Chapter 3 of Daniels and Zemelman was, in my opinion, more engaging, although I quickly grew tired of the "Textbooks are bad, and here's why" tone of the chapter. They did offer suggestions for how to fix the problem, but I feel that they could have achieved their purpose with a tenth of the words used had they employed some Tacitean brevity.
The articles, unlike the text chapters, did give me two "Ah-ha!" moments. Allen provided some very good evidence that read-aloud time is not something for younger students, but can be successfully used in secondary classrooms. And Harvey had an an excellent quote (Which in essence is, "The primary purpose of education is to enhance understanding) and detailed the creation of "Wonder Books," which are a question log, which will hopefully spur students to seek answers to those questions and/or give the instructor items to work into lessons that will be of greater interest to students.
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| Tangentially, the readings featured a book called "The Year 1000" and didn't mention Emperor Basil II the Bulgar-Slayer, who really spiced up that time period. |
I certainly agree with you about the tone of the textbook chapters. While it did give suggestions of how to improve the use of textbooks, it was generally negative. I commented in my blog about the numerous generalizations they make. Some textbooks are well designed and can act as wonderful resources for students.
ReplyDeleteAs far the supplementary texts, I agree that there was not much for world language teachers on their list. The list is certainly extensive, and I'm sure that many of our colleagues will benefit greatly from the list. Thankfully there is a plethora of supplementary texts for our subject.