Although I just bitched about clickers, I actually really did like using one, when it worked. Maybe if they changed the technology so that they didn’t need to be registered/paid every time and if they were more reliable, it would be cool. I remember a lot of people had trouble with theirs, but this was 3 years ago too. I hated all those huge classes I took at my last college (100-400 people), and the clickers got everyone involved. And it was fun to see how many people got answers wrong
Don’t buy them until halfway into the semester, and only if you discover you truly need them to learn. The price won’t change anyways, and you may discover you don’t actually need it.
“Latest edition” is exactly the same as the previous 1-10 editions, except for the cover design, and some chapters may have been rearranged. Figure out how to read the index and/or table of contents, and you’ll find the material in the book anyways. Especially things like math and chemistry… it really hasn’t changed much over the years! Edition 8 will give you the same information about how to derive an equation as edition 9 will. And you can get edition 8 for free or cheap instead of paying 150$ for edition 9.
Consider the fact that pretty much every other university in the US and Canada is also teaching the same subject, and a good many of them have web pages with course notes, assignments, etc, and that for the most part, the material covered is exactly the same as what your teacher will cover. I’ve gotten through a degree in biochem and partway through an engineering degree with having bought very, very few books… if it’s not available on the internet, there’s a damn good chance you don’t need to know it (at the undergrad level)
If you need to read some version of classic literature (Dickens? Shakespeare? Dumas?) consider getting the text from Project Gutenberg. It’s free.
Re: saving money in general
At most schools, there are some fees that are automatically applied to your bill, but which you can then opt out of. I get anywhere from 15-100$ back every semester, depending on whether I opt out of dental/medical fees (I do now, with my husband’s job) and just choosing not to support all 3453 charities, 45 newspapers, 12 competing radio stations and 4 tree-planting initiatives on campus. Look into it.
Don’t eat on campus. Pack a lunch… it will be cheaper, guaranteed. And you’ll avoid the Frosh 15 (or the Sophomore Seventy…!) Carry a water bottle.
I’m sure there are a bunch of other things, and this isn’t even directed at anyone in this thread. I just never understood people who go out and spend 1000$ on books before classes even start, or complain they have no money when they eat in the food court every day. School is expensive, but there are some things you can do to make it less so!
Except that you won’t have the notes, introductory material, and bibliography that you would get with a good scholarly edition, the text may or may not have been professionally edited, and if the work wasn’t originally written in English, you’ll probably end up with an entirely different translation from the rest of the class (most often, a nineteenth-century translation whose copyright has expired). Sometimes you get what you pay for (and in any case, most scholarly editions of classic literature aren’t all that expensive – it’s the textbooks that cost an arm and a leg).
I’m with the OP on the stupidity of the clickers, however. They tried to sell us on them in one of the teaching workshops at my old school, where the administrators had never met an educational fad they didn’t like. I suppose it might be possible to use clickers effectively – if you are teaching a large lecture course in a field in which memorizing factual information is a useful and desirable skill – but I have yet to see it done well. And I think they reinforce some lazy intellectual habits in both students and professors – memorizing rather than understanding, black-and-white thinking rather than exploring the complexities of a topic.
One thing regarding Project Gutenberg–make sure that the translation on non-English works is the same translation being used by the class. For instance, if your professor’s assigned the Pevear and Volokhonsky translation of Crime and Punishment, and your PG search gets you the Garnett translation. . .well, they’re kind of different.
I agree with you.
The clickers were kinda cool, and a useful learning tool when done right. The only people who really complained were the people who bitched about the fact that they had to start coming to class.
The REAL fun of getting screwed is in that multiple registration fee, or- better yet- when I got a clicker, and then the school upgraded clickers to a newer model the next semester, and so i had to “buy” another one again the next semester.
So far, I’m now at my 4th different kind of clicker, but at least the 4th ones are in medical school- and there they just hand them out whenever they want to do the question thing, so it’s free, but then you dont get any personal points.
