Teaching what really happened

After reading “teaching what really happened “one thing that caught my attention was that students spend more time with textbooks in history class. The author also mentioned that many teachers rely on the textbooks to teach (Lowen, 2009). I agree that in history class students spend a lot of time using textbooks because this is how I learned history. I spent an hour listening to the teacher lecture information from the book, we looked at the pictures in the book, and we also read the book as a class. This made me think about the reason why teachers rely so much on textbooks. I believe that teachers rely so much on textbooks because they are not given many resources. Textbooks are usually given to teachers as a main source to help them deliver their lessons. I also believe that history is a really complicated subject since it involves wars and other serious events. This may be a reason why teachers rely so much on textbooks. When schools or districts assign certain textbooks everyone tends to believe that they are appropriate and that they are portraying the material the correct way. If teachers were to rely less on textbooks and they were to use other materials, I believe that it would be harder. Teachers would have to be more aware of what is appropriate and what is not. They would be more concerned with how they describe certain events, what they should explain and what they should omit. This makes me wonder whether I will be like other teachers who rely so much on textbooks to teach history. Some districts do not have a lot of resources therefore I fear that my students will learn from textbooks that continue to have misconceptions. I also fear that they will never learn the truth about historical events.