I see I’m not the only one on the SDMB to have had Ian Mueller and David Malament.
One of the textbooks for electrical engineering had been written by a former prof at the college, by then retired. The one who recommended it to us had had some input into it himself, but said, “It makes no difference to me. I’ve had all the brass I’m going to get out of it, and it was precious little, I can tell you …”
I took a closer look at it today (now that I have a binder to put it in.) It turns out it’s not a straight Kinko’s job, but was custom printed by Pearson Learning Solutions. Pearson is one of the big textbook publishers. It looks like PLS specializes in printing up these custom books for profs. Also, it’s actually closer to 600 pages.
One of the supplemental texts for a political science course I took was compiled by the professor. It was a series of essays by other poli-sci professors with the first and last chapters written by our prof. When discussing it in class the prof refused to acknowledge that it was his book.
Student: Prof. Jones, what about (insert relevant theory here)?
Prof Jones: If you read the essay by (name) in the Jones book…
Rest of class: 
Student: Isn’t that the book that you wrote/edited?
Prof Jones: What gives you that idea?
Rest of class: :dubious:
The book had his picture inside the back cover with a blurb that he was a professor of political science at our university.
it could be a book the prof wrote to fit their lesson plan as mentioned.
it could be a mass market textbook in the works. it can take lots of years of real world use to refine a textbook. especially math and sciences, getting the best illustrations, photos and examples takes real world feedback.
Your two sentences are completely unrelated.
Yes, it’s true that publications are an important factor in tenure and promotion at most universities and colleges, but that is completely separate from the issue of setting your own book as the required text for the classes you teach.
When a tenure or promotion committee looks at your publication record, they’re not asking, “Is this person’s book used in the classes that he teaches?” They’re asking questions like, “How long did it take this person to write and publish this book?” and “Is this book considered important within its field?” and “Did this book receive good reviews in scholarly journals?” and “Does this scholar have the potential to write another book of equal or greater quality if we grant tenure or promotion?”
Given that much of what we’re talking about here is textbooks, it’s also worth noting that in my field (history), writing or collaborating on an actual textbook for use by undergraduates probably won’t get as much recognition from tenure and promotion committees as writing a well-received scholarly monograph. If you write a new, groundbreaking piece of historical research and analysis that gets purchased by 2,000 libraries and 2,000 professors and grad students in your own field, it will probably be worth more at tenure time than writing a textbook for the freshman survey that gets purchased by 100,000 undergraduates.
What’s basic? I took a grad-level (500) course in proposals and grants with the author of a book on writing same - an English prof who worked with consulting and PR firms in the midwest. He had a remarkably logical system worked out, based on evaluating the various benefits, risks and deliverables you need to lay out when making a business proposal.
A very bright prof, a very good book and a pretty good class - the problem was simply that he had written the book. He didn’t (maybe couldn’t) explain or contexualize certain concepts, because he couldn’t get far enough out of his own head to know what it was like not to understand them.
Sure- in graduate school I had “Foundations of the Internet Economy” or some such required economics class, and Stan Leibowitz wrote the books and taught it.
http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=stan+liebowitz&x=0&y=0
Plus, he wrote an article recently that started a Dope thread:
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=576969&highlight=liebowitz
This is an extraordinary difficulty for professors.
While the basic concepts and material are almost always the same, we all have our own teaching styles and topics that we like to focus on. Invariably, no matter how many textbooks are out there on the subject, they always have two huge flaws from any (good and attentive) instructor’s point of view:
-They don’t sufficiently emphasize the material that you this is most important for your students, and
-They overemphasize certain material that is extraneous.
I’ve written two “course packs” for different courses that I’ve taught, and they’re now used by every professor in that department at the University they were written at. But I’ve also had the bad experience of having a bad professor with a bad coursepack and very little recourse.
Overall, it’s most likely a sign that the professor cares about your education and put in the time and effort to write up what he/she believes are helpful materials. If they’re not helping you, you’re absolutely right, Calc I hasn’t changed. Go buy a textbook for $5 from Amazon that’s 30 years old and teach yourself. Trying that, in my experience, might also give you a newfound appreciation for what the professor has done.
