boomer_humor
rockerface đșđŠWe had a prof who said he only used to book for the problems and they changed their order each edition. He would give us the previous years question numbers so we could buy the book used.
My friends and I ended up splitting a single copy of the book and texting each other the homework questions each week.
I had another prof who used an open source book and only charged us the price to print it. You could access it for free in PDF online, or even the source to generate the book in additional formats.
My maths prof wrote his own textbook, we had to buy it but it cost I think ÂŁ40 new and covered everything we needed for a 3 year physics degree and you could easily find a used copy near campus. Still got my copy somewhere.
I think it was the only textbook I actually needed, all my lecturers wrote their own courses and extra reading tended to be from journals. Only other book I remember using regularly was the CRC Handbook and those were just scattered here and there around the department.
Skyline969My anthropology class had us buy four textbooks all written by the professor.
None of them was used at all during class.
I didnât buy them, or rent them, or spend any money on them. And then I learned to look at the book author while signing up for classes, since the book(s) is/are usually listed.
I worked for a professor like that.
Apparently the guy had complaints like this for years, forcing students to buy HIS BOOKS. ALL OF THEM.
They donât give a fuck.
Iâm a college professor. Iâm very aware of textbook prices. Most students donât read the textbook anyway, even if its something you want them to read everyday.
For intro classes, I use openstax, which are available free online. For upper-level classes, I try to pick non major publishers, ie not pearson or cengage, with much more reasonably priced books.
My version of this meme would be the prof begging the students to actually read the book he picked out that is free or cheap so that they are prepared for class and the students rolling their eyes and instead just going to chatgpt or cheggâŠ
You also had the work/life experience by then to be better able to filter out pertinent information from the material.
Most college textbooks are written in an overly complex manner and require some skill to extract and process the information from them.
So right out of highschool you could have read the textbooks but gotten very little out of them.
Some of that speaks to your maturity and drive too tho. You clearly had a desire to go back, a will to learn, and hopefully a purpose to use that degree you were earning.
At 18 years old, so many people just go to college because its the next step or their parents told them they were. They dont have the passion, maturity, or vision of how their life can be different with a degree
UnderpantsWeevilMy version of this meme would be the prof begging the students to actually read the book he/she picked out that is free or cheap so that they are prepared for class and the students rolling their eyes and instead just going to chatgpt or cheggâŠ
Waiting for the meme, in another five or ten years, when students are bemoaning how the subscription fee to ChatGPT For Grad Students keeps going up.
Gladaed
lime!
grysbokIâm a professor who uses OER materials too; I might have bit off more than I can chew this semester since a new class of mine lacks a free textbook and I said, to hell with it, and am curating weekly readings from stuff I can get off EBSCO our campus pays for. So far itâs solid but I didnât have time to prep it all in advance so itâll be a wild ride every weekend!
I think I figured out a sneaky solution though; I made an assignment to had students find and report on an article for 5 to 10 minutes of class. They get real practice for grad school and I get crowdsourced sources. Win win!
This guy also found a pretty nice (similar) solution for this:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=x3CY6RR4uns
They basically wrote their own textbook through class assignments, students are co-authors, seems to work great in their case. At least thatâs how he presents it.
Iâm still a bit unsure how to handle that in my own classes. There are not always suitable OERs or the ones you find come with licensing issues (CC-NC and afaik itâs not clear if you can use them because I do teach for the money).
High Impact Practices for Integrating Open Educational Resources (OER) into University Courses
Dharma Curious (he/him)Hey, Prof! I have a question.
If you were to do things over again, with todayâs climate and opportunities, would you pursue the same career? Iâm considering going into teaching, but it seems damn near impossible to make a living doing it nowadays. A friend of mine teaches highschool and he makes more than the professors at my school (granted, I go to SNHU online). Any advice?
Different prof here, but a few thoughts:
- academia is not as shiny as it sometimes seems, but it can be great. You can have a lot of freedom to do what you like, work when you like, how you like⊠do meaningful things. Not always, but the chance is there
- itâs not to get rich. Selling expensive textbooks is rookie level exploitation compared to what people do in the industry, and most of the profit doesnât even go to the prof
The book to read for this is âthe professor is inâ. The author takes quite a cynical perspective about academia, but in many ways itâs true. Worth a read (and probably you can get it for cheap second hand)
I will check that book out, thanks!
