It’s a very brrrrrrrrrr morning down here in South Georgia. I haven’t been out walking yet. I’m doing things in reverse this morning. Warming myself up with freshly brewed coffee and some warm thoughts before I go out and risk being quick frozen before I reach the end of the dirveway.

The house is a little chilly. I’m here home alone with a touch of loneliness. My warm Susan had to fly unexpectedly to Charlotte yesterday to be with her mother. I’ll join her Wednesday morning when I drive up with Robby and Nicole for the family gathering and a lot of grandbaby spoiling. So, I’m thinking and reflecting. Why not. It’s this is the time of the year when we put on the mask of Janus. It’s been an interesting year. It has been a truly interesting year, both professionally and personally, a year worthy of being the opening paragraph for Dickens’ TALE OF TWO CITIES. Preferring to focus on the upside of things, my mother-in-law recovered, the UNC/Wake Forest basketball game was one to be remembered even if my beloved UNC lost in triple overtime, I am proud to say that I made two pieces of sculpture that have drawn rave reviews from the six or eight people who have seen them. Susan and I found out that within the next eight months the count of our grandchildren will soon jump from one to four! If my Natalie has made me feel young, what will three more do!! I went through an very interesting, and for me a surprisingly invigorating, post-tenure review. And now, as the old year ends and new year is bearing down on me, once again I’m supposed to evaluate myself for annual review as both the Ghost of Christmas Past and the Ghost of Christmas Future–without being repetitive.

So, I’ve been pondering what am I going to say that I haven’t said in the reflections I included in the admittedly massive, two inch thick, post-tenure review document. The answer has come within the last week or so. The answer is in what I can only call as unexpected gifts, delightful gifts, magnificent gifts, uplifting gifts, touching gifts, humbling gifts, almost one for each day of Chanukah: an e-conversation with a student in class this past semester, an unexpected e-mail from a student who is now an aspiring professor and whom I haven’t seen or heard from in almost a decade, a call from a new-found friend and colleague, an e-mail from another new-found friend and colleague, reassuring and supporting and encouraging e-mails from old friends and colleagues whom I deeply appreciate.

So, I think I will take my department chair, Dean, Vice-President of Academic Affairs, and whomever to the distant, forgotten, mist shrouded, swamp planet of Dagobah, the home of the Jedi master, Yoda. There Luke’s face is showing enormous strain. He’s standing on his hands, with Yoda perched on his feet. Opposite Luke and Yoda are two rocks the size of bowling balls. Luke stares at the rocks and concentrates. He grimaces. One of the rocks lifts slowly from the ground and floats up to rest on the other. Luke is distracted by Artoo. The rock falls. Luke falls. Yoda shakes his head. Then, Yoda tells Luke to lift the X-wing fighter out from the fetid bog (I have the script of this favorite of all movie scenes taped to my computer desk):

YODA: Use The Force. Now….feel it. Concentrate.
LUKE: Oh, no. We’ll never get it out now.
YODA: So certain are you. Always with you it cannot be done. Hear you nothing
that I say?
LUKE: Master, moving stones around is one thing. This is totally different.
YODA: No! No different! Only different in your mind. You must unlearn what you
have learned.
LUKE: All right, I’ll give it a try.
YODA: No! Try not. Do. Or, do not. There is no try.
LUKE: I can’t. It’s too big.
YODA: Size matters not. Look at me. Judge me by my size, do you? Hm? Mmmm.
And well you should not. For my ally is the Force. And a powerful
ally it is. Life creates it, makes it grow. Its energy surrounds
us and binds us. Luminous beings are we….not this crude matter. You
must feel the Force around you. Here, between you…me…the tree…
the rock…everywhere! Yes, even between this land and that ship!
LUKE: You want the impossible. I don’t…I don’t believe it.
YODA: That is why you fail.

