handing out pieces of paper. Do any of you reading this question prefer to learn from books rather that being given handouts. I find books are very glossy and attractive and are a good learning aid and I feel that children would grow up to be smarter if they had more bookish knowledge. There are a lot of books in the libraries and bookshops but one hardly comes across them in British Schools.
What British schools have you been in? I'm a teacher and every single pupil in my department uses a book - supplemented by but not replaced by handouts.
Many schools do have good libraries but in a classroom environment I can see that books may not be the best option. Firstly the school needs to buy enough books for the whole class to use and this may be too expensive. Secondly, the whole of the book may not be relevant or appropriate. Thirdly, books could quickly date or no longer be relevant to the syllabus and with the additional cost to the school of buying all those books this would have to be a big issue. As a fellow book lover, I can certainly see your point about them being more attractive though and that using them might encourage more children to read rather than use the internet or tv.
I work in a college and all students require a text book, text books are difficult in school for several reasons. One is expense, faculties are given a target they have too keep, meaning that if they go over the teacher pays from their own pocket. The students may forget the books, or take them away with them. Most importantly, reading tasks in school were often undertaken in pairs, even singularly the fact stands, many individuals with special learning needs or just general slow readers, couldn't keep up with the pace and would loose the vital information. With handouts the information ci wonder why booksan be brief and the teacher can explain it clearly.With my students, as some have mentioned before, I often use handouts to work alongside the text book, to help them gain comprehension of the text. Every school I know does have a library though , so there shouldn't be a restriction on accessing books there. I love books too, they have really helped my learning, but I hated them within school because I was a slow reader so often I would skip bits and not really absorb the information.
As an English teacher in a British school, there is a very simple answer to this - at the moment, the curriculum does not have the time to study entire books (for example, I taught Great Expectations last half term, but the focus of my assessment was upon chapter 1 and chapter 27), and so we give out extracts. This also means that, when it comes to close textual analysis, children can highlight and make as many notes as they like over the handouts - they simply couldn't do this in the book, because it would be too expensive to buy new books every year. The one exception at GCSE is when we teach Of Mice and Men - the children are then allocated a copy each to read and study from, but as per exam instructions, they are not allowed to annotate it (although we do have copies they can annotate and then clean copies for the exams). Replacing these copies of M&M each year costs my department ￡2000+... imagine the cost if we had to fork out for new books each year for the novel, play AND Shakespeare assessment!
Lower down in the school we give the children whole books, but again, they are not allowed to annotate them, so we can use them year on year. If we wish to do close textual analysis with annotation, we hand out the relevant pages in the form of worksheets.
Personally I belive that hand outs are beti wonder why bookster since they allow for more flexibility for teachers to adopt study to their style
I would have thought the reason was obvious, handouts are cheap, books are expensive and have a finite life.
Of course they do. Most schools have extremely comprehensive libraries.
Hi!
I'm afraid I'm going to have to disagree! I have four children, all of which constantly bring books home from school. Okay, so they do bring home 'handouts' which have been prepared by their teachers but I feel these are used as an additional source of learning as they are always accompanied by books, in one form or another - whether they be text books or just a plain and simple story book. Indeed, all three schools which my children attend have extensive libraries - the younger two, who are in Primary school, are encouraged to choose their own reading book from the library and they are given at least three other books to read, within their reading ability and chosen by their teacher, during the school week. My boys, who attend Secondary school, sign an agreement at the start of Year Seven, saying that they will use and look after any books properly and return them in the condition in which they were received. If they are damaged or not handed in at all, they are made to pay a fine which ensures the continued use for the next set of pupils.
I don't know whether we are just lucky being in an area where books are obviously known to be an invaluable source of learning or whether your knowledge of your local schools isn't quite up to scratch. Whichever the case may be, I do agree with you that books should always be available to every child as they are a fantastic learning aid and fortunately for my children, they are already reaping the benefits!
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