71–80 of 106 posts
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The teachers I know do start with standard lesson plans, but for reasons I don't understand they feel the need to customize them.
NIH is a powerful sentiment in many areas, not just tech.
I have no idea how commercial textbooks for anything up to specialized, college-level classes are viable. You'd think that enough states (and countries) would put the work into the Wikibooks calculus book so it meets their standards and just use that.
I don't get it, either. I laugh when schools complain their textbooks are "old and outdated". So what? Has there been a revolution in algebra I didn't hear about? I also laugh when teachers say they expend all this effort making "lesson plans". There are 3.7 million teachers just in the U.S. You'd think they could share them?
I would LOVE to use free textbooks and older books. I try to do so as much as possible. But the real problem (for me at least), is how can I get a copy for all of my students? I can't afford to print them all a copy of old stuff, and after about 5-10 years, the publishers stop printing the older books!
I came across this problem big time this school year -- planned on using a book I love and have been using for 10 years old to be told last minute it's now OUT OF PRINT. (It was in print just 6 months ago). sigh
Old is OK in many places, but only if you can get 50-100 copies of it each semester / year...
> thank you, thank you You are very welcome. Glad to help. :-) (I'll just say that the TeX Users Group is very interested in improving the PDFs that LaTeX outputs in this regard, and has projects in this direction. They are at https://www.tug.org .)
Can you elaborate on what / where those projects are? It's not clear from the tug.org website.
I love LaTeX and if I had a relevant skill set I'd be willing to help out.
Thank you.
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The teachers I know do reuse their lesson plans when they teach the same class. One of the biggest values of seniority is being able to teach the same class every year. Why they don't standardize has everything to do with the kind of people who become teachers and what they want to be doing with their time.
> The teachers I know do reuse their lesson plans when they teach the same class. Of course they do. I knew I was being buffaloed. Though the point stands that why don't they share lesson plans? Why do we need 3.7 million unique lesson plans? There ought to be plenty of off-the-shelf plans to use.
As for why there aren’t off-the-shelf plans:
You might want to adapt the curriculum to the current class of students or the broader community. The College Board does distribute a syllabus for AP US History classes, but it’s deliberately sparse so that teachers can plug in people and events that are “locally valued” (their words, not mine). A class in Alaska might spend more time on Native events and statehood; one in Boston might up the emphasis on the Revolutionary War events that happened nearby; Texas is going to go crazy with the Alamo. This is true for other subjects too. A science class might spend more time on local ecosystems that they can visit. A few of my literature class read a play and then went to see a production of it; that part presumably had to change every year, based on what was being performed nearby.
The other reason is that the teachers need to review the lesson plan anyway: no one can remember a thousand hours of material! While doing so, it makes sense to “refactor” them into something that matches your own mental model of the content. Teaching off someone else’s materials feels weird and often goes a little more poorly.
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Have you ever talked to any of these people you're laughing at? Maybe there is some nuance or background you're not aware of. I'm not a teacher, but I think often when they talk about old textbooks, the issue is that they are physically falling apart, not just that they were published a long time ago. These books are in continuous use by children, so you can't compare it to a book you've had on your shelf for 40 year…
I understand that textbooks fall apart and need replacement. I'm just talking about the complaints that they are outdated. The complaint I constantly hear from teachers is they work their fingers to the bone preparing lesson plans. I ask why are they making them from scratch, why not share? and don't get a response. > Every state, district, individual school might have its own rules about what can and must be taught,…
In the US, public school students with disabilities (learning and otherwise) are legally entitled to “Individualized Educational Programs”, which is supposed to be tailored to their particular needs and abilities. For example, a student with a speech impairment might be allowed to pre-record a presentation, or do it in private, rather than live in front of the whole class. There are a lot of requirements, and putting together something that passes legal muster and really tries to support the student seems like a lot of work.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Individualized_Education_Progr...
> thank you, thank you You are very welcome. Glad to help. :-) (I'll just say that the TeX Users Group is very interested in improving the PDFs that LaTeX outputs in this regard, and has projects in this direction. They are at https://www.tug.org .)
It would be nice to have this thread as a "collection" place for different open textbooks. I personally use OpenStacks, they're quite good. https://openstax.org/
There's a couple of variations available - it was written by some professors at Georgia Tech, one of which moved to Duke and teaches off of it there - but the UBC version is my favorite, as it makes some changes in the lesson order to teach vectors before matrices.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I understand that textbooks fall apart and need replacement. I'm just talking about the complaints that they are outdated. The complaint I constantly hear from teachers is they work their fingers to the bone preparing lesson plans. I ask why are they making them from scratch, why not share? and don't get a response. > Every state, district, individual school might have its own rules about what can and must be taught,…
Were they IEPs? In the US, public school students with disabilities (learning and otherwise) are legally entitled to “Individualized Educational Programs”, which is supposed to be tailored to their particular needs and abilities. For example, a student with a speech impairment might be allowed to pre-record a presentation, or do it in private, rather than live in front of the whole class. There are a lot of requireme…
I had a student with limited vision in a class once, who had a reader. Luckily, I had written the course notes (basically a textbook) in latex. I consulted with the student and saw how the reader worked. All was fine, but it was slow because it said e.g. "backslash begin open brace equation close brace", so I made a perlscript to remove backslash and braces (and a few other things) and then it all worked really well.…
Basic scripting is such a powerful tool, it's sad that so few people know how to use it.
I think, scripting. It is just scripting.