No, it’s printed on regular white xerox paper, unbound and 3-hole-punched.
When I was in High School, our teacher had written the text book for history. It was used state wide.
He was an arsehole.
…
My physics prof at Purdue made us buy his book. It was written almost exactly the same way as he spoke. It was also determined to have been largely plagerized, and a year later, said prof was gone.
It was really too bad - he was good at explaining concepts. He apparently just sucked at writing textbooks.
I’ve had a few. Math class where a supplemental text was being written as we were testing some of the software. He was about 2–3 chapters ahead of us, and used us for proofreading and idiot-proofing. Cool guy, so we didn’t mind, and it was for the lab portion, not the whole grade.
Literature class where one of the texts was his study on aesthetics. Dense, but well-written, and the teacher was interesting. It was out of print, so he had the campus binder do up copies for our class. I don’t remember them being very expensive, so it must have been pretty close to at-cost for everyone. I really doubt he was making any serious money off the 40 people or so who took that class, and it was only offered once every year or so.
Japanese class. She was in the process of publishing the second and third volumes by the time I was in my second semester. We were working from galley copies. The text itself sucked. Not the contents necessarily, the concept. She had organized everything by topics, with a cultural note at the end of each chapter, and a list of words used in the back, but no index, and no overall glossary, and no way to find anything that you’d covered in any kind of systematic way. I spent a couple of weeks sticking different colored Post-Its with notes on them to try and make a tab index when I was reviewing for coming to Japan. Didn’t help much.
Multiple problems with the concept were: Situations are complicated, which means there was little to no graduation in difficulty or usefulness of the material presented. Some of it was way too complicated, some was basic stuff that we should have been taught right away, but we didn’t get to until the end of the second semester. I didn’t realize you could link two sentences using the て form of a verb until halfway through the second semester, because the bitch hadn’t introduced it until then. Spent 6 months struggling to find a way to say “and” or link two ideas when we’d covered て forms back in the first or second month, but she’d never mentioned that little grammar point.
The text was grammar-heavy, with very limited vocabulary and many of the words she did introduce were not general enough for maximum utility.
The cultural notes came off as odd and unnatural when introduced in a dialog between characters, and the emphasis of certain things was just stupid. It would have been okay in a Japanese culture class, but no one really cares about learning words for Japanese New Year when the only time you’ll ever spend Japanese New Year with a Japanese family is if you happen to be related to them. I’d lived in Japan for 5 years, and was thinking about getting engaged before I had occasion to use a single word from that bloody chapter. On the useful-O-meter, learning the words for cuticle and smegma would probably rank higher.
I later found out that her “organization” was straight out of Japanese textbooks for teaching English. There’s more than one reason Japanese are famous for not being able to speak English after 6 years of mandatory study in school. The textbooks I had in my Japanese classes could have been used as Exhibits A and B in why language teaching in Japan is absolute shite.
Hell, my Japanese wife was amazed that when she took Spanish class in the US, they were able to carry on very basic conversations by the end of a single semester. She says that’s when she realized how terrible her English instruction to that point had been.
So yeah, that particular book was something I considered a huge waste of money, and a vanity project for the professor. But, considering the few people taking her class, she wasn’t really making money off us.
When I took second semester physics from Dr. Thomas Helliwell at Harvey Mudd College, he used his own book for the portion of the class on relativity, though if I recall correctly he used a mainstream physics textbook for the rest of the class. His book was a small paperback, but it was a legitimate publishing job.
The story behind this was that when Helliwell first taught the class sometime in the 60’s, he had ordered for his 150 students copies of a certain book on relativity. (I forget the name and author.) Helliwell had read the first edition a couple years earlier. A new edition had been brought out in the meantime, so he ordered 150 copies of the new edition, assuming it would have only minor changes from the old. However, the author of the book had decided in the interim that the theory of relativity must be false because of the twin paradox, so Harvey Mudd ended up with 150 copies of a book explaining why the theory of relativity is false.
After that, Helliwell decided to make a short book from his own notes on relativity, and it’s still in use today. (Though I’d guess that he’s retired by now.)
You’re lucky – at least there was another professor who taught the same course so you could retake it and actually learn something. My experience was like bouv’s, where both micro and macro economics was taught by the professor who wrote the book and “[h]is lectures were basically just truncated chapters of the book. So if you were having trouble with something in class, you couldn’t turn to the book for help. And it was very sparse. Very few example problems, and not very clear explanations.”
But unlike your situation, this man was the only professor who taught either class. The only saving grace was that he graded on a curve, and no one did very well in his class, so it ended up being relatively easy to end up with a B, even though my actual exam scores didn’t really reflect such a grade. It was ridiculous.
