College Textbooks

Textbooks are expensive.  Students know this and professors know this.

At the institution where I teach, we use the same textbook for two different Earth science courses.  One course covers weather, climate, and oceanography and the other course covers geology.  Both are designed as State University of New York (SUNY) general education courses in natural science for non-science majors (in other words, students majoring in, for example, art, are required to take a natural science course as part of their liberal arts education and either of these courses work).

The text we use is a popular book that's been around a long time (13^th edition now) and, in my opinion, is well-written and comprehensive (full disclosure - Prentice Hall paid me to be a content reviewer of a recent edition of the text).

At our college bookstore (Folletts), this book sells for $163.25 new, $122.50 used, and there are rental options for new, used, and digital versions of this book (the digital rental is the cheapest at $76.75 for 180 days).

Amazon, on the other hand, charges $118.49 for a new edition of Earth Science and you can get free shipping.  The Kindle edition is $100.94 and doesn't expire in 180 days.  If you buy from 3rd parties through Amazon, you can get new versions as cheap as $88.00 plus $3.99 shipping and used versions for even less.  It definitely pays to get your textbook's ISBN from a professor early and order online.

I also place a version of the textbook on closed reserve in the library since we do have students who are simply too poor to purchase a textbook (the publishers and the bookstore hate this practice!).

Many students, of course, will opt to buy textbooks from somewhere other than the college bookstore (often from a student who took the course a previous semester) or simply opt to not purchase the text altogether (although, in my experience, students who don't read the text usually don't do as well in the course).  The college bookstore responds by not ordering a full complement of books for the course enrollment and then some students who wait until the last minute (usually for financial reasons - they can't buy a text until they get a financial aid check) can't even buy a text the first week of classes because it's too late to order online and the bookstore's sold out.

It's a mess.  At my institution this past fall we had chemistry students without a text three weeks into the semester due to the bookstore being unable to obtain more copies (chemistry students use their textbooks for problem solving assignments just like math students do - not having a text is a disaster!).

Speaking of chemistry, textbook costs are even worse for science majors - many lab courses in the sciences require both a text for lecture and a lab manual for lab (and lab manuals in geology run from $75-$100 and may not have used versions available because student write in lab manuals). In courses like chemistry, physics, and calculus, textbooks may be several hundred dollars in cost (although they may also be used for two or more semesters).

So why are textbooks so expensive anyway?  Geology textbook author Donald Prothero wrote an article on this very topic (Why are textbooks so expensive?).  It's complicated, publishers are the ones making the bulk of the profit, but the bottom line is that it's expensive to produce a book loaded with color illustrations and photos that needs a lot of peer review.

Many professors eschew textbooks altogether but I haven't done that yet.  Geology is such a broad subject, and so visual, that textbooks do help.  I simply can't cover all I need to cover is 42 hours of classes for a typical semester - students need to do that extra reading to flesh out the stuff I cover more superficially in lecture.  Many of them, of course, don't realize that, at least until the end of the semester when they see the final exam!

By the way, I'm always surpised when I see students selling back all their textbooks.  I still have my original physics text, chemistry text, calculus and differential equations texts, upper-level geology texts, etc.  While some topics do get out of date (introductory geology texts are different now than they were 30 years ago, but Newtonian mechanics hasn't changed).  I love textbooks and have tens of thousands of dollars worth in my office (of course, as professor, I get many for free now) and refer to them surprisingly often!

Apocalypse, what apocalypse?

 

Chickadee

Just a picture of a black-capped chickadee (Poecile atricapillus) at Spring Farm on the Mohonk Preserve.  This is from my hike a couple of days ago on Christmas Eve day.

Judging by birds at my winter feeder, chickadee populations have declined in recent years (although this year we seem to be seeing a few more which is hopeful).  I like the little guys and love hearing their calls.

The Gift of Homeschooling

As regular readers of this blog know, my wife and I homeschool our two tween-age children.  I'm a community college professor and my wife stays home with the kids.

It's a sacrifice living on one salary (most people are surprised when they learn how little community college professors are paid - around here, it's significantly less than the local high school teachers and everyone thinks they're underpaid).  The benefits are good but the administration is always trying to chip away at them and I've been 2.5 years without a contract.  Anyway, this time of year is always rough with higher electric bills, fuel bills (both of which I sent out today), and the holidays with all that entails in terms of groceries for dinners and gifts for family.

We live in a very modest modular home, I'm currently driving a 1998 Saturn with 190,000 miles on it, and we have old, mismatched furniture I'm somewhat ashamed of when friends and family come over to visit.  My wife and I rarely buy new clothes and we carry pay-as-you-go TracFones.

So, with all of the financial struggles, why do we homeschool?  We could send the kids out each morning to the school bus, my college-educated wife could get a full-time job, and we could easily bump our salary up to over $100,000/year.  Things would be easier financially.  But, as those of you who homeschool know, our lives would be dramatically different.

As a professor, I have a flexible schedule (it doesn't mean, what some people think, that I only work a few hours a day - flexible means I can do my course prep and/or grading at home at night rather than in the office during the day).  I can leave work in the afternoon and shoot off model rockets with a bunch of home-schooled kids and their parents.  We can go with another homeschooling father and learn about tree identification.  We can take month-long driving trips across country to see national parks.  We can go caving and learn about karst and groundwater in the middle of the day. We can have other kids over some afternoon to learn about dinosaur trackways.  We can teach them Greek, just for the fun of it, even though it's not part of the NY State curriculum. [Screw the NYS curriculum - as a community college professor I see the kids who come straight out of high school and they're illiterate and innumerate - not ghetto kids, by the way, these are regular, middle-class kids from OK families]

Yes, you can do all of those things and have public-schooled kids, but not usually as a family.  There's always some one's work or school schedule to worry about.  If something comes up, we can suspend formal schooling for a while without problem.  We continue schooling throughout the summer.  The kids move through stuff at their own pace (not a pace determined by a teacher) and they don't advance in subjects like math until they have mastery.  We don't separate learning from other activities - all of life is educational and learning.  They don't think of learning or reading as something for "nerds."  We don't watch broadcast TV (we don't have it) but we all read books every single day.  I would match my kid's knowledge and educational level against any public school kid any day of the year (except in popular culture - without the TV they wouldn't recognize some of the popular "celebrities").

My kids likely won't remember our old brown couch with holes in it (the one I'm sitting on now).  They will, I hope, remember rocket day and hiking with dad, and camping in Yellowstone.  They will remember a mom who was with them at home as they grew into young adults and the freedom and encouragement to pursue their own interests wherever it led them.

All I want for Christmas is for it to continue in the future as well as it has to date.  In another 10 years, we'll see how it all turned out!