College

AwkwardLookMonkeyPuppet

This is essentially just stealing from poor college kids. Despicable. I hardly ever bought any media in college (books, CDs, whatever). I spent an incredible amount of time at the school library studying there. I couldn't afford to buy the books. If a book was mandatory then I had to find a different class to fill that slot.

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We are, by strict definition of the term, a first-world shithole.

The third world is simply the set of states that were unaligned during the Cold War. The term took on a secondary implication of poverty largely because of American foreign policy. Failure to implement neoliberal market reforms marked a country out as "poor", while embrace of those reforms would result in your country being spotlighted as "growing" and its people as "enriched".

But its all just marketing. While Americans threw billions into the economic sinkhole of Pinochet's Chile and Park's Korea and Diem's Vietnam, countries like Burkina Faso and Yugoslavia and Iraq raced ahead of their peers by triangulating a path between the Great Powers while embracing local economic development instead of fixating on a debt-laden export market expansion.

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I worked for a professor like that.

Apparently the guy had complaints like this for years, forcing students to buy HIS BOOKS. ALL OF THEM.

They don't give a fuck.

lime!

in Germany*

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I always pirated PDFs of my textbooks, but in the few cases where I couldn't find anything online (typically when the book is niche and very new), I would always wait until I knew that I actually needed the book, because it was frustrating how often this meme came true.

I had this one professor I was really grateful for though. He was a big open-source guy, apparently used to contribute to freebsd and postgres, and he went out of his way to find open-source textbooks for all of his classes.

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I had one professor who did this but spiralbound for our only course textbook but it was mostly just pulled from other sources and they only charged like $20 for it. It was great. Another one of my professors got in trouble with the on campus print shop because she was sending students there with her personal copy of the textbook to make photocopies of like 50 pages at a time lmao. One thing I appreciated about my school was that our professors seemed generally aware of crazy textbook prices and did what they could to help make it more manageable.

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The yanks and their shitty primary education are the first to claim that their inability to type coherently is "language evolving"

I'll use "third-world" how I like

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I'm a professor who uses OER materials too; I might have bit off more than I can chew this semester since a new class of mine lacks a free textbook and I said, to hell with it, and am curating weekly readings from stuff I can get off EBSCO our campus pays for. So far it's solid but I didn't have time to prep it all in advance so it'll be a wild ride every weekend!

I think I figured out a sneaky solution though; I made an assignment to had students find and report on an article for 5 to 10 minutes of class. They get real practice for grad school and I get crowdsourced sources. Win win!

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One of my professors wrote a major engineering textbook for his topic. It sucked. I value having a textbook written by someone other than the professor because that way I have a chance of encountering 2 ways to learn the concept.

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One of the first things I learned was to never buy books before the first class.

Dharma Curious (he/him)

Hey, Prof! I have a question.

If you were to do things over again, with today's climate and opportunities, would you pursue the same career? I'm considering going into teaching, but it seems damn near impossible to make a living doing it nowadays. A friend of mine teaches highschool and he makes more than the professors at my school (granted, I go to SNHU online). Any advice?

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Here in the Netherlands we had some teacher who wrote a (small) book on “How to write professionally” and of course that book was mandatory.

BandDad

One year we had to buy a "clicker" to give digital answers to multiple choice questions live in class. We only used them a handful of times and then found out we couldn't resell them after the semester because it was coded to a specific student and couldn't be changed or something.

I at least appreciated the professor apologizing to us when we reported it to him and promising to not do it to another class when he found out you can't resell them, but still... I may as well have just thrown $50 in the trash and gotten the same result.

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Some of that speaks to your maturity and drive too tho. You clearly had a desire to go back, a will to learn, and hopefully a purpose to use that degree you were earning.

At 18 years old, so many people just go to college because its the next step or their parents told them they were. They dont have the passion, maturity, or vision of how their life can be different with a degree

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Hmm that sounds like a profit making opportunity for a technically inclined person.

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I had this one professor I was really grateful for though. He was a big open-source guy

I had the bizzaro version of this guy in college once. He sold his own 150$ "textbook" that you had to purchase from a copy shop next to campus. It was just a bunch of sections of other text books that were clearly copied and put together in a tabbed paper folder by the little printing shop.

Was also the same guy that wouldn't accept assignments unless you turned them in a specific blue folder, which you could conveniently buy from the same copy shop for 5$ a piece.

Still kinda pissed about it like 15 years later, but at least now I can kinda appreciate the hustle that dude had going.

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I just create surveys and put a QR code in my slides. They answer the question on their phone.

Pistcow

I mean, going back in my 30s school is wwwwwaaaaay easier than the daily adult life struggles. Also, I have ADHD, and a lot of my peers went to college and professional life while I took an extra 10 years to mature. Bbbbbuuuut, a bit of grit and lick I've sling shot up to them all thanks to going back to school. It's not a competition, but going from $25k to $100k correlates to an increase in happiness by climaxing the stress of seeing basic needs.

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It was, they sold the clickers

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My favorite was when I took Calc 2 and the teacher just told us if we knew someone who took the course in the last 7 years ask if you can get theirs. The new version just deleted 4 chapters and didn't even change the chapter numbers. It just went something like Chapter 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,13,14,15..