little book, big book—weighty matters

I live two and a half blocks from a high school. It’s just down a tiny hill, so I can't see it from my place. But they are building another jail-like monstrosity, so the scent of hot tar and the noise of big machinery reminds me that it's there. And several mornings each week I happen to see a teenager swoop past on his skateboard, alive and beautiful, one leg gracefully swinging like a pendulum as he sails by.

Last week, very early, I saw a fella, my age-ish, who looked like he had just rolled out of bed—baggy shorts, t-shirt, flip-flops, unshaved, baseball cap. He was carrying an enormous textbook and hustling toward the school, talking on a cellphone. On a mission, focused, but still pretty cheerful, he smiled and lifted his chin in greeting when he saw me.

He was obviously bringing a forgotten book to a student. Maybe he is an enabler, but I’d prefer to think of him as a great dad. But my first thought was about that book. Honestly! If our grandparents could get their learnin' from books that don't require a handcart to transport, there's no reason for our kids’ texts to be so gigantic.

(Unless, I thought, bitterly, the publishers are in league with chiropractors.)

I’ve been noticing this for some time, the absurdity. Once, at the Goodwill, I picked up a middle school science book, a teacher's edition, and, I'm not kidding, the first one hundred pages (100!) were advertising for National Geographic and supplementary materials.

During our homeschool days, I perused many, many textbooks, and on the whole found them physically and visually overwhelming. So many photos and graphs and sidebars— it was often, ironically, nearly impossible to find the narrative throughline in any given chapter.

When I was a little girl, my mother had an old McGuffy’s Reader, and, ohmygosh, I loved that book. I knew how to read, but it wasn’t the stories that captivated me, but the beauty. This was the 1970s, when illustrations of people were distorted and cartoon-like, colors psychedelic. That little reader was so different. I loved the font, the simple line drawings, the scent.

When I was maybe seven or eight I brought that McGuffy’s reader along on a trip, and left it behind on an airplane, the upstairs area of a 747—a detail I remember because, hoo-boy, everyone was unhappy about the loss. Much later, early in my adulthood, I found a copy of that same edition in a used bookstore and gave it to my mother for Christmas. She did not even remember the incident!

It was about at that time I started collecting vintage schoolbooks, my favorites being pre- WWII. The size, of course, is the first difference you see when you compare current textbooks with the oldies, which are tiny and light. And, both the subtle and overt racism in those bygone days of yore show up in the vintage texts—no surprise there. What did surprise me, though, was an image in an algebra book from 1936, young women playing “basket-ball.” In my tiny, haphazard collection, later schoolbooks, if they contain any images of women at all , depict them in domestic roles.

My grandmother was born in 1910, and based on her stories, and what I know about that time in our history, I imagine there was a brief period in the early 20th century, between suffrage and the Second World War, when women enjoyed a degree of freedom that their mothers and grandmothers did not, before the backlash against first wave feminism was in full swing. My grandmother never used the word “feminist” in my hearing, but she taught me what it was to be one.

To be honest, I wouldn’t have picked up that algebra book if it hadn’t been for those girls in action. I am usually more attracted to grammar and reading books. But it fit my criteria—pretty plus less expensive than a caramel macchiato. And that image evoked a particular time, a collection of stories from my grandmother, who was herself a math major in college and a math teacher later. So I bought it. And, later, casually chatting with friends, I learned that “basket-ball” was hugely popular with many of our foremothers.

If the messages and lessons that we take from a schoolbook have as much to do with the values of the writers, the political and historical context in which they were written, as they do with the intended instructional content, then what do our enormous, noisy textbooks say about us?

My sister is a schoolteacher, and listening to her and other friends who have children in school, it sure seems like electronic resources will be eclipsing those big books any second now. It reminds me of when folks are talking to someone who does not speak the same language, that inclination to get louder and louder, to be heard. You wonder if the textbook companies know the gig is up, so they're getting more flamboyant to capture attention.

Several dirty jokes about size and insecurity are coming to mind right now.

But I’ll leave it at this: In a world where we are faced with presidential candidates who make a mockery of the democratic process, where gun violence is epidemic, where climate change remains almost wholly unaddressed—there are plenty of weighty matters our children will inherit, and wouldn’t it be better if, right now, they weren't weighed down by unnecessarily massive texts?