Throughout my life, I have had the opportunity to read numerous books, including a fair share of textbooks. However, in my experience, none of them have been as subpar as McDougal Littell's "Discovering French 2", the sequel to McDougal Littell's "Discovering French 1". This textbook pales in comparison to Miller and Levine's biology textbook, though to be fair, no book could possibly be compared to the greatness of Miller and Livine's biology textbook.
There are many issues with McDougal Littell's "Discovering French 2". Firstly, the textbook suffers from being terribly outdated. The images lack vividness and appear grainy and colorless. However, more importantly, the representation of contemporary life in the textbook is inconsistent with modern times. For instance, it features outdated modes of communication like old-fashioned telephones while disregarding more recent technologies like smartphones and the internet. This issue is not just me nitpicking, but instead highlights the fact that the textbook may be imparting irrelevant knowledge while failing to address essential contemporary concepts.
Secondly, the textbook's drawings are vividly colored but severely flawed. The characters are portrayed in disproportionate dimensions, with elbows and fingers that appear like they were drawn by a third grader. Although this issue is not particularly important, the poorly drawn characters can be distracting.
If the publishers of the textbook intend to fix this mess of a book, they would need to take significant revisions. Given its outdated content, a large portion of the book would require rewriting and the illustrations would require replacement. In my opinion, the best option would be to create a new textbook altogether.
What a unique blog post! Never had I thought I would see a blog post on a French textbook. Despite that, I found your blog post very intriguing, as you bring up interesting points and provide engaging images too. Great writing!
ReplyDeleteThis is a very fair and in-depth analysis of this book. I agree that the lack of organization and consistency throughout the book is a major flaw. Our Latin textbook, in contrast, has one vocab set per chapter, and one exercise and paragraph per page. I find that this more organized approach is much more helpful.
ReplyDeleteThis is rather convincing that the French textbook is awful. The drawings are just wacky. Also by old-fashioned telephones, how old fashioned are they exactly?
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