I’m a college professor. I’m very aware of textbook prices. Most students don’t 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/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 chegg…
Many people learn better if they both read something and have someone teach it to them in their own words, which is kind of the whole basis of a liberal arts education. Your learning mileage may vary.
I went to community college out of high school and dropped out after a year. I went back when I was 35, got my bachelor’s in 2 years, and was the best student in my major and got an award. All I did differently was read the books…
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
I mean, going back in my 30s school is wwwwwaaaaay easier than the daily adult life struggles. Also, I have ADHD, and a lot of my peers went to college and professional life while I took an extra 10 years to mature. Bbbbbuuuut, a bit of grit and luck I’ve sling shot up to them all thanks to going back to school. It’s not a competition, but going from $25k to $100k correlates to an increase in happiness by climaxing the stress of seeing basic needs.
I’m 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 it’s solid but I didn’t have time to prep it all in advance so it’ll 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!
They basically wrote their own textbook through class assignments, students are co-authors, seems to work great in their case. At least that’s how he presents it.
I’m 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 it’s not clear if you can use them because I do teach for the money).
In Europe we just have scripts for each lecture. Professors may liberally take and modify content from books so you might sometimes wanna check out their sources in a library but you do not need books.
My favorite was when I took Calc 2 and the teacher just told us if we knew someone who took the course in the last 7 years ask if you can get theirs. The new version just deleted 4 chapters and didn’t even change the chapter numbers. It just went something like Chapter 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,13,14,15… brand new price tag though.
I had one professor who did this but spiralbound for our only course textbook but it was mostly just pulled from other sources and they only charged like $20 for it. It was great. Another one of my professors got in trouble with the on campus print shop because she was sending students there with her personal copy of the textbook to make photocopies of like 50 pages at a time lmao. One thing I appreciated about my school was that our professors seemed generally aware of crazy textbook prices and did what they could to help make it more manageable.
One of my professors wrote a major engineering textbook for his topic. It sucked. I value having a textbook written by someone other than the professor because that way I have a chance of encountering 2 ways to learn the concept.
If you were to do things over again, with today’s climate and opportunities, would you pursue the same career? I’m 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?
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
it’s not to get rich. Selling expensive textbooks is rookie level exploitation compared to what people do in the industry, and most of the profit doesn’t even go to the prof
The book to read for this is “the professor is in”. The author takes quite a cynical perspective about academia, but in many ways it’s true. Worth a read (and probably you can get it for cheap second hand)
I’m not concerned with getting rich, I just want to be able to afford to support myself, and potentially a kid one day (though, that’s increasingly unlikely). I’m a full time caregiver for my mom, she’s disabled, and bedridden. So working from home is pretty important. I don’t have any kind of, like, ivory tower aspirations or anything. I don’t imagine I’m going to change the world, or be some oft-quoted academic. Lol. I’d love to teach Anthropology and go on digs some day, but I’m getting an English (creative writing) degree, and I’d love to just have a relatively stable income teach some kids about story structure one day.
My 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 chegg…
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.
I’m a college professor. I’m very aware of textbook prices. Most students don’t 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/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 chegg…
Yeah so I could show up to class just to listen to the chucklefuck prof rewrite what I just read and be bored out of my mind
Many people learn better if they both read something and have someone teach it to them in their own words, which is kind of the whole basis of a liberal arts education. Your learning mileage may vary.
I went to community college out of high school and dropped out after a year. I went back when I was 35, got my bachelor’s in 2 years, and was the best student in my major and got an award. All I did differently was read the books…
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
I mean, going back in my 30s school is wwwwwaaaaay easier than the daily adult life struggles. Also, I have ADHD, and a lot of my peers went to college and professional life while I took an extra 10 years to mature. Bbbbbuuuut, a bit of grit and luck I’ve sling shot up to them all thanks to going back to school. It’s not a competition, but going from $25k to $100k correlates to an increase in happiness by climaxing the stress of seeing basic needs.
I’m 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 it’s solid but I didn’t have time to prep it all in advance so it’ll 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:
https://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 that’s how he presents it.
I’m 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 it’s not clear if you can use them because I do teach for the money).
In Europe we just have scripts for each lecture. Professors may liberally take and modify content from books so you might sometimes wanna check out their sources in a library but you do not need books.
My favorite was when I took Calc 2 and the teacher just told us if we knew someone who took the course in the last 7 years ask if you can get theirs. The new version just deleted 4 chapters and didn’t even change the chapter numbers. It just went something like Chapter 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,13,14,15… brand new price tag though.
in Germany*
Here in the Netherlands we had some teacher who wrote a (small) book on “How to write professionally” and of course that book was mandatory.
Thank you for not being one of those professors who writes their own “book” which is 85 pages stapled together that they charge $150 for.
I had one professor who did this but spiralbound for our only course textbook but it was mostly just pulled from other sources and they only charged like $20 for it. It was great. Another one of my professors got in trouble with the on campus print shop because she was sending students there with her personal copy of the textbook to make photocopies of like 50 pages at a time lmao. One thing I appreciated about my school was that our professors seemed generally aware of crazy textbook prices and did what they could to help make it more manageable.
One of my professors wrote a major engineering textbook for his topic. It sucked. I value having a textbook written by someone other than the professor because that way I have a chance of encountering 2 ways to learn the concept.
Hey, Prof! I have a question.
If you were to do things over again, with today’s climate and opportunities, would you pursue the same career? I’m 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:
The book to read for this is “the professor is in”. The author takes quite a cynical perspective about academia, but in many ways it’s true. Worth a read (and probably you can get it for cheap second hand)
I will check that book out, thanks!
I’m not concerned with getting rich, I just want to be able to afford to support myself, and potentially a kid one day (though, that’s increasingly unlikely). I’m a full time caregiver for my mom, she’s disabled, and bedridden. So working from home is pretty important. I don’t have any kind of, like, ivory tower aspirations or anything. I don’t imagine I’m going to change the world, or be some oft-quoted academic. Lol. I’d love to teach Anthropology and go on digs some day, but I’m getting an English (creative writing) degree, and I’d love to just have a relatively stable income teach some kids about story structure one day.
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.