I took a 300 level course (undergraduate upper level) course where the profressor was a co-author. One of his tests included a question on content that was mentioned in the preface/introduction, and nowhere else. I literally followed the instructor’s direction to read it, and I’m sure many didn’t.
I never had this happen. But I was taking a basic history class using a book written by Jackson Spielvogel, and during the same semester I took an honors history class with that same Jackson Spielvogel. Fortunately the professor of the basic class and Dr. Spielvogel were on friendly terms…
Some of the electronics classes I took in college used actual published textbooks written by the prof.
Huh. I didn’t even have this happen in the higher-level courses in my B.A., to my memory, even in those courses where I knew for a fact that the prof had written undergrad-level textbooks on the subject. Maybe that just wasn’t Done at my school or in my faculty.
Actually, you reminded me. I was Chem E, but we needed two semesters of Electrical (ECE) to graduate.
I got my intro ECE with a wonderful old guy. Crusty, full of fun stories, had spent plenty of time in industry designing microchips. He was actually retired but everyone loved him so he was regularly invited back to teach lower level courses “for fun”.
My favorite moment from him. He was discussing Fourier Transforms, when all of a sudden he just shakes his head disgustedly:
Thinking about Fourier Transforms is like beating your head with a wrench. It just feels good to stop and move on.
This guy had a freely available ramshackle collection of notes and example problems. And they were farking excellent. Yeah, they weren’t written like a proper textbook but MOST IMPORTANT for us engineering types - a concept is presented briefly, then there were 5 “example problems”, with detailed solutions in the back.
I really think that’s how engineering types learn best. EXAMPLES, EXAMPLES, EXAMPLES. Leave the theorycraft to the Mathies and the Physicists :D. We need to understand why a particular equation means something through example before we can love it. Yes, that’s one of our endearing quirks.
But yeah, my “official” ECE textbook gathered dust that entire semester. His “notes” were more than sufficient for me to get a solid grade in the class.
//interesting side-note, I was sitting in his class when the first plane struck the WTC. I remember that class pretty well :eek:
I had a terrible intro to Psych statistics book that was written by one of the department professors. If I’d had a pellet gun back then I’d have strung it up in a tree and presented it with my rage in small, lead-based pellet form.
I’ve had lots of professors who used texts they wrote themselves. Almost always it was clearly because they wrote the book to present the material in the order and the way they wanted, not because of any financial desire to sell a book or because of a departmental requirement to publish. In several cases, we used the regularly-published textbook that the professor wrote (my calculus class was taught by the guy who wrote one of the best-selling academic textbooks ever. Omn calculus, of course. I’d used a version of his text in high school, and used it my first semester at colege, as well.)
It wasn’t a “basic” course, but in grad school for one specialized course we used a textbook that the professor was writing and re-writing as we took the course. he’d come in the first day of the week with a stack of new pages and tell us to throw out the previous ten pages he’d given us, and replace them with these ten, plus the new pages. Truly a bizarre experience – the textbook was changing week by week.
My first-year Crim Law professor wrote the book. A real book, not one of those copy-shop deals. He’s pretty well-known in the field. One of the best classes I ever took. It really motivated my eventual career path.
The majority of my college books were like that, we only had five (four of them optional, the last one was what you really needed to study for that class, disregarding your classnotes) which were actually published by an editorial house. They were “published” by the student union; some of them had been prepared by the professors themselves, some by the students (in which case you’d have both the professor’s book and the student version available). Students prepared books by typing the best classnotes they could find; my own classnotes for Chem I ended up in one of those books as “the Cliff Notes version” of someone else’s extra-detailed notes. The union also collected exams from previous years, which we used as study aids.
This was ChemEng when only one university offered ChemEng in Spain; any of the subjects was not covered exactly as the teachers wanted it in any of the books available. Rather than make us buy three or four books, they wrote their own.
I took an art appreciation class my first year of college with a professor who wrote his own text. Later, I took a serial murder class with a guy who also wrote his own book, and the other book for the class was written by another professor in the same department at the same school.
I can’t say I learned a lot in the first class (never been much for art) but the second class was incredible. That professor is quite well regarded and his book is still in demand.