I’m going to do a more extended reflection of my experiences at EduCon over the next few days – I’m letting the weekend stew a little bit, plus I want to gather some of the links and resources I found out about into something that might be vaguely useful. But one thing that I know EduCon did is give me the motivation to confront the gap between the teacher I am right now and the teacher I want to be. And I am never going to make as much progress as I want on that front until I come to terms with the three-way battle between me, myself, and the textbook I’ve been assigned to teach.
I feel like I need to apologize for the possibility that I might, at some point in this post, say something positive about a textbook. I feel like I spend much of my day banging my head against the thing, and it’s a 1300 page world history text, so you can just imagine how much fun that is. Reading and answering questions out of a textbook is so disconnected from building something that addresses a real challenge in your own life that the ghost of John Dewey should start warning me that I’m about to get a visit from the Spirit of Education Past. I’ve spent a lot of my time as a high school teacher looking for ways to help my students put some personality into the events of history, and there’s not a lot of personality in a textbook.
So why do I also spend a lot of time trying to figure out how to help my students get more out of this thing?
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