Xref: utzoo sci.math:4997 sci.physics:5028 comp.edu:1487 Path: utzoo!utgpu!watmath!clyde!att!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!mailrus!purdue!i.cc.purdue.edu!k.cc.purdue.edu!l.cc.purdue.edu!cik From: cik@l.cc.purdue.edu (Herman Rubin) Newsgroups: sci.math,sci.physics,comp.edu Subject: Re: How to beat the high cost of text books! Summary: We should teach, and this requires flexibility Message-ID: <1049@l.cc.purdue.edu> Date: 5 Dec 88 13:28:28 GMT References: <2219@cbnews.ATT.COM> <684@stech.UUCP> <17553@agate.BERKELEY.EDU> <1124@osupyr.mast.ohio-state.edu> Organization: Purdue University Statistics Department Lines: 48 In article <1124@osupyr.mast.ohio-state.edu>, vkr@osupyr.mast.ohio-state.edu (Vidhyanath K. Rao) writes: > In article <17738@agate.BERKELEY.EDU> matloff@iris.ucdavis.edu (Norm Matloff) > writes: > >[...] It definitely does appear that publishers are conscious of the fact > >that students must buy the **assigned** text for the course[...] > > Ultimately the blame must fall on the students (as somebody else pointed > out). You see, in basic courses, I would rather ask the students to buy a > problem book, and may be one (or more :-) books out of a short list. > > Unfortunaltey, students feel uncomfortable about this. In fact, a biologist > collegue of mine was bemoaning the fact that students wnat to know which > pages of the text were going to covered on a given day, rather than knowing > the name of the topic alone. I often feel the same way. In fact, when I > lecture, I give only the name of the topic. But student think that that is > too little. If that the way they feel, they deserve to be gouged. > I will not even give out in advance what topic I will cover on a given day. This is even the case in multi-section course in which the other sections are doing this. I do not necessarily follow the same order as the other sections. But the students want to know what will be covered on a given day, and what will be on the examinations. Our examinations should have at least half the questions things which can be done by someone who understands the concepts but not the manipulations, and cannot be done by someone who has merely memorized the various types of manipulations. I suggest that the liberal use of crib sheets be allowed in mathematics examinations. A formula can always be looked up in the real world; a definition can be looked up; a theorem can be looked up; the understanding of what these mean cannot be looked up. Students want to be told how. This must be resisted; the must understand why. Setting up problems is the important thing, except for theoreticians. The student from outside, and most of our teaching is to such, does not have to know how to solve a well-formulated problem, but how to formulate the problem so that an "expert" can solve it, if the solution procedure is known. If there is not a good book in a given area, it will take at least two man- years and multiple authorship of the entire book to produce a reasonable book for a one-semester course. And the students will hate it, and few faculty will be willing to make the effort to teach the concepts. It is much easier to teach plugging into formulas, it is much easier to grade, and the students like it much better. One can even use multiple choice tests, so it is not necessary to take the effort to grade! So why are the students so ignorant? -- Herman Rubin, Dept. of Statistics, Purdue Univ., West Lafayette IN47907 Phone: (317)494-6054 hrubin@l.cc.purdue.edu (Internet, bitnet, UUCP)