Teaching Without Textbooks

Here’s the dirty secret that you’ll never see printed in a publisher’s glossy promo material: Every textbook on the market is a crashing bore to read. All the publishers will assure you that they’ve added special features designed to attract today’s young people and that the prose is lively and engaging. Yeah, right. The colorful maps, pop-out documents, intra-textual questions to contemplate, vibrant graphics, etc. serve only to drive up production costs and students won’t use them. Note to profs: Got an image or a chart you really want students to use? Put it on a PowerPoint and project it in class.

Texts are not boring because of the people who write them. I know many of the folks whose names are on texts and know that they’re dynamic teachers and writers. The problem is density. Put simply, most texts try to do way too much. I’m a proponent of multiculturalism and the last thing in the world we need is a return to “dead white men” history, but the more any text tries to do, the less coherent it will be. What would make more sense is for publishers to knock out some specialized texts. I’m a social and cultural historian and there’s little that I teach doesn’t reference race, class, and gender; hence, I don’t need a text that parrots me in print. What I could use is a really short political/economic history; just as those whose specialty is political history would probably appreciate a nice cultural survey, or perhaps one that discusses multiculturalism. —Rob WeirTeaching Without Textbooks (Inside Higher Ed)

I generally teach from a number of short books, rather than one whopping text. The exception is Lit Crit, but Keesey’s book is a collection of lit crit essays stitched together with chapter introductions; it does not attempt to summarize all that was ever accomplished in lit crit.

Update: after writing the above, I began thinking of how valuable my big literary anthologies have proved to me, even though the class for which I purchased the anthologies only touched on a fraction of the texts. As an undergrad, I took a two-semester 300-level survey of British Lit, which was taught each term by a top-notch prof with a national reputation. There were 300 English majors and minors in that class, and while we didn’t read every text in our two-volume, densely-printed Norton Anthology, I was glad to have those books a few years later when I was studying for my PhD area exams. But at SHU, our 300-level courses tend to be more focused rather than broad.

Regarding the anthologies themselves, they are all text, with no splashy (and expensive) fold-out maps or other gimmicks. So I wouldn’t put them in the same category as the overblown textbooks Weir is criticizing in his article.

3 thoughts on “Teaching Without Textbooks

  1. Going to 3C’s, I’ve had a Torts and Domestic Relations, as well as American Constitutional Experience and Speech professor who haven’t taught from the book, and I’ve learned more from them than I did actually reading the book–because the professor talked about personal experience, and from the heart.

    I can’t get personal experience and heart from a text book. Plain and Simple.

  2. Re: Norton Anthology. You’re right — I was speaking from my perspective as an English major. But the general point — that it’s the content of the book that matters, not whether it has glossy photos or not — still holds.

    When I was in Toronto I knew an undergraduate who would buy books from the bookstore, photocopy them (presumably in an office where he didn’t have to pay for the copies), and return them for a full refund. I asked him about all the fancy color charts, and he said he tore those pages out before he returned the book to the store. (I was shocked! He looked pretty guilty when I pointed out everything that was wrong with that scenario.)

  3. As a member in the group with (in my opinion) the textbooks that suffer from this disease _the_most_, I feel compelled to comment.

    One of the problems with ALL textbooks is that they were written by people who ALREADY know this stuff! Let me liken this to a martial arts comment I once heard: “I was told over and over (to do a front snap kick) to kick from my knee; I never got it. Then one day, I threw a front snap kick just so, and *pow* it was lightning! When my teacher asked me how I did it differently, all I could tell him was that I kicked with my knee.”

    Another problem: I can spend ten years teaching the product rule in calculus 1 – that part won’t change – but the three or four examples and applications might. Why write a textbook every two years where the only changes are in the examples? I have textbooks from 1965 and 1955 that are still the standards in their fields – they are ALL black and white, with very few line drawings for illustrations. These texts cost $30 or $40 when I bought them in the 80s, so they might cost a little more now, but they certainly won?t cost $180 like a modern calculus 1 book!

    The greatest, most well-illustrated, glossiest book, with the 83 included computer animations, three test banks, student solution manual, and so on is still boring IF you don’t like the subject. My Norton Anthology of literature (that you rave about Dennis) was sold back to the recycling people for $5. I’ve never missed it. On the other hand, my high school calculus 1 text is still right here on my shelf

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