There have been 50 or 60 books written about Empress Orchid, but none of them bothered to really examine the period in China when she lived. I was taught that she was evil; it's in all the textbooks.
'Real Housewives of New Jersey' has taught me more about the nature of a vacuum in space than any of the demonstrations in my high school AP physics textbook.
I used to have to borrow textbooks from my mate in another class. When he was away I'd have no textbooks and the teacher would say, 'Anh, you have to go to detention.' I didn't want to tell her my mum didn't have the money.
When you get pregnant, you start reading pregnancy books. Everything has been pretty textbook. It's amazing how they can say, 'This week, this might happen,' and it kind of does. I had typical nausea the first trimester, which was no fun. And extreme tiredness.
Economics taught in most of the elite universities are practically useless in my context. My country is dominated by drug economy and a mafia. Textbook economics does not work in my context, and I have very few recommendations from anybody as to how to put together a legal economy.
I hate homework. I hate it more now than I did when I was the one lugging textbooks and binders back and forth from school. The hour my children are seated at the kitchen table, their books spread out before them, the crumbs of their after-school snack littering the table, is without a doubt the worst hour of my day.
Textbook survival tells you to stay put. Stop. Wait for rescue. Don't take any risks. But there'd been a whole host of survival shows like that and I didn't really want to do that.
Textbooks describe economics as the study of the allocation of scarce resources. That definition may be the 'what,' but it certainly is not the 'why.'
To take on the jobs of tomorrow, students must become more than good test takers. They need to become makers who design, sketch, build, and prototype. And their classrooms will need more than a chalkboard and a set of textbooks.
An art project, a hands-on science experiment, or a special field trip can transcend textbooks and flash cards. No one knows this better than those teaching students with autism.