“There is no try.” It is a spiritual message of trust and faith and belief. As Luke found out the hounding lack of belief, weak commitment, eroded persistence, hesitant faith, faltering hope of a discouraging and retreating “I tried” or “I tried my best” can’t call forth the power of The Force. When I begin to hear myself as more of disbelieving Luke at the edge of the bay gazing forlornly at the half-sunken X-wing fighter rather than the assuring Yoda, when I want to get my blood flowing, I don’t think of those intellectual, cold, clinic words such as empower, generate, direct, guide, generate any more than I do pedagogy, method, or technique. They’re not very exciting, inspiring, or moving words. They sure don’t conjure up any charged images.

What gets my blood moving is to see my face, the face of the teacher, as the face of the Luke, the belief in the power of The Force, as one of the faces of the heroes in Joseph Campbell’s THE HERO OF A THOUSAND FACES. Sound farfetched? A teacher? A hero? Me? You? Doggone right! What makes a teacher a hero? Journey! Vision! Mission! Quest! Faith! Hope! Commitment! Persistence! Think about it. What if the most exciting adventure for everyone is the one they embarked on every time they entered a classroom? What if the first love of everyone in the classroom is being in the classroom, not in some laboratory or archive? What if they are teaching because they want to, because they want to be there, not because it pays the bills, not because someone told them to be there, not because it’s the price of having the opportunity to do research and publishing, but just because it was something they really wanted to do? What if they feel The Force and drew on its power and used its energy? What if it is in the classroom they follow their heart’s desire, their soul’s longing, their innate purpose, their reason for being? What if it is in the classroom they swim deep in deep water, feel the gravitational pull of doing “good works,” soar on the updraft of making a difference. Would the world be transformed into a better place? Would their world be? Would each student’s world be? It’s a staggering and heroic idea.

I doubt if many of us academics think of teaching that way. We don’t use that word, heroic. We don’t draw on that metaphor. Most of us prefer the bland, intellectual words. I prefer the stirring emotional, almost spiritual word “heroic,” for that’s what teaching really is. Why shouldn’t that be. What could be greater, mightier and more aspiring, what can be a grander golden fleece, than to hear a student say after nearly a decade, “Thank you for being such a caring teacher. It really made a difference for me….”

That so few of us see our inner longings and purposeful stirrings as heroic is in many ways a tragedy. After all, a teacher hears a call to adventure and launches into that great journey each day without knowing what lays ahead. The journey may be mysterious, begun by a “what would happen if,” but the purpose is not. A teacher ventures forth from the everyday world into a region of spiritual wonder about each student, encounters and tames fabulous forces of faith and hope and love, and helps each student to see The Force within him/herself. The teacher says, “I’m willing to go on the journey, to do whatever it takes to reach out, touch that student, and make a difference.” The journey is the metaphor for transformation of the ordinary into the extraordinary.

It is not an easy journey. Every journey is filled with the unknown and peril. The journey demands we hear, see, feel the new while letting go of the old. There will be challenges on this journey; there will be that first challenge; there will be that next challenge; there will be those continuing and unending challenges. There will be blistering trials to endure and afflicting circumstances to encounter. There will be dragons, students, witches, society, Minotaurs, experts, Gods, colleagues, institutions. They constantly will try to subdue your own voice into a submissive echo. They will try to set priorities that will turn you back and beat you down. They will try to waft away your flame, shake your the confidence, cloud your certainty, rattle you, and just stop you dead in your tracks.

Am I being melodramatic? That’s for you to say honestly to yourself. The question I’m asking is what will you do when you hit an inevitable challenge? Will you see it as an opportunity or a obstacle? When I’m challenged to my limit and am tempted to pack it all in, I remember the words of John Wesley that, too, are hanging above me right now. He reminds me of the purpose of Yoda’s “Do not try”:

Do all the good you can.
By all the means you can.
In all the places you can.
At all times you can.
As long as ever you can.

