Entirely Secondary: Textbooks Too Much Like Frozen Dinners

(Editor's note: This a column by San Leandro High School English teacher Jerry Heverly is inspired by education blogger Joe Bower. He says that when his students do an experiment, learning is the priority. Getting the correct answer is entirely secondary.)

You go to the library to get something to read. You emerge with five books. The first book has a bright green cover with a calculator and a graph on its hard cover. It weighs three pounds, five ounces. One weighs four pounds, six ounces, another is a whopping five pounds, nine ounces. The average heft is four and a half pounds. By way of comparison a gallon of milk weighs eight pounds so these five books are almost equal to three gallons.

Your steps out the library door are obviously labored as the burden of 22 pounds of knowledge makes forward movement difficult. I should add that you also have two three-ring binders, a box of pens, an apple left over from lunch, and your iPod. Without a strong backpack—and a strong back—you won’t make it to the car.

Don’t lose (or damage!) any of these books. The library will charge you between fifty and a hundred bucks for any ones you lose. (The one with the calculator on the front goes for ninety-eight smackers.)

There may be some risk of losing or damaging these tomes. We are going to ask you to bring them home every day—and, of course, return with them each morning. Better hope the rain doesn’t leak into your backpack.

We’re talking here about high school textbooks, if you hadn’t guessed already. In this strange world of education it is considered normal for a 16 year old weighing under 150 pounds to lug 20 pounds of books home each day. I see them on  the streets bent over like eighty-year old’s, their backpacks bulging. They remind me of photos I’ve seen of goldminers trekking into the Klondike a hundred years ago. It’s true that only the dedicated few actually suffer this burden each day. Many are the strategies that kids have devised for keeping those ponderous volumes gathering dust in a locker.

To me the English textbooks we use are like TV dinners: frozen ‘knowledge’, expertly packaged, bland, nutritious. They still have the mashed potatoes, peas & carrots, and Salisbury steak that I ate in 1955.  The stories haven’t changed. They still have questions at the end of the chapter. Lots of pictures. Vocabulary words defined in the margins. The publishers have learned how to anticipate problems. (Don’t know where Ireland is? Here’s a map.) The material has been vetted by every possible interest group to root out every possible offense. (Mr. Santorum should be outraged. California textbook regulations say no religion may be portrayed as inferior to any other.)

You ought to expect me to work harder. I shouldn’t be able to make my students lug home a five pound anchor in order to read the pre-digested essays and short stories that some billion dollar publisher has selected because they teach the mandated morality. But if you let me pick the literature my students might read something you would find objectionable. Or something you don’t want to them to hear about. And it would mean my teaching would be starkly different from the lady next door. More about that next week.

(New to the column? Read other installments of Entirely Secondary.)

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