Re: Our textbook

[Bob LaMontagne <rlamont@POSTOFFICE.PROVIDENCE.EDU>]

Sorry, but there are more out there than you would think.
my biggest frustration in undergraduate school was taking
math courses. You would have a book that was so heavy that
it was just this side of becoming a black hole. Then the
boring nerd teaching the course would plow through it one
page a day - slowing proving every theorem and corollary.
You'd keep looking at the rest of the book, finding all
kinds of neat things - but you were lucky to get out of
chapter 3 by the end of the course. If this was an isolated
event I wouldn't mention it on this list. However, it
turned out to be the rule rather than the exception.

I have rarely had a physics or engineering professor who
has done anything this egregious. However, I've always felt
a bit cheated when the size of the book was double the
amount actually covered.

I would never argue that a text should be chosen because it
can be covered completely. We should choose the text that
we feel best matches the approach we would like to take.
But I fully sympathize with the point Ludwik is making.

Bob at PC

*********** REPLY SEPARATOR  ***********

On 4/7/2004 at 8:25 PM Larry Smith wrote:

> > On 7 Apr 2004 at 20:24, Ludwik Kowalski wrote:
> >
> > > Students are
> > > deprived of the pleasure which comes from the
> > > feeling of mastering "nearly everything" in a
> > > textbook.
> >
> > This is incredible.  I have never witnessed a single case
where an
> > undergraduate
> > student had mastered the content of a text...any text.
>
>
> Nor have I noticed any cases where the student felt
deprived of the
> pleasure Ludwik describes.
>
> Larry