Sunday, June 13, 2010

textbooks

It's that time of year, again. Time to choose textbooks. Every year, I consider writing my own, if only to save myself the aggravation of choosing the lesser of evils. (Yes, I know, the aggravation of writing a textbook would be much greater.) I am currently wrestling with the great, imponderable question of our time: is there no market for a cheap textbook? Honestly, nobody would assign a textbook that was, literally, a book with text - no pretty pictures, no fancy graphs, no human interest stories in brightly colored boxes? Personally, I'd like to find such a book, but instead, I'm forcing undergrads to spend hundreds of dollars on glossy-paged tomes whose content is simultaneously too detailed and insufficiently informative (neat trick, that). I understand that textbook production - like conference realignment - is driven by profit margins, but I keep thinking that some small publishing company might be able to produce a simple textbook that would sell well because it undercut the prices of all the usual suspects.

I have to admit, though, that even if I could find such a textbook, I'm not sure I would change my existing courses until after I have tenure (if then). Especially at a teaching-intensive U like this one, I really have to prioritize if I'm going to have any time to do my own research. The time it takes to prep a class can expand, like a gas, to fill the available space. A new textbook is one of the most time-consuming, yet thankless, changes a professor can make. The textbook will affect every aspect of your class from the schedule in the syllabus to which dates you use in your last lecture, but it's not a course improvement you can highlight in your year-end review. Far better to invest in adding an on-line component or service-learning project. At my institution, at least, those are the kinds of innovations that actually count toward the teaching portion of tenure review.

5 comments:

  1. Our children are already going far from the books and they just read here at the internet about the new book. They download such and read online but that trend is not good from one perspective because they do not make time now for reading as they used to be.

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  3. Books are the real companions of a person because whenever he/she is alone the homepage of the books can help them to understand the mind of the person and can teach him new lessons as well.

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