Thinking About Math Textbooks

 I found this article very thought-provoking. It did a good job of denaturalizing elements of textbooks that I hadn't considered before such as pronoun use. There is a sense of formality to the language of textbooks that I think makes them harder to engage with as a student and also lends them an air of authority. this comes from using language like "must," and other strong modal verbs that the reading called out directly. It really separates math as something one knows from math as something one does.

I recall at the beginning of a class in my undergrad on complex numbers having the professor (Dr. Asia Matthews, whom I think you may remember, Susan) ask all the students if they personally knew any mathematicians. The room was entirely quiet for quite a while. Eventually, I put up my hand and mentioned the name of someone whom I'd met at CMESG. In retrospect, I know many mathematicians, by any stretch of the definition, but somehow I found myself struggling in the moment to apply that label to real people in my life. 

This disconnect between doing and learning math is one that I think a large majority of students (and even teachers) feel. It's easy to think of math as an already determined set of facts and procedures, especially in a high school context. Much of my own personal philosophy about mathematics revolves around humanizing the discipline, so I tend to fall on the side of avoiding direct textbook use. I think they can be quite helpful in developing banks of problems, but even in that case I would endeavor to modify them to a degree and bring them into more of a "thinker" context rather than the "scribbler" default that so many seem to exist in.