NYT: Leninist’s Attack McGraw-Hill Head Office!

Well, not quite.

I am very disappointed in myself for not coming up with idea of online modular textbooks (where a ‘textbook’ could be assembled from professional written modules as a course instructor sees fit) years ago.  Apparently I spent too much of my time as an undergraduate bitching about circumstances rather than exploring solutions.  Oops.  I’ll try to do better in graduate school.

The Connexions program described in the article is particularly impressive.  I remember courses requiring two to three books (each ranging from $45 to $180 dollars), where only a few sections of each book might be required for the course, perfectly suited for an online modular reader.  If you were unfortunate enough to take a course after the release of a new edition, the used book market was out of the question.  Sharing was possible, but difficult considering you and your friends all wanted to get drunk on Thursday and cram for the exam Friday morning.  The only viable option in this situation, besides paying full retail, would be braving the accusing stares of those at Kinko’s while you spent three hours photocopying textbooks for you and your friends.

PERSONAL ANECDOTE:

Some of my professors were fairly understanding and attempted to allow students to follow along in either the newest or previous edition whenever possible (generally the younger professors who may still have had student loans to be paid off themselves).  Nonetheless, I still ended up maxing out all my credit cards at the start of each semester, feeling very much a prisoner to my professor’s outdated and capricious academic resources.

One of my favorite professors, David Welch, teaching a Politics course on International Conflict at the University of Toronto, actually came up with his own reader, not textbook, that could be printed on demand at a local copy shop for about $18.  He was a funny and engaging lecturer with direct experience in his field, able to capture the attention of the majority of the ~1,200 overprivileged brats attending his lecture, so he would have been one of my favorites either way.  His course just happened to be a bargain as well.

On the other side of the spectrum, another professor, whose name I choose to withhold as there is a fair chance he is no longer an asshole, for an introductory astronomy course I took not only selected a ~$150 textbook requirement for a course so basic that almost all the necessary information could be found on a single wikipedia page, but he had apparently ordered a vastly insufficient number of textbooks to be sent to the campus bookstore, requiring students to check in daily for new stock.  Approaching the time the first exam was scheduled, only 60% or so of the students had textbooks and the remainder were awaiting for the stock to be replenished.  As many students were bombarding Prof. Unnamed with pleading e-mails about the textbook shortfall, stressing at the possibility that the exam would be resplendent with tangential information likely to be found only in the textbook, designed merely to test a student’s abidance to the reading schedule rather than knowledge or comprehension of the subject (a common occurrence), he decided to open a lecture with a response [I'm paraphrasing from a six year old recollection here]: “Look, I know there aren’t enough textbooks and I’ve ordered some more.  But you are adults, not babies [he really did refer to us as babies].  You should have gotten to the bookstore earlier if you wanted the textbook”.

I was dumbfounded.  How does a man become a leader in his field, obtain a Ph.D. in ASTRONOMY of all subjects, become a professor in Canada’s pre-eminent institution of higher learning, and STILL NOT UNDERSTAND THAT EVEN IF WE ALL LINED UP OUTSIDE THE BOOKSTORE AS THE DELIVERY TRUCK ROLLED UP, 40% OF US WOULD BE WITHOUT TEXTBOOKS! I sent an angry e-mail to him and received a half-hearted apology about how maybe he shouldn’t have called us babies but still, we should have been able to come up with our own solution, that more textbooks were on the way, and that he would limit the textbook-specific content on the test.  I was fortunate enough to have obtained a used textbook early into the course, so I was not personally affected.  And I did score in the 85%-95% range in the exam.  But still, fuck this guy.

SECONDARY ANECDOTE:

For the final essay of the course, I wrote what I thought to be one of the strongest essays of my academic career on Nuclear Propulsion in Space Travel.  When it was marked and returned to me, there was a big red scratched out number on the front of the essay, and then a circled second number “89%” beneath it.  When I looked at the reverse of the cover page, due to the cheap low-weight computer paper I use, I could clearly see that, beneath the marker scratches, “98%” was written originally.  When I enquired with the teacher’s assistant why she opted to take 9% off my essay (as there were no, or virtually no, corrections or marks made on the essay itself), she explained to me that the second highest essay grade in the course was 84% so the professor told her she could NOT give me 98%.  Which raises two questions:

1. If I had scored 34%, and the 2nd lowest score was 65%, would they have bumped me up to 50%?
2. Is it a bad idea to send an angry e-mail to my professor at the start of a course from my personal e-mail, which contains my full name in the address?  Live and learn.

TERTIARY ANECDOTE:

I actually began to avoid buying textbooks until I realized I absolutely had to around this time, or buying them and abstaining from opening them until necessary.  I still have a 2nd year statistics text book, new and still shrinkwrapped with the companion CD and lab manual in my closet.  Anyone interested in an “Exploring Statistics – A Modern Introduction to Data Analysis and Inference – Second Edition” textbook?  All reasonable offers accepted!  I think I got 81% in the course, so it must be a pretty good textbook.

… and the cow goes moo