3 ms·

I agree with the main point that students should read and understand textbooks. But disagree with some assumptions and points. 1. Many textbooks are written to

I agree with the main point that students should read and understand textbooks. But disagree with some assumptions and points. 1. Many textbooks are written to be understood, but they vary a lot by field and class level. Generally, I think lower level textbooks best meet Downey's standards. As you get into what is junior/senior (300-400 level) classes, there is not always a neat textbook available. 2. I disagree with 10 pages per week per course. I think the expectations of what students can read per week are too low. I attended a couple different schools, and one has a reputation of having high expectations of students, and most students tend to rise up to the challenge. I think most professors don't expect enough, and what a degree represents is watered down. I do feel strongly that busywork and pointless readings should be avoided. Pages per week should not be some sort of metric for learning, but 10 well-written information-rich pages a week per course is not usually going to be a challenge. Nationally, most students don't even read much of what is assigned, so telling students to not read a book if it has 500 pages won't change the status quo. 3. The idea that writing a textbook is easy is crazy. Even if you ignore the other requirements put upon professors, it is time-consuming to do it right. Even short niche books, think O'Reilly type stuff, take time to produce.

ploxiln 10y ago
I've had a teacher in high school and a couple in college that were in the process of writing their own textbooks. They would print out and hand out a half of a chapter or so every other week (probably ended up printing out and handing out about a third of the final book over the entire course). They were amazingly good. I think that teachers who are passionate about what and how they teach, probably have ideas for what they want to see in a textbook. They're probably a bit too busy to have already finished the book, but they're probably working on it and checking its effectiveness on real students. But I do generally agree with you that "most students" is not a good metric for what is reasonable today. "most students" put in an amount of effort that rounds to zero. This is not really their fault, they're just going through the system that's set up. The problem is how much pressure and reward there is for just going through the system. Classes where everyone really wants to be there just for interest in the material have a very different quality to them.
maus42 10y ago
10 pages a week might be fine and well in a mathematics course and related fields, as it's a field famously characterized by it's use of a concise notation. You can state lots of things in a 10 pages. You can spend several hours working with a proof that you can fit on one page. The softcover edit of Rudin's Real and complex analysis is a small book of 400 pages, and and is supposed to a full-year course. What about a less-mathematical course, say, history or philosophy? Well, lots of depends how dense and difficult the text is, and how many courses the student is assumed to be taking the same time. But on the other hand, looking the bare page count, that's not much higher than the reading assignments we had when I was in high school (Finland, 00s), and there I was absolutely bored with the slow pace and had enough free time to read approx. 1 - 1.5 full-length / short-ish novels in a week. (edit. in retrospect, this feels like an overestimate, but I also read the Potters in less than 48 hours / one weekend when they were published, so maybe not.) Because the article mentions "professors", this is supposed to be about university level students: the selected few who actually are academic inclined and moreover, have chosen their field of study out of their free will. I have habit of reading books on my daily commute train trip, most recently Kahneman's Thinking Fast and Slow: I average around 4-5 pages per 20-30 minute trip. I'm mediocre student in internationally mediocre university, so I assume my mental faculties are not exceptionally high. If there's is a problem of students simply not being able to find enough time to study (because they are working 2 jobs), this is an external problem which is not solved by changing curriculum but introducing financial support. If the problem is that students are not willing to find time to study preferring other activities, this is a problem solved by having different students.

ploxiln 10y ago

I've had a teacher in high school and a couple in college that were in the process of writing their own textbooks. They would print out and hand out a half of a chapter or so every other week (probably ended up printing out and handing out about a third of the final book over the entire course). They were amazingly good. I think that teachers who are passionate about what and how they teach, probably have ideas for what they want to see in a textbook. They're probably a bit too busy to have already finished the book, but they're probably working on it and checking its effectiveness on real students. But I do generally agree with you that "most students" is not a good metric for what is reasonable today. "most students" put in an amount of effort that rounds to zero. This is not really their fault, they're just going through the system that's set up. The problem is how much pressure and reward there is for just going through the system. Classes where everyone really wants to be there just for interest in the material have a very different quality to them.

maus42 10y ago

10 pages a week might be fine and well in a mathematics course and related fields, as it's a field famously characterized by it's use of a concise notation. You can state lots of things in a 10 pages. You can spend several hours working with a proof that you can fit on one page. The softcover edit of Rudin's Real and complex analysis is a small book of 400 pages, and and is supposed to a full-year course. What about a less-mathematical course, say, history or philosophy? Well, lots of depends how dense and difficult the text is, and how many courses the student is assumed to be taking the same time. But on the other hand, looking the bare page count, that's not much higher than the reading assignments we had when I was in high school (Finland, 00s), and there I was absolutely bored with the slow pace and had enough free time to read approx. 1 - 1.5 full-length / short-ish novels in a week. (edit. in retrospect, this feels like an overestimate, but I also read the Potters in less than 48 hours / one weekend when they were published, so maybe not.) Because the article mentions "professors", this is supposed to be about university level students: the selected few who actually are academic inclined and moreover, have chosen their field of study out of their free will. I have habit of reading books on my daily commute train trip, most recently Kahneman's Thinking Fast and Slow: I average around 4-5 pages per 20-30 minute trip. I'm mediocre student in internationally mediocre university, so I assume my mental faculties are not exceptionally high. If there's is a problem of students simply not being able to find enough time to study (because they are working 2 jobs), this is an external problem which is not solved by changing curriculum but introducing financial support. If the problem is that students are not willing to find time to study preferring other activities, this is a problem solved by having different students.