Well, the semester is over. I'm in an impish mood that's going to
get me in trouble. And, talking about trouble, there's a riot brewing
over by the bookstore. Students are lining up in moody hordes to sell
their textbooks as fast as they can even to find to their displeasure and
anger they're being offered a penny on the dollar. It's beginning to look
like the storming of the Bastille.
Let me let you in on a well-kept secret. The conspiring
military-industrial complex has nothing on the academic-publishing
complex. So, let's make proverbial hamburger from an academic sacred cow:
the textbook, that tome whose sacredness on collegiate campuses rivals
that of Scripture and the Koran. Digesting it may give us some food for
thought. It most certianly will give us indigestion and clouds of gas.
So, here is one of my questions: why do the overwhelming majority
of us academics assign textbooks for the students in our classes? That
question I'll let you answer.
I have another question. Why don't the students generally read
the textbook? Sure they use them as coasters, not to mention as
proverbial door stoppers and paper weights. Put two each at the end of a
bar and they make for good--though not cheap--weightlifting. Lug them
around on your back and it builds up the muscular and cardio-vasular
system. That's why collegiate gyms are empty. The students get their
workouts carrying around their ton of textbooks. But, why don't the
students generally read them unless they are under threat of execution.
And then, they still don't read them. For that question, I have a bunch
of answers.
Several months ago, I had been pouring over textbooks for next
year. What a ripoff! It seems the textbook I use, as well as its
compatriots, usually goes through a new edition every 63 hours. But,
don't get me into this uneducational commercialization of education that
borders on thievery and extortion. I've decided that to wade through this
ponderous textual swamp is the ultimate act of academic masochism. At
best, it's a very second only to grading. Reading each text is like
taking a cup of Nytol. I've had to slap my face and pinch myself more
than once to bring me back from wherever I was driting off to. And, I was
interested! Slowly, as my eyelids leadened, eyes strained, my muscles
stiffened, my attention fluttered, and my head bobbed, I began to
understand once again why students read as little of the textbook as they
can get away with. Aside from the fact few teachers have taught students
the difference between reading and highlighting and going back in a fit of
cramming memorization for a test on one hand, and studying and
understanding on the other. Most professors don't know what SQ4R is.
Most professors don't help students learn how to study from a textbook.
It's one of those "it's not my responsibility" things. No, students
don't read the textbook not because they're slackers. Having
gone through the tortures of writing a textbook and struggling to get it
by the editors and then running into a wall of marketers, I understand
that the answers are simpler than that. The textbook publishing business
has nothing to do with the students' education!
At the rising prices--21$ increase just this year--I wonder if
these weighty tomes are really worth their intellectual weight beyond
added income for professors from book buyers crawling over campuses like
ants. Here are a few, a very few, of my many objections:
1. Most textbooks, written years before they are pushed, are often
obsolete by the time they hit the desks. They may have been up-to-date
when they left the authors' hands, but so often they are out-of-date by
the time they're in the student's hands and certainly are useless by the
time the students graduate years later. Morever, the supposed up-dated
new editions are still more often than not behind the information curve.
2. Yeah, I know the arguments about students needing a structured
reference, although I thought that was one of our major tasks. So, I'm
not sure who or what is ancillary to whom or what. Anyway, we're up on
the material more than is the textbook. Most textbooks' cutting edge is
as dull as the proverbial doornail. They come wrapped in a condom.
Everything has to be safe. They have to be so politically correct, so up
on the latest fads, so totally uncontroversial, so inoffensive, that it's
hard to tell one from the other. Uniformity and conformity, not
originality, is the order of the day for any hope of profitable book
orders. That's why textbooks won't stand up! They're published to lay
down.
3. Most authors are selected on the basis of their scholarship, not
whether they are master teachers or master writers. Here is a replay of
the the old adage, if you know it,you can teach it. In the publishing
game, if you've got a long scholarly resume, you know the material. And,
if you know the material, you can write it for students. The problem is
that writing an article for a professional journal or writing a book for
interested fellow-professionals is a far cry from writing a teaching
textbook for a novice, uninterested or disinterested student.