Those are some pretty good words and pretty uplifting words. They’re also pretty heavy words, pretty demanding words, pretty hard words, and pretty challenging words. He didn’t say “some,” he said “all.” He didn’t say when it was convenient, comfortable, or safe. He said “all” and “ever.” He didn’t say we should think about it or just give it a try. He said to commit, do. Until we are committed, until we are Yoda’s doers instead of the novice Luke’s tryers, there is hesitancy, the chance to draw back with that surrendering and killing “I tried” or “I did my best.” But, when we heed Yoda, “Do not try,” all sorts of things happen that otherwise would not occur: the X-wing fighter lifts from the bog and is transported to dry land.

I believe that. I have seen that. I have experienced that. When you “do,” you slowly discover new passion and begin to feel a steady, daily glow from harnessing the power of your The Force within you. You get off your knees, stand straight, hear sounds of singing and rejoicing that replace the howling and wailing, go on, and do. This brings me back to Yoda with a touch of Wesley. And if I was a resolution man, this would be my resolution for the coming new year of teaching and for that matter for anything:

when I think I’ve done all the good I can, do more;
when I think I’ve used up all my means, do more;
when I think I’ve done it in every place I can, do more;
when I think I have no more time to give, do more;
when I think I can’t go on any longer, do more.

I won’t “try;” I won’t try “my best.” I will “do.” I will do whatever it takes. I will do. It may not be enough. And when I’m tired and discouraged, I will remember, as the Talmud says, we are not required to complete the work; we just are not allowed to desist from it. I would put it this way: we are required to do more and make that difference.

Now these resolutions does not mean those dragons will go away. People may become angry, jealous, and feel threaten. People may threaten you. People may reject you. People may try to make you into a cartoon. People may accuse you of going into a battle you can’t win. People will try to drown you out with “It’s impractical. It’s impossible.” People may accuse you of being selfish, arrogant, having ulterior motives, being out of touch, being touchy-feely, unprofessional, promoting yourself, being self-center.

As Mother Teresa would say, do and do more anyway.

I and Susan would like to take this opportunity to send each and every one of you and your family a sincere and deeply personal season greetings. May your yule logs and Chanukah candles burn brightly. And, may your coming new year be filled with joyous rewarding “There is no try.”

Make it a good day.

–Louis–

Someone has been raking me over the coals about bringing up this issue of grades over and over and over again. I do so because this is obviously an issue that won’t go away however we may want to turn away. I bring up the issue of grades, as I told some people already, because my intent is merely to get me and others to think about the extent we all are “grade-oholics,” and the consequences of that affliction on our feelings, thoughts, and actions.

Talking of “grade-oholics,” to paraphrase an old Hassidic saying, “Anyone who thinks grades can get him everything is likely to do anything to get them.” That is especially true if there are the additional outside threatening social, political, professional, personal, and family pressures. For teachers, as scandals of teachers helping students to cheat on standardized tests surface and of school boards cooking retention and graduation books, that is especially true if grades are used by administrators and Boards of Education as a hovering and fearful productivity sword of Damocles in factory-like hiring, promotion, and firing practices. For students, that is especially true if cheating is modeled by their role models: parents, teachers, coaches, professors, and even collegiate administrators at the highest levels. So many people invest themselves, identify themselves by these grades. So many identify and value others by these grades. Grades are education’s cocaine. Grade addiction is not much less than drug addiction. You got to have it and you’ll come up with every excuse, rationale, explanation to do whatever it takes to get it because you got to have it. Like any addiction, you’ll deny you have it and proclaim you can stop any time you want. And, like any addiction, the need is so powerful to make you feel so important and powerful that it has a powerful narcotic affect on all values.

Early this semester seizing as a teaching moment what most would call a “no big deal” incident in class, I deliberately made it a big deal in all the classes. I asked almost 200 students in the classes if they had ever cheated? Almost seventy five per cent admitted they had in one way or another, to some extent or another, at one time or another. Seventy-five per cent!! That’s close to the 72% national average. Then I asked the all important question, why. Every one of them came up with every self-serving exonerating excuse, explanation, rationale in the book. It was as if they’d read the studies on cheating and had taken the defenses to heart. They pointed to their role models, to teachers whom they knew helped students cheat and had cooked the test score books. They mentioned corporate executives. They heard of coaches and professors and administrators who had compromised themselves. The mentioned parents who had written papers for them. The pointed to their peers with an incredulous look of “Hey, everyone is doing it.” Everyone seemed to be telling them that the grade doth make the person.

