I always have this listed on my syllabus… though I don’t assign it, but have it as a reader for people who might want to catch up on what I can’t cover in a semester:
It has now been made into a physical version by Stanford press. But it’s been years since I’ve assigned a textbook, and then it was the relatively low cost Zinn’s A People’s History.
Friend of mine went through college on an ROTC scholarship. The Army gave her a choice of having her housing or textbooks paid for. She chose the textbooks which came to significantly more than her rent.
#aaronslaw
Captialism? How the fuck does that work? Not very well for the masses it seems.
Yeah I have the same sense that a lot of our popular textbooks were drafted in the '50-'80s (Jackson, undergraduate texts by Kittel and Griffiths, Ashcroft and Mermin…). There are some likely historical motivators - the focus on developing American talent for the space race; the popularity of physics PhD degrees boomed by a factor of ~10 from 1940-1970; quantum mechanics(/QFT) and the standard model of particle physics underwent a lot of maturation; solid state physics gained increasing recognition as a field…
Depends how many (or how highly placed) professors wrote their own textbook.
I have to say that many of my best college classes were in a community college. The teachers there were there to teach. It was their primary duty, not something they had to do in between research papers. And some teachers know too much about their field to teach basic classes effectively.
I’ve always thought it was a silly concept of introducing new text books for basic math and physics classes. Basic math and physics haven’t changed.*.
OTOH, the sticker shock thing is real. And while it my surprise some, 17-21 year olds are NOT (en mass) good at budgeting. Furthermore, as college becomes more of a “mandatory” road to success, and as more students from less affluent backgrounds enroll, having books as part of the tuition can be a HUGE benefit. I routinely have students without a book for my class because they cannot afford it until their grant/scholarship money clears in the second week of classes. Having the book cost “built in” would alleviate that which I find pedagogically a good idea, but socially as well, removing the often internal stigma of being the “too poor for school” kid.
There are some! GA has a low cost/ no cost textbook initiative, and is actually funding grants to do just that. (I’m lucky enough to be one revising a text for nursing chemistry). Writing a text book is a huge undertaking to do well… even just the formatting and keeping a uniform tone is a pain. Throw in the problem of writing well, and to a novice audience, and trying to balance depth and breadth…it’s damn hard.
What a fun text! I thought I was just going to click through, but now that I pull my head up, I’ve read Ch. 29 and half of Ch. 1. I’ve also found some nice readers to list as further reading, and the devotion a few people put into these things is inspiring.
Textbooks are hard to get away from in my field (physics), for a bunch of reasons:
-the recurring need to reference equations with coupled explanations and sample problems
-the accumulative nature of some technical content
-a culture of mediocre class attendance
-some students become surprisingly insecure when one strays from textbook content (likely linked to the above factors)
Glad to hear about this program, and good luck with your book! I’ve done enough writing and course material creation to appreciate the scale of the challenge.
I would hope the successes (and setbacks) of this kind of program can help create a framework for investment at the federal level, as well. My experience is that federal funding agencies often give a lot of weight to rather limited impact-per-dollar metrics, which makes it easy to neglect important factors that don’t fit into an existing rubric.
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