Also here is a “funny-if-it-weren’t-so-true” report from John:
Hi Ben,
I recently had the privilege of hanging out with Diane Grieman at a gathering of local CI teachers, and she had an interesting story about textbooks. She spoke of a colleague who, when asked how she managed to teach from mostly TPRS based materials, in spite of requirements that she use a traditional textbook, she replied that she orders the hard-cover version of books like Cuentame whenever they are available. Or, if a hardcover edition is not available, she simply has spiral-bound books rebound in hardcover library-style binding. This makes the books look more like “official” textbooks, and placates most of the skeptics.
So if anyone is working on a collection of classroom materials, it would be useful to offer a more expensive hardcover binding option for these kinds of circumstances. Ultimately, we could start “publishing” our own textbooks, even if there is nothing more in them than word lists and stories written by previous classes, with illustrations, and/or suggestions for further work, based on what has worked in our classrooms. That in itself would be a pretty awesome textbook–infinitely more useful than a book published by the big companies.
John