Readability is never a true requirement. In my field, most of the first
year survey textbook writers haven't seen an undergraduate, much less a
first year student, since they were one a millenium ago.
4. The textbook contributes to the illusion that we've met the
requirement of having "covered the material" and having offered the
students the opportunity to "master the material." After all, all we have
to do is assign chapters 40 through 66 on the next to last day of class to
pat ourselves on the back.
5. Contrary to righteous self-proclamations, the publishers are
adopter-oriented, not reader-oriented. I haven't read a textbook that is
written for the students who supposedly have to read it. I haven't read a
textbook that isn't written for the professor who has to adopt it. The
publishers will use every merchandizing trick in the book, even devious
and bribing ones, to grab the professor and will devote very little time
to grabing a student. Test banks, CDs, DVDs, instructor manuals,
websites, powerpoint presentations may be tasty to professors.
Nevertheless, the textbook remains tasteless to the students and hard to
swallow much less digest.
6. So, I can't remember the last textbook I read, either as a student or
professor, in any subject, that was readable. And, God forbid a textbook
should be enjoyable. After all, getting an education is serious business.
These textbooks aren't exactly attention holders, eye catchers, spell
binders, cliff hangers, or heart throbbers. They're not exactly going to
make the NY TIMES best-seller list. Hemmingway these authors are not
however they may pride themselves and publishers tout them to be. The
textbook is not a book students or most anyone else would read under the
covers. The textbook isn't a "you gotta read it" book. The textbook
isn't a book that will bring a tear to a student's eye and a pang in his
or her heart and a heave in his or her chest and a sigh in his or her
throat. The textbook is never a peak or memorable experience that will be
life changing and stay with you throughout your life. In fact, in some
educational circles readability is the antithesis of scholarship;
readability is condemned as amateurishly "popular." No, the textbook is
as an exciting read as the legalese of a warranty or a credit-card
contract.
7. And finally, most of us use a textbook because it is the thing we
academics have always done and had done to us. The students have figured
out that while many professors require them to spend an outrageous amount
of money either because it's the traditional thing to do or a department
requirement (same difference), so many professors spend outrageously
little time using or referring to it. Or, if they do, their lectures are
virtual carbon copies of the textbook. How many students do you know who
have aced a course without ever having buying the text? How many
professors' lectures consist of reading from the textbook? To be honest,
I know a bunch.
8. And finally, dare I talk about the financial investment collegiate
institutions have in the survival and profitability of their bookstores?
Administrators revile off-campus competition and do eveyrthing within
their power to stifle if not eliminate it, some going so far as to forbid
faculty from handing over reading lists to off-campus competitors.
Publically they discount the internet, but privately they pull their hair
out when students buy books on the internet at discount. So much for red,
white, and blue American capitalistic free enterprise and free
competition. They want to hold up the students by not having to hold down
the prices. They sell the books at outrageous sums and then demand they
be in pristine, unmarked, almost unread shape before they buy them back at
outrageiously little sums. This selling and buying is such a money making
business that it almost makes the business of football and basketball seem
penny-ante.
The textbook glitz is fool's gold. Professors may be lured, but
the textbook is not alluring for a student. Oh sure, we can require them
to purchase the textbook. We can demand they bring their purchase slip to
class as proof they have obeyed us. Yes, some do. Some academics even
engage in the questionable activity of requiring their own texts. We can
threaten the students to read the text with a "there will be six questions
from the textbook on the test." We can plead and bribe students by saying
"if you include material from the textbook in your test essay you'll get
extra points." We can be devious and ask trick questions, as I know one
professor had done in a freshman English class, from the backnotes.
We can do all this. All this, however, begs the issues. Putting
unthinking, stagnating "it's always been done that way" tradition aside,
after due honest reflection, what makes the textbook educationally sound?.
Make it a good day.
--Louis--
Louis Schmier www.therandomthoughts.com
Department of History www.halcyon.com/arborhts/louis.html
Valdosta State University
Valdosta, Georgia 31698 /~\ /\ /\
(229-333-5947) /^\ / \ / /~ \ /~\__/\
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