Response to Textbook and Math Education

This is a very interesting article. It brings up  a lot of details that I never paid attention to (both as a practice teacher and as a student), but worth to think about. 

Firstly, I was attracted by the impacts of pronoun usage in a textbook. Take the usage of the second person pronoun "you" for example, it can be interpreted differently under different context, and thus position students in relation to mathematics differently. While phrases such as "you find", "you know" tells the readers about themselves, other phrases such as "the equation tells you.." portray mathematics as activities independent of human. 

I agree with Morgan that "the absence of first person pronouns obscures the presence of human beings in a text and affects not only the picture of the nature of mathematical activity but also distances the author from the reader, setting up a formal relationship between them." While the second person pronoun also involves the reader in its context, as a student, I did experience some frustration with it. When the textbook assumes "common knowledge" by saying "you know" but I actually don't know it, I always feel bad for not knowing it or for being "stupid". I also find myself more engaged when learning in a community, where the textbook uses "we .." to team up with me. 

The role of a textbook to students largely depends on the teacher. I have experienced many classes where no textbook is required. I have also been in some math classes where I learn the most from a textbook. Now as a teacher candidate, I rely greatly on textbooks to provide me with ideas. At the same time, I also learn the "language" used by textbooks and reflect on the language that I use in class. 

Textbooks definitely have their roles in math education as we can not make sure the quality of every teacher out there, and it's always good to provide students with supplementary materials. At the same time, I also doubt whether the language of a textbook will make such a difference on students' math learning experience, since most of the time, it is a human being (or a human being inside a screen) who is teaching math, not the textbook.