Chapter 6: How to Use a Textbook

Textbooks, math textbooks in particular, are a complex monster that intimidates students. They include language that is hard to understand at first glance but also language that is difficult to remember 10 minutes later. They are long, hard to understand, and sometimes more confusing than they are helpful. This chapter provides many different strategies to help students better understand the textbooks they are reading. The section of this chapter that I thought was the most interesting was the last section titled “Get a Better Textbook!”. This small section provided a lot of insight for me as an inspiring math teacher.

I know from personal experiences that math textbooks can be super helpful but also very confusing. I remember explicitly that my AP Statistics textbook was one of the most challenging texts I have ever read. Nothing in the textbook ever made sense to me, it was all just black squiggles on a page. I noticed throughout the course of that class that I comprehended the material better when my teacher gave us a different platform to read from other than the textbook. Anything was better than reading that textbook, whether it was a worksheet, story, note page, powerpoint. Anything. I think that if we, as teachers, can adopt different platforms and teach from many different literacy texts, we can do better job of reaching all students no matter their reading level or learning strategy. Subject Matters states that “It’s more important to be vigilant, to be on the lookout for new materials that might suit our students better” (Daniels and Zemelman 201). Moving away from textbooks and into more interesting, relatable texts will engage more students and allow students to better understand more challenging material.

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Kaylie Herbert