My first brush with textbooks were the ones my father kept on a high shelf in the house from which he developed his school lesson plans for his junior high kids. (I remember a spanking for climbing precariously on a stool placed on a trunk to reach them at age 5. )
When little, I remember the intensity of discussions in our home. There were four of us girls only two years apart in ages, and throughout our elementary school years we were often enrolled in each others' classes in various combinations and in high school in years which electives were only held every two years, we ended up competing with each other for the highest grades in the class.
Truly, we girls were uniquely different from each other, and we absolutely never could study with each other for anything except if when we taking turns giving each other spelling words. But, there was always the intense concentration to do better than each other.
Anything we read, we had to give an opinion. I remember our discussions on biblical passages, religious themes, shortest way to Kasilof, who could curl their tongue, the validity of Kon Tiki, and Amundsen's trip to the South Pole, alternate routes up McKinley (before the more poetic Denali), Black Like Me, Up the Down Staircase, Dante's Inferno, Cartoons from the New Yorker, and Charlotte's Web.
One recurring discussion was whether or not it was wise for kids to learn to read early. Sisters argued whether we were stunted by having to wait to learn to read or not, and what would've happened if we'd attempted to figure it out on our own. As I was the eldest, our parents insisted I wait until I joined the other little Bluebirds in first grade, but there was no holding back anyone else once I'd mastered it. Pretty much we four girls all learned to read that year, and moved quite quickly beyond Dick, Jane, and silly Sally and their trip on the train to Chicago. Heck, in '64 we rode the Mooser Gooser along the coast, and would never have gotten except that the ride was over and we're going to the Old-Fashioned Ice Cream Parlor. I guess Pa didn't want us touching his school textbooks, because he was afraid that our schoolteachers might be stymied by the time we were in school.
And, indeed, as a teacher's kid I spent a lot of time before and after school helping the librarian put away books, running off tests for class on the hectograph copier or ditto machines. I think there was a mimeograph machine, too, one could use if the copy was typed. (But, I was happy to use the new Xerox for pep band parts when it was installed in the office.) Yes, I once rolled my thumb under the revolving drum of the ditto machine to elicit a red-purple color where the blood spurted out from under the cuticle.
When there were 3 minute timed math combination tests, I was the one that got to watch the clock while the teacher stepped out Yes, after the first one and half minutes, I often lost concentration and gave an extra one or two minutes. (I was too proud to tell anyone I had no idea of how to tell time and to me it was either the long or the short hand, not that there was any difference between the hour and the second hand--which was the first and which the second hand was beyond me, and for that matter after 1.5 minutes, actually if I stared hard enough the hands started to revolve the opposite way, and so got mixed up how many times they had gone around.)
Yes, but by sixth grade, I was the one that got to stick my chewing gum on the blackboard with my nose sticking to it while everyone else did their classwork. By that age, I could not sit still at the desk if Henry and Ricky and Charles were whispering in back of me while working to finish assignments from the previous day.
Anyone remember the darkened classrooms and teacher writing on an overhead projector? Nap time. If there was reading at the desk, I had to ask permission to barricade myself in a corner. Nor, could I focus on working on the next day's assignment in class after the lecture. Math classes were usually scheduled last period. Meredith Mills and Cindy Adams always finished geometry homework during class, so they could skip off to basketball practice without a heavy rucksack and assignments to complete. Adele Powell always finished analysis assignments before we left for the day. I could never sit still long enough to do math in the presence of others.
When I brought the book home, I never remembered the way it was shown in class, and had to come up with some more intuitive way to solve the problem. For a few years before I started having brain problems, I could actually solve problems without knowing how I did it, just by letting my head do its thing. Later, after surgery, math was meticulously deductive.
Homework went home in a big cloth bag. But, after a certain age, it was difficult to even study in the house. Brothers and sisters sat around the living room table. I have pictures in my mind of one of the twins helping younger brother with math. Some times I could not even concentrate to study in the house where there was a sound. Sometimes, I had to follow the moose dropping out to the big rock in the woods (for the first could weeks after school started anyway), and other times, it was to the radio shed before Pa got home where he had all his ham operator equipment and a nice quiet if only staticky background noise, and sometimes, in a houseful of kids and parents and cats, I had to make a fortress behind my sister's bed and study in the quiet there. I still remember dry eyes after hours under hot incandescence of a study lamp.
Later, ..in assembling summer math work-outs for my children when they were in elementary grades, (had to be fun and challenging) I picked up old textbooks at library jumble sales. These old books often had a theme; practical math, technology-based, or consumer math, etc. It was a bit of a challenge to plumb the depth of 4-5 textbooks to come up with different problems illustrating a similar concept for different reasons using each different book, to provide in-depth variety and challenge on a certain theme.
English texts in the 60's were pretty standard grammar references, and the information hadn't gone out of date when I snapped up at library sales. I remember 6th grade grammar, past tense, present, future, and the complexity of different parts of a sentence. We hit the basics pretty hard in Mrs. Hildeman's class in 4th grade and everything after that was merely a different fancier layer, sometimes more esoteric than conceptual. Actually, many of the content of the study was not applicable until studying a foreign language.
Geography, yes, a terribly boring subject, best studied under the guise of non-fictional references consulted for National Geographic magazines! My husband would pick up books or videos about children in other lands, and we could often make that the focus of our learning. I think, as a blanket statement, people from other countries that move here often have a sense about a cultural place in the world and certain common themes from history than we do.
As for science text...my house as I was growing up was full of them. Since my learning style could at best be called Bohemian, I found all types of basic science discussions to the learning. I could only focus on one topic at a time, and study of any topic--started with checking out books and books, starting with beginner simple books to as in-depth as as possible to learn all about a topic such as with muscles: calcium ATP, bones, blood, Krebs cycle, voltage, potentials and electricity.
Studying science from a textbook was too lightly scattered. The encyclopedias and references were oftentimes much better than trying to read paragraph after paragraph in a science book. I remember another way we would study was to look at nature and try to find out as much as possible about it. For example the abalone shell on the dresser resulted in discussions about life cycles of mollusks, bottom fish shrimps, lobsters, and oyster beds along the East Coast, grading pearls and forming nacre, makng pearl buttons and trading on the lower Manhattan, barnacles, shipbuilding, the Theme from the Pearl-Fishers, reading The Pearl, Venus in the scallop shell and Three Graces, Shell gas, dissolving eggshells in vinegar, fluoridation, and pearlescent lighting. I think we even talked about the lustre of opals.
And, that was the way my children easily learned, too.
I don't really know how kids can stand to learn anything at all from textbooks.
In college, I tried to sell the texts back as soon as possible if it wasn't referential. Remember the data is at least 5 years old by the time it's published, and older by the time some school contracts to purchase it.
What I always had in the back of my mind for a good class textbook was a collection of pamphlets, leaflets, or journal articles to assemble in a loose-leaf folder. That style of education, is probably too labor-intensive, though, and requires a standard lecture.
