Most courses at AMSA require textbooks. Some textbooks are digital, some are physical, and some classes feature both. This may seem strange and even excessive to some, but others think it is vital to an AMSA student’s education.
Biology teacher Stephen Scerra believes that having two textbook options can potentially help students learn better.
“I don’t have a preference because some students like the online version better,” Mr. Scerra said. “Sometimes it’s easier to go to the glossary in a hard textbook to find different sections, but you also can use control+f to look for something on an online document.”
Some math courses at AMSA use both digital and physical textbooks. Upper school math teacher Madhavi Marathe believes that having both accessible is important, because it can let students receive a lot more information from different sources.
“Either the WebAssign [online] student book or the Larson [physical] book that we are using is easier to understand depending on students’ perspectives,” Mrs. Marathe said. “The [physical] books that we were using earlier were harder for students to read and understand.”
One reason that some courses utilize online textbooks only is obvious: money.
“When we looked at the different [physical] textbooks, they were costlier, and we didn’t have that much in terms of budget,” Mrs. Marathe said.
Mrs. Marathe explained that owning a license for an online textbook that students in multiple classes can use throughout the year is a cheaper alternative than buying the same textbook physically.
Although there are a lot of benefits to using online textbooks, many experts say that the benefits of using physical textbooks far outweigh the benefits of going digital.
In an interview with Education Week, Maryanne Wolfe, the director of the Center for Dyslexia, Diverse Learners, and Social Justice at the UCLA Graduate School of Studies, said, “It’s important to remember that students get something from holding a paper book in their hands as they absorb a text. Physical books encourage ‘the development of deep reading processes,’ including empathy and critical analysis.”
Some AMSA teachers and students agree.
“I like to use a physical textbook, because I think it’s easier for my mind to like set it in, and I like looking at the print,” Mr. Scerra said. “So I personally would like to use paper textbooks because I think it’s easier to follow along.”
Freshman Aiden Kuscher prefers the physical textbook over the online one because “online ones are too hard to use.”
The trade-off, of course, is that textbooks are heavy, and backpacks loaded with them are a load indeed. But for some students it’s worth it to have something they can hold and look at without staring at a screen.
In the end, as economist Thomas Sowell has written, there are no solutions; there are only trade-offs.
