that inspired me to consider anew the different viewpoints we have
of textbooks as teachers than we had of them when we were students.
(I realize that some of us were students back in the Mesozoic era, so
our memories may be cloudy and/or be of texts long out of date. But
anyway ... )
I'm assuming that the "Reif" referred to in Leigh's comment (in
the context of a thermodynamics discussion) is F. Reif's _Statistical
and Thermal Physics_, a text I remember having in my junior-year stat
mech course. As a student, I HATED the book. Despised it. Loathed
it. It was opaque, unintelligible, and provided (to us students,
anyway) virtually no conceptual 'hooks' on which to hang the
mathematical details. I learned more about the _ideas_ of thermo (not
the formalism) from a friendly grad student than I did from that book.
I had similar reactions as a student to other texts that,
since becoming a teacher, I have heard praised as "accurate" or
"thorough" or (my favorite) "a classic", books I would have
characterized in my student days as dry, pedantic, and mind-numbing.
(I did have some texts that I really liked, works that provided a good
conceptual framework while expecting - and motivating - a great deal
of intellectual investment from their readers.)
I had a similar experience from the opposite side of the desk not
long ago with a new Introductory Textbook, algebra-and-trig based. It
was praisedin print (and on phys-l) as taking a more modern approach
to introductory topics, which it did. I really liked it when I got a
chance to see it, so I adopted it - and saw my students get
extraordinarily frustrated with it. What appealed to me as someone
already trained in physics and what helped my students along on their
first exposure to physics ended up being quite far apart, which, I
guess is the lesson I had learned while using Reif (et al.) but had
since forgotten.
This is not meant to be yet another slam against the Standard
Introductory Textbooks. I really doubt that I could do a much better
job of writing something like that myself. The point is that the set
of printed works that appeal to us as professionals may not have much
overlap with the set of printed works that help students learn
physics. I stress to my students every year that reading the textbook
is not where most of their learning is going to take place anyway -
but that is cold comfort to the interested and motivated students who
look for insight and inspiration in the printed materials for the
course - as I did with Reif - and find none.
I _still_ hate thermo after all these years ...