Maybe my day job running a math circle — with really knowledgable and creative instructors carving their own idiosyncratic curricula of math enrichment — has left me blinkered to the realities at most schools, but I’d much rather give teachers as much autonomy with their own students as possible.

What gives these “researchers” reason to believe they know better what we should do in the classroom when they are not living the day to day enounter with students who often need reinforcement of preliminary concepts, who need not just instruction but motivation, who enter the classroom with preformed beliefs about what they are capable of that needs to be considered (and ideally changed for the better) is simply their lack of knowledge of what real life teaching is.

Not only are the researchers lacking in real life knowledge of teaching, they have the arrogance to think that getting a PhD gives them the right to tell others what to do. If critical thinking skills are important to the development of a student then use critical thinking skills must be the right of any teacher. Obedience to others who presume a superior status and thinking what is best for my students are anathema to each other.

Amen to the teacher who develops her/his own materials. When I was teaching I calculated that I easily put in more time reading through homework assignments and preparing the next lesson that responded to the difficulties I saw, along with teaching the new topic, than I spent in the actual classroom teaching. Add testing and other responsibilities and it was more like 1.3:1.

Yes, this is very time consuming but teachers do what they do out of care for our students and our refusal to listen to what others think is best for the students we know. Give us the general outline of topic and help us with resources to utilize to put together our lessons for our students. This would be helpful, not a set of marching orders.

I am attaining my master of arts in secondary mathematics. I completed a high school lesson on statistics today for my student teaching. The textbook did a TERRIBLE job of explaining what a standard deviation was. There were no visuals representing the data in the given examples. The whole lesson felt like word vomit. I started supplementing with normal distributions I drew on the whiteboard to illustrate the differences when comparing data. I cannot overstate the lack of visuals in the textbook. For exceptional learners (students with disabilities) visuals are essential in math. Concepts need to be accessible to everyone. My bet would be that many of those teachers have to supplement with materials to differentiate as well.
It doesn’t matter if it has McGraw Hill stamped on every page. If it doesn’t work, it doesn’t work. The problem with education is that teachers aren’t expected to be critical thinkers anymore. In the same vein, we are not teaching students to be critical thinkers either. Our district is lead by wonderful admin but none of them have ever taught mathematics. None of them have ever taught any STEM subjects, in fact. They are in charge of curriculum. That tells you a lot about the state of public education. Very top heavy and beauracratic with very little common sense or practical application. Our local ISD is the same. The consultants have 3-5 years of classroom experience and now they’re “experts” being fed every line from curriculum companies.

In the current digital age where most of us are using some sort of learning management system I feel no need to use a middleman for my content. I can create lessons targeted to the needs of my students in a voice that they can understand. By creating my own problem sets I make it slightly harder to cheat. It also allows me the ability to create problem sets large enough for my students to have multiple attempts without seeing the same problems over and over.

This article feels like it was written by either a textbook publisher/writer or an expert who makes their living teaching others how teach. Neither of these really want to encourage teachers to act independently because it hurts their bottom line. Please remember that classroom teachers are professionals that often have decades of experience they have used to hone their skills. Textbooks and supplemental materials definitely have a place in the classroom but that does not mean we need to demonize those who have chosen to move on from them.