Textbook Teachers

By Laura Miller

Ever since teachers Sue Ellen McMullin and Patricia Couts started using the textbook Stairway to Algebra , not once have they heard their students ask the dreaded question, "When are we ever going to use this?"

They used to hear it a lot, McMullin says. They also used to notice that their 8th-grade students at the all-girls' Holton-Arms School in Bethesda, Md., often looked puzzled or discouraged. And they were having to bring in more and more homespun exercises to supplement the mainstream commercial text they were using in class.

That's why they decided it was time to write their own. Two summers ago, the veteran Holton-Arms teachers got to work, outlining topics, splitting up chapters, scouring over old notes, creating new problems, and batting around ideas until they emerged--in time for the 1993-94 school year--with a 398-page, professionally printed and bound, bright red textbook with...