I could easily have called their positions lame, illogical, immoral, unethical, contradictory, even hypocritical. That would be unfair. None of them had entered this world from their mothers’ wombs with souls tainted by this academic original sin. It had been ingrained into them, it had been part of their education inside and outside school, it continues to be part of their education: grade-getting and achieving a high GPA are chips both students and teachers needed to play in this high stakes credentialing game. And, so many of us do so little to unlearn them. We’ll self-righteously punish them, but few of us will unlearn and rehabilitate them. We talk so much about grade inflation and talk so little about character deflation. Instead we emphasize that grades might, just might, get them through the door, but we don’t tell them the nasty little secret that grades won’t keep them in the room.

In this blame game, we “supposed-to-know-better” educated adults no less than the malleable adolescents are Jabez Stones susceptible to the temptations of Mr. Scratch. Maybe the real tragedy is that every one of them, like most of us, blamed someone else or something else: society, “the system,” the times, the culture, the, the, the, the. It was always someone else’s fault. Someone or some thing always made them do it. Not one, NOT ONE, accepted the responsibility for his or her own actions. Not one, NOT ONE, accepted the responsibility for his or her cheating. No one, NOT ONE, admitted to flawed character. What they didn’t realize was that in the quest of the holy grail of a grade they and we make ourselves so unholy; we all steal self-respect and integrity and responsibility from ourselves and others. No one makes his or her life better by avoiding responsibility. In fact, that lack of responsibility is a form of self-imposed servitude to all those to circumstances and other people. Responsibility, self-respect, and integrity are about our ability to respond to circumstances, to choose the attitudes, actions and reactions that shape our lives. It is a concept of power that puts us in the driver’s seat.

Yet, almost all of us give grades so much power to cripple, shatter, corrode, destroy, kill, obstruct, limit, suppress, silence, invade, steal, and conquer us and others. We are all both the corrupted and corrupters. We all are both tempting Mr. Scratches and tempted Jabez Stones.

In the end, however, we shouldn’t really be talking about grades. Grades are not the ultimate problem with grades. It not all grades! It’s all people! We each are the real problem. We, the faculty and administrators, are complicit. And, I include myself. It is true that over the past few years I have banished all tests and grades from class. But, in the end at the end of the day and at the end of each term, I bow to others.

We–students, politicians, parents, faculty, administrators, et al– tend to overvalue grades, to want them too much, to want to give them to much, to think they say too much, to think they will bring too much. We all seem to be a Tevye wishing “if I were…..”

Sure, grades are the currency of the academy. Sure they’re like oxygen: they’re needed to exist, but they aren’t the reason for our existence. But, in the long run they’re not worth the paper the transcript is printed on compared to honesty, integrity, responsibility, accountability. Sure, grades may not be the root of educational evil, but the love of grades instilled in and accepted by most everyone, BY MOST EVERYONE, just may be.

Make it a good day.

–Louis–

Well, it’s finally the end of the semester. Boy, do I need the good cheer of the holiday season. The lingering goodbyes and the tearful till we meet agains with students during the last-day-of-class closure has been replaced this past week by a grateful and relieving feeling that a suffocating weight has been lifted. This past week is that dirgeful coda to the joyful semester with students when I do not feel happy, when my feet and heart are heavy, when my energy is depleted, when I feel dirty and corrupted, almost evil. My teeth hurt from all the angry gnashing I’ve done this past week. After doing everything within my power to instill a love of learning, arouse a belief in each student of his or her own unique potential, convince each of them that there’s nothing average about any of them, persuade them that there’s a hell of a lot more meaningful to an education than merely getting a grade, it would be so easy to now feel like a sellout. It’s that time when I realize once again how the formal institution of education has become such a barrier to the spiritual experience of learning. You all know what time it is. It is that time when the whole concept of love of learning is almost totally undermined by the most anti-learning, fear inducing devise conceived by the mind of man. It’s the time of concocting final grades. If I was a drinking man, I’d go out and get snookered, three sheets to the wind snookered.

