Without a Textbook

Author's Note: This piece is about the experience I had with using a textbook instead of doing projects for Academy.  Mckena, Riah, Sydney K, and I tried using textbooks, but it didn't turn out to be successful.  This piece is about how the experiment went.  In this piece I will do my best to describe the experience with emotion and voice.

The possibilities of learning are endless.  The ways you learn doesn't necessarily matter, but the efficiency is what counts.  Textbooks are great resources, but they bore your mind when you sit there reading them as if they are assigned reading novels.  In our school, textbooks are rarely used due to that reason.  Academy 21 makes you go beyond textbooks, learning about everything the normal classes are doing gets annoying so we go above and beyond trying different ways to learn, share, and experiment.  Being in Academy makes you wonder why anyone would ever want to learn in a textbook again.

We sat in the front of the classroom discussing how we were getting work done, if we were getting to learn what we needed, and how we were getting it done.  Academy 21 is challenging compared to the usual classes, in this case the class is social studies.  Coming from the elementary school, we are used to being spoon fed random fact about states, ancient civilizations, culture, and everything in between.  Now, in Academy 21 we have to decide what we are learning about, how we are learning it, and how to share our information.  The first time doing this by yourself is challenging.  That's why we were sitting there; we all wished to go back into a normal class where we sat in front of a giant book filled with facts while a teacher gave us a study guide and told us when our test would be.

A light bulb turned on in our brains and gave us the idea.  Let's try to use textbooks and make a mini social studies class in Academy.  All of us wanted to start right away; we pulled out the books and began to read.  Before we knew it, a schedule of meeting times and homework had overwhelmed us.  I never thought learning from a textbook would be so challenging.  In a result, our way of learning from a textbook failed.

Textbooks are designed for teachers to tell the student to flip to a page and learn a specific part of history.  They aren't meant for students to read through chapters on their own, and try to answer the questions.  All the vocabulary and quiz questions are meant to be discussed as a class.  Regular classes test you knowledge by tests.  In Academy 21 we share our knowledge through writing and projects.  We put what we know to use and share it with others.  When we share our knowledge with each other, we learn more in the same amount of time.

I will never go back to learning from a textbook, because now I know what it's like to learn on your own -- without the step by step guidance.  Textbooks just give you random information about our history.  Academy pushes us to go above and beyond our usual; we strive for advanced.  We don't just learn, we achieve.