textbooks don't really suck...

Undergrad English textbooks make me sad. I don't think they suck, I don't think they are horrible, I just think they are horribly easy. And yes, I'm a grad student, and yes, I should find their material easy, but I would have found most of the exposition of English readers easy in high school--and I do think that's a problem.

I've read any number of readers and handbooks over time in hopes of finding one at the undergraduate level that didn't talk down to students. I'd like one that uses words with more than five or six letters.... sometimes. I'd like one that maybe completley LEAVES OUT exposition around readings and lets me frame them on my own as a teacher (or hell, as a student) because exposition invariably reads as "you're too dumb to understand this on your own" or "you probably learned this in junion high but just in case you weren't paying attention..."

I'm not sure why any college textbook feels like it has to start from ground zero. End of piece questions in one text I've been reading start at the "Why did so and so do this?" level, which was specifically stated in the text, and I absolutely know that we answered that same question to readings in third grade. These questions are supposed to save me time as an instructor (not having to write my own) and yet they don't, at all, because if I want synthesis questions, if I want the students to connect readings to their lives and to their own writing and to the world, then I'm going to have to write my own anyway that call for something higher than K-12 thought.

And that's why when I taught comp and nothing but comp, long long ago, I taught from what was considered a graduate level coursebook at my school. (Well, the other reason was that I was told that it couldn't be done, wouldn't work, and I really love proving people wrong.) Design Writing Research worked just fine on an undergraduate level, even though students' understanding of the text was very different than the graduate level of understanding that was attained in a course I took that used it.

First of all, maybe it's strange to use a book explicitely about graphic design, material texts, and deconstruction in a composition course. However, the book provided interesting studies in things like subliminal messages and page design that forced students to think in new ways. The book got good reviews from the students too, "the book made me think" was a common one. When I had to use an easier, more expensive, and longer book I didn't get that response--ever. Everybody hated it, and they didn't understand why they had to read things they already knew.

Second of all, the book was colorful, had lots of pictures, and there were many different ways to use the readings. We actually talked, in a very light sort of way, about deconstructing texts means, and how to look at new media and pictures and even situations as texts.

Students worked up to the level that I asked them to be at when I taught out of that book. My earlier classes had gone well (I used that book my second year of teaching) but the level of thought that came out of them was lower. It's hard to get students thinking about complex issues when the reader presents absolutely zero of them, and it's even harder when the reader presents complex issues, but then frames them with exposition that is so long, so explanatory, that students instantly agree with the exposition instead of reading and figuring out their own viewpoints first.

That said I have no idea what book I want to use next term. Bugger.