apply to each book—an Augean stable. Since they have time only to flip
through most books, they look for easy readability, newness, a stunning color
cover, appealing design, color illustrations, and ancillaries such as audiovisual
materials, ready-made teaching aids, and test questions. Ancillaries can be
critical. Many teachers, especially those with little background, depend on
them. Publishers supply complete lecture outlines, little stories to add color to
the basic narrative, and websites with “animated maps” and “infographics,” to
quote a McDougal-Littell brochure. Test questions are especially important.
Many teachers have neither time nor knowledge to make up their own unit
tests, having 120 students in four sections of the course. Thus, a discussion
group of teachers of advanced-placement U.S. history courses was notified in
fall 2006 that some teacher somewhere had posted questions and answers from
the test bank that accompanies The American Pageant. “To say the least this is
quite distressing,” wrote a teacher in alarm. “I have e-mailed the teacher in
question and asked him to remove the links ASAP.”^31
Unfortunately, marketing textbooks is like marketing fishing lures: the point
is to catch fishermen, not fish. Thus, many adopted textbooks are flashy to
catch the eye of adoption committees but dull when read by students. The
American Journey, the new seventh-grade textbook by Joyce Appleby, Alan
Brinkley, and James McPherson, exemplifies the problem. It is disjointed to
the point of incoherence. Perhaps in response to the alleged short attention
spans of today’s students, the layout department at McGraw-Hill has run amok.
Consider what should be a compact, interesting chapter: “World War II.” This
chapter begins with a star in a box containing a paragraph titled “Why It’s
Important.” Another star in a box introduces five “Chapter Themes.” A theme,
we learn in the beginning of the book under the heading “How Can I Remember
Everything?” is “a concept, or main idea, that happens again and again
throughout history.” Whether a concept or idea “happens” is dubious, as is
whether such themes as “continuity and change” can help anyone remember
anything. As we read the first section, “Road to War,” for example, how does it
help us to know that it fits under the theme “continuity and change”? What
doesn’t?
Then, highlighted by a star in a rectangle titled “History and Art,” comes the
title “Embarkation, San Francisco, California,” for a painting by Barse Miller.
It is captioned, “World War II American soldiers believed they were fighting
for what President Roosevelt called the Four Freedoms: freedom of speech