Blogging about math textbooks

  This article analyzes how textbook position students in relation to mathematics, theirs peers, teachers, other people, as well as their own experiences. I find this article interesting because the authors are putting a lot of emphasize and value on textbooks that should be used as facilitators in learning about math. In my perspective, the crucial element in learning math at school is still on how the teachers deliver the lesson. In other words, what matters the most is how teachers teach math. It's not like students are being asked come to a math class, open their textbook, and learn math on their own. Teachers and students can utilize textbooks as tools to facilitate understanding in math, but it is not the central element. 

As a former student, I actually like textbooks. I remember I would go home and do a lot of practice questions from the textbook before a test. Although the curriculum is suggesting students to learn math in a new way, I personally enjoyed learning math the traditional way by doing lots of practice questions. I get the feeling of satisfaction after solving a math question correct, and that also proves to me that I am learning something because I know how to do it. Whenever I get stuck on something, I would always refer back to the textbook. Sometimes I can find questions on the textbook that were not covered by the teacher in class, and I would self-learn it by reading the textbook. Also, doing many practice questions from the textbook actually helped me achieve high grades back in high school. 

Shifting my role to be a teacher, as much as I liked textbooks (I still do), I think I have to slowly move away from it because it actually belongs to the "old" way of teaching. With the new curriculum, teachers are being asked to shift away from the traditional-based teaching styles, and implement pedagogies that are more relatable to the real-world. During my two week practicum, students would still have their textbooks, but teachers rarely refer to the textbooks, and they would design teaching content and practice questions on online platforms such as IXL, Desmos, and CEMC. In this technology-rich world, teachers have to incorporate the aspect of digital literacy onto their lessons.  Now going back to the topic of textbooks. As a teacher, I would still use and refer to textbooks in planning my lessons. Textbooks could be rich resources for explaining concepts and finding examples. Nevertheless, I can foresee in the future, textbooks will eventually retire and be supersede by computers in mathematical education.