World Famous Comics: Glencoe Literature: Reading With Purpose, Course 2
Glencoe Literature: Reading With Purpose, Course 2
From: McGraw-Hill/Glencoe Publisher: McGraw-Hill/Glencoe Average Rating: Binding: Hardcover Label: McGraw-Hill/Glencoe Number of Items: 1 Number of Pages: 1007 Publication Date: February 28, 2007 Reading Level: Young Adult
Worst Textbook Ever Seen This is the worst textbook I have ever seen. It will behoove you to be forewarned it is entirely grounded in outcome-based educational methods. My stepdaughter has an online correspondence course using it. Almost everything in it is from the 20th-21st centuries (from the beginning of the decline of Western Civilization onward), the rest from the 19th century. So, there is no Shakespeare, Chaucer, nothing from, say, Ancient Greece, hardly anything edifying. The book contains a very small amount of actual literature, a story by O. Henry, poems by Poe and Frost, and so on. But, overwhelmingly, the contents are complete junk. More than half of the reading selections are NON-FICTION. It contains: more SPANISH vocabulary words than I can count (an ENGLISH book), the phrase "Raza-style" defined as something innocent and positive, stories featuring ill-bred ghetto children who don't make efforts to better themselves and escape the ghettos, fluffy stories about friendship, a People Magazine article, a history of hip-hop music, a biography of Tony Hawk, endorsements of the UN and Head Start. This kind of thing may be what kids like to read, but it is certainly not literature and does not belong in primary (or secondary, for that matter) education textbooks. Each page has text in at least three colors, highlighting already done, notes scattered everywhere. It gives me a headache to look through the book. There are color photographs on most pages (enough for the socially promoted and illiterate), interspersed even within stories, so the reader's concentration is often broken. Furthermore, every selection has an elaborate, hand-holding reading and study strategy mapped out, taking up as much of the book as the selection itself does. It involves such things as using context clues (whole-language word-meaning guessing game) and assignments to write about one's feelings. Most of these sections include a an assignment based on a popular COMIC STRIP. The questions for the end of each reading selection have OBE prompts before each one, such as "infer," "respond," "recall," and "interpret," in order to drill students to recognize them for national testing, and so they will develop certain SKILLS deemed important for school-to-work goals, with no regard to retaining knowledge or achieving cultural literacy. Beware of this book. If you want your child to receive a traditional education based on a solid foundation, do not use this book or permit his or her school to do so. I recommend rather the book, The Well-Trained Mind. It is very good overall, and the literature curriculum (minus the recommendation of Beloved, which is not appropriate for children especially) is world-class.
Anything Goes Trivia
Megaton Man
Trevor