But it’s still kinda nifty…
But yeah, this is weak stuff to bitch about- it can always get worse next semester, just keep that in mind.
Since no one seems to believe that clickers can be used successfully (and in a way that is unique to their technology), here is an example.
The professor is explaining the basics of the concept of the day. I’m a biologist, so let’s say that we are talking about what components comprise a functional gene. After explaining the concept, the professor uses the clicker software to pose a question. This is not a fact-regurgitation question, but a problem-solving question. In this case, I might pose a question about gene therapy, present several genetic constructs and ask which one will work best (A, B, C, or D). The students use their clickers to answer and a histogram of the answers is automatically generated and displayed on the lecture screen (the students can see this, too). Forty percent answered A, 10% answered B, 10% answered C and 40% answered D. At this point, the professor asks students to discuss the question amongst themselves to see if they can come to an answer. After a few minutes discussion, the students are repolled using the clickers. One of three things will happen. 1.) The answers will move towards the correct one. If so, professor announces they are correct and moves on to the next concept. 2.) The answers move towards the wrong answer. The professor needs to back up and recover the topic. It would also help to ask for info from the class to discover the misunderstanding. 3.) The answers remain split. Again, ask the class questions to determine the deciding factor between correct and incorrect answer and recover the relevant material.
The technology makes it easy to do this type of instant assessment regularly. A paper quiz does not replace this capability. Even with a TA grading during class, the professor still must move on from the concept before she finds out if the class got it.
Also, it should now be obvious that this is not an easy integration for the professor. The software can be touchy in it’s integration with PowerPoint, but, even more importantly, is the time that it takes to design good, helpful questions.
Of course, like all technology, it’s pretty easy to use it badly. Just because it can be used poorly doesn’t mean that the technology is useless. If so, PowerPoint must go!
But what do you do if you have homework assignments that consist of problems from the textbook?
Basically, yeah. I hate how often the assbastard publishing companies bring out new editions. But if you want to literally be on the same page as the prof and the rest of the class, you have to have the same edition they do. Again, if homework assignments come from the textbook, you’ll hae trouble if your edition is different than the one the assignments refer to.
Or, if you’d rather not read a long novel off a cmputer screen, you can usually find such things dirt cheap at used bookstores (either online or brick-and-mortar). Just make sure, as others have pointed out, that if you’re required to have a specific translation, or an edition with specific supplementary materials, that you get the right one.
Remember the old days, when everyone used to just drink from the water fountain in the hall?
Ah, bullshit. You say I lack empathy, I say you lack perspective. You’re complaining about paying for something (that actually serves a purpose for school; whether it’s the best method to use is obviously debatable) that costs probably less than what you spend on beer on an average Friday. I, like 95% of the people in this country, was poor as fuck in my early 20s, too (though your join date tells me you’re probably a little older than the general college population), but those kinds of fees wouldn’t have broken me even back then, nearly 20 years ago. Personally, I have a hard time seeing it as being “shafted” - maybe mildly inconvenienced. Certainly not at the level of complaining about it to a bunch of strangers.
It has nothing to do with schadenfreude, either - as you’ll notice if you do a search, I’ve never done a thread complaining about closing costs or property taxes, because really, those are also just minor inconveniences (though much more expensive ones). I only brought it up for perspective. If someone had sold me some swampland and I’d sunk my life savings into it, that would be worthy of a Pit thread. Maybe I just have a higher tolerance for such things, I don’t know. But it’s not a case of “I got screwed, so should you” - it’s more a case of “I don’t think your definition of ‘screwed’ is anywhere close to mine, and this seems like a trifle not worth getting all het up over”.
Brilliant advice. Remember kids - every time you get screwed over at anything, quit it entirely! Have a bad job experience? Quit the workforce! Have to pay taxes on your home? Ditch the house! Spat with the wife? Abandon the family! Get a headache? Reach for the nearest brick…
Life sucks. Then we die. In the meantime, we may bitch. Deal with it.
