I received a letter from an old friend and fellow freelance writer today. She described a typical request from a textbook development house: can you write 37 pages of high school chemistry, this week? This is so typical of textbook development houses. And I have some sympathy for their situation, because often they don’t receive their own projects from publishers until it is almost too late to get the project done at all. I have never received an assignment from a development house that didn’t begin with a question something like, are you available now and for the next three months? In contrast, when I receive assignments directly from the publisher, I am often given — oh, as much as two weeks advance notice before I have to start writing.
I know I have some readers who are not textbook writers, but who are teachers worried about the textbook industry and how it shortchanges kids when it comes to getting an education. I know you can all come up with dozens of reasons why textbooks are problematic, but here is one more: often they are written in such a ferocious hurry by a development house that they can’t be properly developed. The content is researched in a rush, the writing is rushed, the editing is rushed, and the final product is bland and colorless.
Why does this happen? I really don’t know! But I am dying to see publishers start to produce some smaller books that focus on specialized topics — books that can replace textbooks for classroom teachers who don’t like to teach out of texts. Part of the problem, I think, with giant textbooks, is that a book that big has a momentum of its own. The deadlines just are not movable. So writers have to make do with what research they can scrounge on short notice. Likewise editors. Wouldn’t it be lovely to see the textbook industry move toward producing smaller references — a book on the Vietnam War, for example? Or a book on the human nervous system? Small, stand alone books, with, perhaps, web-based resources (tests, worksheets, podcasts, project ideas, additional information, links to more resources, etc.). Producing unit-sized books could revolutionize the production process for textbook publishers. If one book needed more time, another one could be shifted forward in the production queue. Simply having greater flexibility in the production process could dramatically improve the quality of the books that we produce. I also think that if the process involved an endless line of small, stand alone units, it would be easier to give writers some notice of what they were going to be expected to write and when…something freelance writers everywhere would be extremely grateful for!
My children have been going to public schools in China for 5 years, and throughout the whole time, they didn’t use one single giant textbook. Math, social studies, science and language arts each had a 5″ x 8″ paperback text of less than 200 pages , easy to carry and take notes in. They studied from those textbooks for a semester, then received new textbooks for the 2nd semester, which were not published until right before the semester started.
Several advantages besides the ones Bonnie mentioned. One, the textbooks are inexpensive, so students can keep them at the end of the year to refer back to. They own them, so they can write notes in them. (Don’t you remember how scared we were to make even a little mark in our textbooks?) Two, the entire text can be mastered duirng a semester, allowing for all children to have a common body of knowledge. Of course they can learn other material if they want, but it’s a good thing when you have a populace which has a solid foundation of basic knowledge. Three, students bring home all their textbooks every day. This allows parents to keep up with what their children are learning, which allows families to support the education of their children. Four, teachers have leeway to add materials that are of interest to the students.
The Chinese school system is not perfect and has some serious flaws such as relying heavily on rote memorization, but this is changing. Educators in China are improving the quality of education by taking the best practices from the West at an incredible pace, and educators in America need to be learning from the best practices of other countries as well. After all, if our methods in education are holding our students back from progressing as much as possible, shouldn’t we do away with them?
“All humanity has been created to carry forward an ever-advancing civilization.”