Math textbooks response

As a former student, I don't know how much I agree with the article. In my experience, for the most part, reading a textbook was enough for me to be able to answer most questions correctly. When I was younger, this wasn't true and I needed more guidance, but from about 5th grade onward, I was able to start doing my math work as soon as I knew what section we were doing. However, as a teacher, I view things differently. I know that my experience was unusual. I got my passion for math from my teachers, but my understanding came easily. As a teacher, I think giving students real context for their lives and getting them to see themselves doing math is really important, which seems to be something the textbook examples lacked.

I think that the explanation of the concepts should come from the teacher. As the teacher, you should be aware of your students interests and to some extent their goals, so that you can bring their lives into math and get them to see a reason to do it. I like the idea of textbooks for work problems though. I think having some consistency with problems that students are doing throughout the province is a really good thing. And having a little review in the textbook of how to do the problems in case the students forget their notebooks at home would also be great. But I think it should be clear that it is review only and that the actual lesson should be taught by the teacher.