The Trouble with Textbooks. Or, Why Kathleen E. Welch is My New Favorite Person

As both a student and a teacher, I've had a love hate relationship with textbooks. In the past, as a student, I encountered teachers who relied to heavily on textbooks that had little to say or said it poorly (or both). As a teacher, I find that I have a difficult time balancing just how much or how little to use the textbook in my classroom. Kathleen Welch's assertion that the textbook often serves more as a tool for the teacher than for the student seems to fit my experiences in the composition classroom.

As a beginning composition teacher, I found myself relying too heavily on the textbooks, trying to go through every section of every chapter, even reading lengthy passages, essentially spending class time doing what students were supposed to do for homework. When this method predictably failed - students (and teacher) becoming bored and listless - I course corrected too far in the other direction, relying so little on the textbook that the students began to wonder what the purpose of even reading it was if we weren't going to go over anything in it. Through trial and error, I've learned that the information in the textbook is useless to the students unless they see it in practice alongside the discussion. And I think I've reached a comfortable balance regarding how much time to spend on the text, with the focus of each class being on student writing informed by what they've read.

One part of Welch's text that I found interesting was the discussion of excerpts. It seems to me - and maybe I'm just misinterpreting Welch's meaning here - that the Norton Field Guide is very much guilty of decontextualizing many of the excerpts it uses. I understand that there are the introductory and conclusion blurbs before and after the texts pointing out where they came from and what their purpose was. But often they seem to do a poor job of illustrating the actual "how" of how a text is written. For instance, in the "Analyzing a Text" chapter, Bullock excerpts a portion of William Safire's study of the Gettysburg Address to illustrate context and pattern analysis. It's a great example, and I was able to make use of it. But what might have been more useful, and based on her article I think Welsh would agree, is a step by step illustration of how a student writer creates a similar study. This is where I think Ballenger's book is, in many ways, a preferable text for the composition classroom. My students and I were able to examine the student texts included in The Curious Writer and find examples of what they did wrong and what they did right.

In any case, it's not the job of the textbook to teach, and if we rely on it as such, then we are doing ourselves and our students a disservice. The textbook is a tool, but the actual act of teaching has to be a hands on collaboration between student and teacher. And as Welsh asserts, a classroom in which student writing becomes the primary text is often more effective than a classroom that centers on a set of guidelines taught out of a textbook.