I don’t think he’s “getting screwed over anything,” so your whole exaggerated misreading is out the window. I just figure if he’s so outraged over a nominal fee he should storm out and saves beleaguered college professors from dealing with one more whining, entitled, unteachable ass, and saves himself twenty bucks. Win-win.
As for you, whatever, dog. Good luck with your bumper sticker philosophy. It’s not even a particularly clever bumper sticker, if you ask me.
Honestly, it has never happened to me. What I would do, though is go to the prof/library/a classmate, and either a) hand copy the questions or b) photocopy them or c) solve them on the spot (when they’re easy!). The material in the book will be the same from an earlier edition; the authors very rarely change the text itself, so even following along line-by-line is possible, only you’ll be on page 83 instead of 112. Not a big deal. Also, the QUESTIONS are usually the same, they are just switched around, so instead of doing question 4, you do question 6, but it’s exactly the same. And IME, I learn better from having a different textbook than what the prof is using; there’s no point having an example of how to do something in class that’s the same as the text book, because if you don’t understand it, you probably won’t get any further. But if your book has a similar question, it might help you learn how to solve it better rather than going by recognition.
Ok, translations should match, and notes and intro sections are useful, etc. It depends on the book. Perhaps I should say you should look there first to see if you can find it for free, otherwise go to any bookstore other than the school one to get a cheap copy somewhere else. I don’t mind reading a long story off a computer screen (I do it all the time!), but I guess some people would.
Oh, I drink from the fountain in the hall too. I also refill my reusable water bottle and/or rinse out my tea mug there… I don’t buy a new bottle of water every day to carry around! I just often get thirsty in class, and instead of being one of the 8000 people lined up at pop machines and food courts getting something between classes, I just drink the water I brought with me!
Don’t do that. The motor in the water fountain is not designed to run long enough to fill up a water bottle, and it’ll burn out pretty quickly if it is used that way.
Ah yes, I’m the whiny unteachable ass who gets straight A’s and takes the hard classes for fun, and wishes there were more hours in the day to in more classes…
Some people are saying that I lack “perspective,” that some 36 bucks (with batteries) or so (counting all costs) just isn’t very much. Maybe it isn’t to you. 36 bucks to me is enough to eat for a week or so. Since I’m not actually getting any value out of it, you’r damn straight I’m pissed. (Though I love the people who postulate some theoretically acheivable, but not *actually achieved * value and then judge my complaint against it.) This is little different than if my bank just took some of my money for a “security fee” so the guards could waste it on blow and hookers. Yeah, it makes the rentacops happy, but it doesn’t actually help me.
But I’ll make you an offer. Put your money where your mouth is. Send me $40.00 and I will never complain again, even in future semesters should I have to pay the registration fees again (and I probably will). Heck, you’re even getting something out of it, since you’l never have to listen to me again on the topic. And after all, blowing clicker price + registry fee + batteries cost isn’t anything big, right? If you complain, you’re just lacking “perspective” about how trivial this is.
… Crickets Chirping
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Oh no, I perfectly understand how it could be used. It just isn’t around here. And again, this is an expense which would properly and vastly more efficiently be handled by the department. The department would incur much less cost if it took responsibility for the things, and even passing along a portion to students would be much cheaper for me.
Though I’m no Luddite, I constantly see teachers using technology which in no way, shape, or form helps people or their class. Powerpoint is nice and all… but if you don’t have a good lecture it doesn’t help. (And projectors do mostly the same thing.)
Technology makes it easier for good peope to do good work if the technology helps themdo it (Yeah, genius, I know. )
But much of the time it’s a crutch for people who do bad work. I’m actually a proponent of de-technologizing many things, because processes not equipped with the right technology suffer for its addition. Furthermore, technology winds up controlling the channels of change. If I have a paper sysem, then if something goes wrong I can change it. I mgiht accidentally circle the wrong answer on a paper test. But I have addition layers which can help me fix it. I can review my answers, alter the answer, and turn it in. However, with a Clicker, I can’t do that. If I hit the wrong button, I’m screwed. I don’t even know that I sent a wrong answer.
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