Herbel-Eisenmann & Wagner (2007)

As anecdotal evidence to align with some of the narrative in the reading, I reflect on my math learning experiences with and without textbooks. I have had good to bad experiences with textbooks. Throughout high school and university, almost all of my math courses had a textbook, however a large portion of those courses, the textbook was an additional resource with suggested problems rather than a key piece to the learning puzzle. I think that in the high school setting, the textbook is often seen as an enemy because there may be inconsistency between what the teacher is doing and what the textbook has written. The authors of this article inspect a the relations between the student and their textbook with five different entities. 1) Their peers. 2) People. 3) Their teacher: 4) Mathematics 5) Their own experiences. Regardless of how a textbook is written, the nature of what is included and the manner in which it is included is complex, driven by politics (as we have seen in earlier readings), from local and global discourse. Additionally, "Language indirectly indexes particular dispositions, understandings, values, and beliefs." The authors conclude, "there is room to draw awareness to the dance of agency between particular persons". I think it is most important to connect this community of relations between the student, textbook, and their environments through focusing on the who. Who found these equations? Who discovered this phenomenon? Where do they come from? This brings the math to life for the students and the textbook can be written to emphasize the diverse humans who made the discoveries we teach.