The Ministry of Education changes the curriculum and old textbooks don’t have the content needed for new units in courses. It happens about every 10 years in most subjects. I teach HS sciences and our textbooks are over 20 years old, literally falling apart. No funding has been provided in 20 years to purchase new texts.
That's interesting. I took another look at the official Trillium list and broke the numbers down by subject. Mathematics seems to have the fastest turnover rates (i.e., shortest times between title approval and retirement): more than 50% of math titles had a total valid lifespan of less than six years.
By contrast, nearly all 25 of the valid science text books had lifespans of more than 10 years, although the longest lifespan was a title that lasted 15 years and the middle two quartiles were between 12 and 13.5 years.
If you're using using 20+ year old books, it could be that your school board is simply ignoring Ministry guidelines (it certainly wouldn't be the first time that happened).
There was a heavy emphasis for nearly a decade on ditching textbooks and finding online sources of information for students, hence the lack of funds for textbook renewal. Problems with this involve the teacher time needed to vet sources and prepare accompanying learning activities and formative assessments, and a lack of devices for students to use while in class. There was/is a disconnect between the people who make decisions for schools and the realities of modern classrooms.
That certainly fits a lot of what I've seen. And if many teachers are effectively expected to build their own curricula, why do we need (expensive) Provincial standards at all?
I recently wrote about some website usage data that seems to suggest that Canadian teachers are accessing US-based curriculum sites (of questionable quality) in very high numbers:
How do history and math texts become outdated? Shakespeare? Philosophy? Grammar? Or have we stopped teaching that? I'm sure biology texts have a very short shelf life these days.
The Ministry of Education changes the curriculum and old textbooks don’t have the content needed for new units in courses. It happens about every 10 years in most subjects. I teach HS sciences and our textbooks are over 20 years old, literally falling apart. No funding has been provided in 20 years to purchase new texts.
That's interesting. I took another look at the official Trillium list and broke the numbers down by subject. Mathematics seems to have the fastest turnover rates (i.e., shortest times between title approval and retirement): more than 50% of math titles had a total valid lifespan of less than six years.
By contrast, nearly all 25 of the valid science text books had lifespans of more than 10 years, although the longest lifespan was a title that lasted 15 years and the middle two quartiles were between 12 and 13.5 years.
If you're using using 20+ year old books, it could be that your school board is simply ignoring Ministry guidelines (it certainly wouldn't be the first time that happened).
There was a heavy emphasis for nearly a decade on ditching textbooks and finding online sources of information for students, hence the lack of funds for textbook renewal. Problems with this involve the teacher time needed to vet sources and prepare accompanying learning activities and formative assessments, and a lack of devices for students to use while in class. There was/is a disconnect between the people who make decisions for schools and the realities of modern classrooms.
That certainly fits a lot of what I've seen. And if many teachers are effectively expected to build their own curricula, why do we need (expensive) Provincial standards at all?
I recently wrote about some website usage data that seems to suggest that Canadian teachers are accessing US-based curriculum sites (of questionable quality) in very high numbers:
https://www.theaudit.ca/p/does-provincial-curriculum-policy-matter
How do history and math texts become outdated? Shakespeare? Philosophy? Grammar? Or have we stopped teaching that? I'm sure biology texts have a very short shelf life these days.
Well as an old friend of mine who grew up in a Warsaw Pact country once told me: "In the Soviet Union, the hardest thing to predict is history."