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

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.