?
Does he have textbooks at school? That’s where my kids’ textbooks were, and they had to check one out if they needed extra time (one of my children, always), because every class used the same textbooks.
Very different than how my high school (and junior high) operated (CA), where everyone was assigned a textbook, and there were very few class copies (<10?). Paper cover your book to protect it, because you’ll get charged if it’s damaged, and lug it from school to home and back again. My backpack weighed north of 20 lbs when I had homework in every class.
Where it becomes annoying in things like Geometry is when the teacher uses some term or phrase that I’m not familiar with (my 9th grade teacher called it something else, or didn’t even have a term for it). I can usually make an educated guess at what it means, but it would be nice to be able to look up exactly what the homework problem is asking for.
Another related issue - his school doesn’t have lockers, and I’ve noticed that the trend towards no lockers seems to be catching on too. So, if he did have a bunch of textbooks he’d have to lug them around with him all day.
My kids (3) have pretty much moved off of textbooks in school – the oldest (9th grade) has a textbook for math (geometry), but other than that I think the only books any of them have are the odd workbook.
Not a fan personally. It makes it pretty much impossible to help them on certain tasks, because there’s no easy way for me to figure out what they should know or what resources they have available to them.
(Though what bothers me more is that my kids never get assignments handed back to them – the grades and any comments get posted to an online system that the kids never really have to check in on.)
Middle and high schools here still have lockers. General wisdom is that kids shouldn’t be lugging 20 pounds on their back all day. Seems like good advice.
The textbook companies have not come down on their prices for digital versus paper. Then, whether or not a school system should buy a shitload of iPads to give out (and then get broken, then reissue and break again) to house the books makes it a no-go. Schools still buy books, use them for several years, slowly discard and replace them, and eventually buy a new edition.
I should probably clarify. When I said my kids’ schools had almost entirely moved off textbooks, I didn’t specifically mean physical textbooks – I meant textbooks of any kind (physical, electronic or otherwise).
In-class lectures, handouts, videos. Now that things are being done remotely, a lot of links to websites (which often have a lot of video content). Not having a monolithic reference for what they’re supposed to know is a real pain. (Sorry, I’m not digging through the last week’s worth of URLs to figure out whether they’re supposed to be calling the upper leg bone the femur or the thigh bone.)
I’ll check in with a teacher friend to see what he’s doing.
Do any of those website links have to be approved by a department head or principal or superintendent or school board? I can see that blowing up to a real problem if not.
Well, I’d hope they’d allow it. (Assuming the teacher knows that femur = thigh bone.) But using “femur” instead of “thigh bone” definitely smacks of “Daddy helped me with my homework”.
I can see that.
But, if the answer to “What is that bone in the thigh called?” is “The thigh bone,” then I wonder about the education your child is getting.
I’m more concerned that earlier today my 3rd-grader thought that “happen” was spelled “hapn”. (And I don’t want to guess at how they would have spelled “thigh” if I wasn’t there.)
