Curriculum & Text

After careful consideration and review, I believe that the rest of my course sequence pretty much follows textbook units, though not necessarily in the order presented in the textbook. I will therefore only need to make minor modifications. For example, I'm deciding whether to follow mitosis/meiosis with all the DNA material -structure, replication, etc., or with basic cell biology - structure, movement of materials, biochemistry. It makes sense to cover this material before DNA, but it also make sense to teach DNA after mitosis/meiosis. What a dilemma. I've posted the current version here.

I've also reached the conclusion that the Holt textbook is useful almost exclusively as a source of great photos. It's nearly impossible to read the text and come away with any understanding of what's going on. If you read a single section or paragraph, it might make sense. But the sections are not constructed well, each one seems to read like a stand-alone encyclopedia or dictionary entry. The big picture is hard to see, the connections between ideas are not well developed. The chapters are also jam packed with topics. I find it just too complicated to tell student not to worry about Topic X, ignore questions 3, 7, 15, etc. I nowrealize how difficult it is (for me at least) to evaluate a text without actually using it in a classroom setting. When looking at the textbooks last year, I simply opened to a few isolated sections and read them, trying to imagine how difficult it would be for students to understand the section. My evaluation strategy seems to have meshed well with the textbook style, and I wonder how many textbook evaluators fall into the same trap.

I am also using as a review book the Amsco publication: "The Living Environment: Biology" by Rick Hallman. This is almost the polar opposite of the Holt text - not many pretty pictures, not many diagrams or sidebars, but a lot of text reasonably well written. Hallman does a nice job of writing a cohesive narrative for each chapter and each major topic. By limiting pictures and making the ones that are present black & white, the eye/brain can really focus on the reading and following the narrative. The Holt text is a visual nightmare, from the pictures to the sidebars - tips, reviews, objectives, real-world applications - to the overly visually stylized text itself, full of colorful numbered lists, colorful bulleted lists, colorfully highlighted vocabulary words, - it's a disaster!

And I don't buy the notion that the "MTV generation" needs this kind of stimulation. That kind of visual bombardment may be great for entertaining or holding attention, but I simply do not believe that it allows for, much less promotes, critical thinking.