Math Textbooks

How you respond to the examples given here -- as a teacher and as a former studentThe first example of modeling a person's height given their leg length gives a real world application of when linear relations are useful. Unfortunately the book does not mention anything about how this relation was discovered, why it is important, who would need to know this information etc. As a student this was a common theme in my math classes. Although it is nice to see math being used for a purpose, the purpose needs to be clear and appeal to the student's interest and get them thinking rather than just having an application for the sake of applying math. By getting the students involved in the application process would also help solidify the idea for them. If they had a choice in what they could explore, discuss with their peers what types of data they would need and determine how the data is related to each other would be better use of their time and application. Having a more natural setting rather than a forced problem that is set up at the end is much more meaningful. As a teacher, I would rather implement "word problems" as projects that students can fully experience for themselves rather than just doing the same calculations as before but with words attached.

What are your thoughts about the reasons for using/ not using textbooks, and the changing role of math textbooks in schools?
I am not entirely convinced by the exclusive/inclusive imperatives suggested by Rotman. Although the authors can write a textbook however they see fit, teachers have some autonomy in how they present the material in the textbook to the students. For example, the teacher can make exclusive imperatives inclusive by having students work in groups to calculate, copy and write things down. Having multiple students perform a calculation in order to see if they both arrive at the same answer, compare the processes they took to arrive at the answer and then discuss what their answer means with each other. Furthermore, if students are working in groups they can each work independently to come up with a way to represent their understanding of a topic and then share their representation with others. 

Another confusing part of the article for me was near the end when the author mentioned the way mathematics textbooks function in school settings. I don't believe that depersonalizing mathematics for communication is the most effective way of communicating the content. Letting the students have a personal connection to mathematics would allow them to become interested and want to learn about it and communicate math with others. I'm not sure if a textbook will inspire students to learn more about math but it can help make the communication and example creating process easier for teachers. 

Also, textbooks seem to take out the rich culture and history behind the math making it seem like a very dry and boring subject that is purely about calculating answers when is much more than that. During word problems, some textbooks use names from different cultures and include women which is a good start but it is very surface level and does not offer substance to learning.