“So–what do you think the problem is?”

That is a simple question with a long and complicated answer. But the basic answer is that learning/knowledge is just not important to these kids and ignorance is perfectly acceptable. There are a myriad of causes. Pop culture celebrates ignorance and the thug culture. Parents who don’t care, or are too busy to monitor. A complete lack of consequences for failure. (my school has not met it’s AYP goals in four years and yet has not retained a single student in that time…go figure). Their elementary curriculum. (My kids who have come staight from elementary school have never seen a Social Studies book, and the ones who were with us in sixth grade saw it last year for the first time.) Ten students have been pulled out of school so far for extended vacations in Mexico and muissed anywhere from one to three weeks. (Three weeks is 15 school days out of a school year that is only 180 days long)

Two of my classes are AVID classes. These are kids who have self selected themselves as wanting to go to college and made a commitment to prepare to do so. I get less than half the homework turned in in these classes.

The only class in which most of the work is completed, most of the students are learning, and frankly is any fun to teach, is the gifted class. These kids aren’t really any smarter. The difference is that these kids’ parents are involved. They check on their kids. They call me and the school. They monitor the learning and the teaching. They enforce consequences for failure and lack of effort.

These are published by a Menonite group. They contain Biblical references. After working through the 3rd through 5th grade books with my eldest, I’ve learned and retained way more than I was ever exposed to during my school days.

So–what do you think the problem is?

I have been concentrating on Grammar. The past several weeks I have been working on independent and subordinate clauses. The first week I instructed the students to memorize the definition of a clause: ” A clause is a group of words with a subject and a verb.” I wrote it on the board, I repeated it out loud several times, I had the students repeat it back to me several times. I then taught a lesson in which the students had to identify clauses and their subjects and verbs. I checked for understanding often and had the students repeat the definition orally as a culminating activity.

One week later I began the class with the question “What is a clause?”. I was greater with blank looks. A few got as far as “A group of words.” Out of 173 students, maybe a dozen remembered the correct definition. When I asked them why, a typical response was “we did that a week ago!”.

When I tried to explain that they are supposed to be learning things and remembering things for the rest of their life, they seemed dumbfounded. When I informed them that I still remembered things I had learned 30 years ago when I was their age I got disbelief and disinterest. Yet these kids can memorize intricate and long button combos for their X-Boxes and WIIs, discuss in detail the stats of their favorite basketball players and know the intimate details of the lifestory of the Jonas Brothers to an excruciating degree.

These kids are in the 7th grade, and can’t identify the parts of speech. Many haven’t memorized the multiplication tables. At least half can’t read an analog clock. Several literally cannot tie their shoes.

There are times I come dangerously close to despair.

The argument developing here seems to be that most (all?) modern textbooks are useless. That doesn’t mean that useful textbooks don’t exist, or haven’t been written.

Also, to argue that some students can’t follow the prose of “big” books is not an argument for building an education around group work. The historic advantage reading imparted to mankind was the ability to absorb and transmit knowledge more quickly and efficiently than by speaking to each other. It sounds as if something is dangerously unbalanced in many classrooms, but it’s not the textbooks’ fault.

What a shock, in high school (AP English) to find a textbook I loved well enough to want to buy my own copy. We had the combined volume, “Story and Structure, Sound and Sense”. I found a paperback of just Sound and Sense in the local University bookstore the next summer, then recently (more than 20 years later) found a nice copy of Story and Structure to go with it.

Of course we had plenty of “great books” to round things out (loved Portrait; loved the language of Return of the Native, hated its story).

On the history side, I’ll take Palmer’s “History of the Modern World” over anything else, for the really big picture (and plenty of fine detail). Minimal sidebars, few illustrations, zillions of pages of text, but so much better written than anything else I could find (when helping homeschool an autistic high-schooler). Took about a year and a half to plough through, but worth it. (We had it in a one-semester Western Civ class in college; never thought I’d be buying a 2nd copy some day!)

FWIW, I don’t like and don’t use literature texts. They’re full of glossy pictures, cost a fortune, and the kids don’t like to carry them (and who can blame them — I don’t like bringing home the TE). One we recently evaluated actually had cut out big chunks of Romeo & Juliet. I just use novels (critical editions when I can get them) and the Hacker manual for the most part these days. I managed to score a set of Sound & Sense this year. All poetry, no pictures, and no “extensions.” It is a beautiful, beautiful thing.

As usual, you’re right on the money. As a student, I always found all those glossy pictures and insets to be just damn annoying. In a piece of literature, they disrupt the flow of the story. In other subjects, they tend to create a sense of ADD by moving the eyes and mind from one thing to another. Using charts, diagrams, photos, and other non-text information to judiciously augment a single flow of information in a textbook can be useful. For some subjects, like music theory, it’s even required. Too bad textbook publishers have fallen for the MTV mantra of hit-’em-hard-and-fast-from-all-angles. Most of their product would be better used as toilet paper.