College

The US is strange

One of my professors, instead of a textbook, created his own wiki-style online resource for the class. Completely free, frequently edited with improvements

One of the best classes I've ever taken

My anthropology class had us buy four textbooks all written by the professor.

None of them was used at all during class.

I didn’t buy them, or rent them, or spend any money on them. And then I learned to look at the book author while signing up for classes, since the book(s) is/are usually listed.

Another one picked a textbook that was available online for free through the university's library

My version of this meme would be the prof begging the students to actually read the book he/she picked out that is free or cheap so that they are prepared for class and the students rolling their eyes and instead just going to chatgpt or chegg…

Waiting for the meme, in another five or ten years, when students are bemoaning how the subscription fee to ChatGPT For Grad Students keeps going up.

It's all very normal when you recognize how much of our institutional structure is corrupted by profit-seeking.

Its no different than a police officer taking a bribe to let you out of a speeding ticket. Or a customs official demanding a kick-back to let a ship unload its cargo. Or a mafia goon shaking down a local storefront for "protection" money. Just institutionalized so there's no risk of being punished.

You also had the work/life experience by then to be better able to filter out pertinent information from the material.

Most college textbooks are written in an overly complex manner and require some skill to extract and process the information from them.

So right out of highschool you could have read the textbooks but gotten very little out of them.

Had a similar experience with a grad-level math class where the prof just handed out a sheaf of handwritten mathematical proofs. The class involved reading the proofs out loud and the prof explaining them. Excellent class.

It's no different to...

*Lists things that only happen in third world shitholes

When you look at the statistics on education, Healthcare, poverty etc.. in the US you can see which country is the true "third world shithole".

That's something I'd want to take to the dean... But then the prof would just use each book ONCE as a workaround.

In Europe we just have scripts for each lecture. Professors may liberally take and modify content from books so you might sometimes wanna check out their sources in a library but you do not need books.

Thank you for not being one of those professors who writes their own "book" which is 85 pages stapled together that they charge $150 for.

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.

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.

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.

in Germany*

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.

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.

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