Moving to one textbook per course for all the Alamo Colleges will dumb down our education and ignore our cultural differences.
The five Alamo Colleges are located in different parts of the county.
Each has its own “micro-culture.”
The district is doing students a disservice by ignoring our differences.
If one college typically has a higher percentage of enrollment in need of developmental classes than another, it means that college is working with a population struggling to catch up while others may have few in developmental classes.
How are all the students supposed to learn from the same textbook?
For some, the material will be dumbed down. Others will still struggle. Developmental classes do not even the playing field magically.
Why not let the instructor choose the right books for their students? Faculty members are the ones who know them best.
How can district officials be so sure the learning material chosen will be the best for students? They don’t even interact with students on a regular basis.
When was the last time an administrator from Sheridan Street spoke to a student who wasn’t on The Ranger staff?
Instead of encouraging students to read more, this is destined to actually keep students from learning to love reading.
They will read even less than they do now and their worlds will shrink to ever smaller spheres.
This policy will restrict students to one textbook and censor faculty. When did it become OK for district officials to interfere with academic freedom?
The Ranger polled 165 random students and 68 percent said they prefer real books to a digital file.
Students may be forced to get their books in a format they don’t want.
It’s peculiar that the district would want to go into the bookselling business. Everyone else seems to be getting out of it.
Instead of engineering a monopoly on textbook sales, the district should focus its resources on efforts that will actually help students learn more and foster a higher level chievement among all students.
Throwing more buzzwords at students already struggling between their own learning styles and the teaching styles they encounter in the classroom is not going to help.
What we need are tutors, longer lab and library hours, more librarians, and transfer center staff. These are what we value.
The district administration can’t offer anything but the resources its burgeoning workforce is sucking up.
“We do not want to turn out students from SAC who are culturally illiterate,” President Robert Zeigler said at convocation Jan. 14.
Amen.