Greg Forster explains How a Physics Textbook Changed My Life on Jay P. Greene’s Blog.

He starts by disagreeing with Jay Mathews’ claim that textbooks are obsolete. Not all teachers can teach well without a textbook, Forster argues. Take his high school physics teacher, who didn’t use the tetbook.

He spent the whole class illuminating the subject matter in his own highly motivated way, bringing in unusual examples and exploring subtle nuances.

As a result, his teaching was incredibly engaging to the few students who shared his intense interest in the subject, and completely useless to the majority who did not. They needed to be walked through the basics slowly and carefully – sort of the way a textbook does.

One of Forster’s lab mates was completely lost. He offered to help her, starting by urging her to read the textbook and ignore the teacher.

She went from a D to an A.

And you know what? I’m married to that girl today.

Textbooks have their uses, he concludes.

And did you know that As Time Goes By is a physics song? Read to the end of the post for the lyrics.

California’s school board decided all eighth graders should be tested in algebra by 2012 in accordance with state standards. But a Superior Court judge has blocked mandatory algebra.

The state superintendent, local school boards, administrators and the teachers’ union say California doesn’t have enough qualified math teachers to get everyone ready for algebra in eighth grade.

Guest blogging on Core Knowledge Blog, Fred Strine laments the ignorance of his fellow teachers, now known as “facilitators.”

Of my 28 colleagues in the English dept. only one other geezer and I know what a direct object is. My grammar diagnostic test routinely given to 7th graders in the 70s proved way too tough for my current high school TEACHER colleagues. Our Language Arts department has no Standard English textbooks. The facilitators wouldn’t use them anyway. “Besides, nobody cares about stuff like subject-verb agreement anymore,” I’ve been told. Meanwhile glaring errors such as, “Her and me feel the same,” pass muster with both students AND their facilitators.

Strine just retired from teaching after 36 years, taking his knowledge of the direct object with him.

Most Textbooks Should Just Stay On the Shelf, argues Jay Mathews in the Washington Post.

Textbooks still make good dictionaries, with glossaries at the back. They also reassure parents, who don’t get to see teachers in action but are comforted, in a perverse way, that their kids’ schoolbooks seem just as dry and predictable as theirs were. But like the newspapers that have been my life, textbooks are creeping slowly toward obsolescence. Jay Diskey, executive director of the school division of the Association of American Publishers, said his companies are moving into “Web sites, podcasts, electronic books, software, courseware, online tutoring tips, educational games, video products” and many other ways to learn.

Big books have failed to hold the attention of teenagers leafing through the pages with music blasting in their earbuds and text messages filling their cellphone screens. Facts and ideas, in my experience, are more likely to sink in if introduced in group exercises, exploiting the adolescent urge to belong. Teachers have their classes organize book clubs, recreate the Constitutional Convention, raise animals, write and perform plays, publish online magazines.

I realize many textbooks are poorly written and stuffed with so many pictures and sidebars that they’re hard to follow. Electronic books will not cripple your backpack-wearing child either. But can we really dispense with texts to live in a brave new world of zine-writing and group projects?

Arne Duncan is supposed to find common ground between System Defenders, traditionalists who want more money and no accountability, and the Army of the Potomac, who want to hold schools accountable for results, write Checker Finn and Mike Petrilli on Education Gadfly. Local Controllers who “want Uncle Sam to butt out of education policy — but to keep sending money,” are Republicans, and probably ignorable.

Is there another way? Gadfly advocates “Reform Realism.”

We embrace standards, assessment, and accountability; we believe that America’s achievement gaps are morally unacceptable, socially divisive, and politically unsustainable; and we recognize that for the U.S. to remain secure and prosperous in a dangerous, shrinking and flattening world, our education system must become far more effective.

But as Arne Duncan has learned in Chicago, we also believe that federal action too often yields unintended and undesirable consequences. Uncle Sam would be wise to adopt medicine’s maxim of “first do no harm.”

The feds would set common standards and tests, while the states would handle accountability for schools that don’t do well.

Update: National standards isn’t a realistic goal, says Matthew Ladner. And he says it in Pig Latin!