Iâm not concerned with getting rich, I just want to be able to afford to support myself, and potentially a kid one day (though, thatâs increasingly unlikely). Iâm a full time caregiver for my mom, sheâs disabled, and bedridden. So working from home is pretty important. I donât have any kind of, like, ivory tower aspirations or anything. I donât imagine Iâm going to change the world, or be some oft-quoted academic. Lol. Iâd love to teach Anthropology and go on digs some day, but Iâm getting an English (creative writing) degree, and Iâd love to just have a relatively stable income teach some kids about story structure one day.
Flying SquidItâs all very normal when you recognize how much of our institutional structure is corrupted by profit-seeking.
Its no different than a police officer taking a bribe to let you out of a speeding ticket. Or a customs official demanding a kick-back to let a ship unload its cargo. Or a mafia goon shaking down a local storefront for âprotectionâ money. Just institutionalized so thereâs no risk of being punished.
Itâs no different toâŠ
*Lists things that only happen in third world shitholes đ
We are, by strict definition of the term, a first-world shithole.
The third world is simply the set of states that were unaligned during the Cold War. The term took on a secondary implication of poverty largely because of American foreign policy. Failure to implement neoliberal market reforms marked a country out as âpoorâ, while embrace of those reforms would result in your country being spotlighted as âgrowingâ and its people as âenrichedâ.
But its all just marketing. While Americans threw billions into the economic sinkhole of Pinochetâs Chile and Parkâs Korea and Diemâs Vietnam, countries like Burkina Faso and Yugoslavia and Iraq raced ahead of their peers by triangulating a path between the Great Powers while embracing local economic development instead of fixating on a debt-laden export market expansion.
The yanks and their shitty primary education are the first to claim that their inability to type coherently is âlanguage evolvingâ
Iâll use âthird-worldâ how I like đ
One of my professors, instead of a textbook, created his own wiki-style online resource for the class. Completely free, frequently edited with improvements
One of the best classes Iâve ever taken
I always pirated PDFs of my textbooks, but in the few cases where I couldnât find anything online (typically when the book is niche and very new), I would always wait until I knew that I actually needed the book, because it was frustrating how often this meme came true.
I had this one professor I was really grateful for though. He was a big open-source guy, apparently used to contribute to freebsd and postgres, and he went out of his way to find open-source textbooks for all of his classes.
I had this one professor I was really grateful for though. He was a big open-source guy
I had the bizzaro version of this guy in college once. He sold his own 150$ âtextbookâ that you had to purchase from a copy shop next to campus. It was just a bunch of sections of other text books that were clearly copied and put together in a tabbed paper folder by the little printing shop.
Was also the same guy that wouldnât accept assignments unless you turned them in a specific blue folder, which you could conveniently buy from the same copy shop for 5$ a piece.
Still kinda pissed about it like 15 years later, but at least now I can kinda appreciate the hustle that dude had going.
He sold his own 150$ âtextbookâ that you had to purchase from a copy shop next to campus.
Would have been interesting for the entire class to buy one, take it to another copy shop, and all split the entire cost.
Then, next year, hang out outside the classroom and offer to sell it to people for $20-$50.
Blue folder would be a little tougherâŠ.
One year I was unable to find a textbook to pirate online so I bought a used copy, set up a camera on a tripod, photographed every page and returned it the next day.
Sounds like too much work but the book was worth more than my time to do it.
SSTFI donât know how long ago that was, but the hustle has long ago counter measured pirating or second handing the books by bundling the new books with a 1 time use code to make a profile into the online part of the course where you have to take tests. You could just buy the code on its own when I was going through this, but the code was like 80% the cost of a code and book.
They also do the thing where questions in the book will be scrambled from edition to edition, so using an older copy of a math book for example wonât track because theyâve arbitrarily changed it just enough.
Bobby TurkalinoI had a professor get upset no one had the book on day 1. In her defense, she heavily used the book.
She couldnât understand that professors would make students a buy a book and never use it.
In another class a student had asked about the book a few days in, the professorâs response was âwe have a book?â He inherited the class last minute and didnât have time to look through all the materials.
One year we had to buy a âclickerâ to give digital answers to multiple choice questions live in class. We only used them a handful of times and then found out we couldnât resell them after the semester because it was coded to a specific student and couldnât be changed or something.
I at least appreciated the professor apologizing to us when we reported it to him and promising to not do it to another class when he found out you canât resell them, but still⊠I may as well have just thrown $50 in the trash and gotten the same result.