Yeah, I mentioned this in the “did you ever finish an entire textbook” thread - the only time I can remember doing so, my professor had written the book.
Despite the fact that it was weird to have a coloring book in college, it was actually very informative. And maybe I’m crazy, I think actually doing the coloring - which wasn’t required - was surprisingly helpful.
It was pretty common for my profs to specify their book for class. Often how much you publish is part of the consideration for tenure and advancement.
I had a neuroscience coloring book last semester. I’m a grad student. It was actually kind of fun, though not having needed such school supplies for years, I had to borrow colored pencils from my roommate (who has a scrapbooking hobby).
Only ever had one textbook written by the professor: it was in an Intro to American Politics class that was a required core course for the poli sci major (which I decided not to pursue largely because of this guy). The book itself wasn’t terrible, but you got better grades if you wrote papers relying almost exclusively on citations from his book and lauding and supporting the ideas he’d written in there. He was really full of himself.
I had a class with Lincoln Brower (Evolution 101 essentially), the leading expert on the Monarch butterfly in this country. Sweetheart of a guy. Every time the Monarch is in the news his name is invariably dropped.
I teach a service (non-calculus, non-major) statistics course. My individual circumstances allow me to teach the course using my own notes. Basically, the course materials are an extended set of cases, together with supporting materials and a test bank. All online, at no cost to the students.
There is a standard text, but all I do is show a topical linkage to it.
I’ve seen the thing the OP referring to as a “reader.” They usually work out a deal with a local copy shop and they’re $20 or so. I had one for English and Statistics courses, I can’t remember what else. At least for the English, I think the prof just wanted a specific combination of readings and thought that was the best way to put them together. I also get the sense that sometimes these are a “beta test” for a future actual book the professor might write. The advantages of writing your own textbook is of course that you can force your own students to read it and pay you money for the privilege.
Twice. Once for my class in Ancient Philosophy, in connection with the usual anthologies of Plato and Aristotle. Only snippets of the pre-Socratics survive (or so I believe, I am not a classicist) and it also included his notes on the various texts (including notes on excerpts of P & A). Since it was the first of three History of Philosophy classes required of everyone in the major, I guess it could count as a “basic” class.
Additionally, I had a prof-made textbook for Intermediate Logic. There do exist published texts for this subject (Herbert Enderton’s book was recommended as an adjunct for the class). A prof-made book is nicer in these kinds of classes, since lecture is usually one proof after the other, with occasional remarks about the philosophical import of some of the more important results.
$65 for 300 pages unbound is way out of line. Still a lot cheaper than a published book. I would imagine that you could get Kinko’s or someone to bind it for $10. I taught a course a number of times using a text written by a colleague. It was 150 pages and I took one copy to a local copy shop that scanned it in and students would come in and get a (neatly) stapled copy for about $10, nothing for my colleague.
I wish there more books like that and textbook publishers would take a long walk off a short pier. Except for Schaum’s; their prices have remained reasonable.
I’ve written books (more like extended note on each topic) for two of my courses at school. Not so much a cost issue, but simply we just couldn’t get the right text.
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Which was a coloring book.
Despite the fact that it was weird to have a coloring book in college, it was actually very informative. And maybe I’m crazy, I think actually doing the coloring - which wasn’t required - was surprisingly helpful.
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Anyone else think it is funny that Amazon says on that page “Tell the publisher- I want to read it on Kindle”.
A coloring book on Kindle. . .
Depending on your definition of “basic”, I’ve had this happen twice. The first was in college - our required History 101 text was written by one of the profs. It was actually published, but seems to have gone out of print since my freshman year - I can’t find new copies on Amazon. It was entirely unremarkable - a competently written high-survey-level history of Western civilization, but not a lot of “there” there, if you get me. Didn’t matter, though - the prof was smart and engaging, and I quite liked the class.
The second time was in law school - the prof wrote our Administrative Law casebook. Or perhaps it’s more correct to say that he compiled it - after all, the bulk of any casebook is case extracts. But there’s enough of his own stuff (notes, questions, etc) and editorial choices that it seems odd to suggest that he isn’t the author of this book. Anyway, it was a perfectly fine book, and I rather enjoyed how well it tied into the lectures. I also thought it was neat that we were learning from a first edition. I should add that this was a legitimate casebook, not just a reader - West published it.
When I was in community college one of my instructors had self-published an abridged version of an existing textbook, which contained only the parts of the original that he intended to teach. He told us we could either save our money and buy his version, or buy the full version for a broader look at the subject (Political science, IIRC, but my memory is fuzzy).
You gotta be kidding, right?