Instead, of flaying myself, I’ve got a question. Actually I have a bunch of questions. Why is it that so many people–students, faculty, administrators, parents, et al–get nervous, defensive, testy, upset, downright aggressive when some of us seem to be playing with the definition of academic success? Is it because by questioning grades as the absolute measure of achievement, some of us are asking if achievement is as easy to attain and define as it is made to seem? Is it because we don’t want to face the fact that a lot of us are conscious of the fact that grades don’t make the grade, that achievement isn’t always what it seems? Is it because we want a cookbook of precise, objective, how-to-do techniques for identifying academic achievement and thereby avoiding the inevitable subjective messiness of human interaction? Is it because we have a difficult time facing the fact that education is as much, if not more, art than it is science? Is it because we prefer the easily manageable quantifying definition that education is about measurable information transmitting and receiving to a difficult to manage transcending and amorphous definition that education is all about unimaginable diverse people? Is it because we don’t want to think about the tension we help create between conformity and freedom, between uniformity and uniqueness? Is it because we profess we don’t want students to ask submissively “what do you want” and then demand in word or deed they submissively do what we want? Is it because we don’t want to think about the tension between “love the system and dismiss the people” on one hand and “love the people and hate the system” on the other. Is it because we don’t want to think about how grades make it harder to respect, understand, appreciate, love, have faith it, have hope for each person whom we are grading? Is it because we don’t want to think how we have been duped into believing, to paraphrase the Bard, that “the grade doth make the person?” Is it because we don’t want to think about how we somehow convert guesses, approximations, impressions, suggestions, estimatations, hunches into truth? Is it because we don’t want to think about the fact that Magna Cum Laude in academics doesn’t automatically translate into Magna Cum Laude outside of and beyond the academy–or even inside it? Is it because while we pronounce that we understand that others don’t understand, we really not sure we understand what it we understand or are supposed to understand? Is it because in denial we don’t want to admit that we’re addicted and corrupting “gradeoholics” who can’t really stop any time we want? Is it because we don’t want to face what we really mean when we say, “He got a low grade, but has come a long way and has learn an awful lot?” Is it because we don’t want to face what students mean when they say, “It’s a snap course. I won’t learn much, but it will up my GPA?” Is it that we just don’t want to think about it?

I sometimes think and feel so many in our academic culture, if so many in our society as a whole, has raised the concept of grades to the depths of infallible dogma to be unquestioningly obeyed, and frowns on such tinkering and sees such questions as heretical departures from THE ABSOLUTE TRUTH.

Make it a good day.

–Louis–

My latest Random Thought has generated a lot of discussion about the value and use of textbooks as I had hoped and unexpectedly reigniting some discussions about testing and grades. At the same it has revealed more. All these exchanges, as I already have told many people, remind me how we’re all very good at arguing backwards. That is, not willing or hesitant to learn from or even consider the learnings of others, we prefer to come up with those “I believe” and “In my humble opinion” and “It seems to me,” or we make those sweeping statements and draw those stereotypical images that defend and justify what we are already doing. So many of us each have this guiding internal dialogue that often surfaces in discussions. The the world of academia and students are such and such or so and so. They’re such and such and so and so, however, only because we talk to ourselves about them being such and such and so and so. Then, we talk ourselves into believing they are such and such and so and so. And, finally, we act as if they are such and such and so and so. So many of us struggle to take a stand on our own established exclamation points and find all sorts of intellectual contorting reasons to wave aside those troublesome question marks.

What troubles me is that so many of us, technology not withstanding, run our classes the exact way we did when we first started in the classroom. Most of us, not trained to be teachers, first aped the professors who taught us, assigned to us, and tested us, and we continued to do so. We accepted at face value the lecture, the textbook, the test, the grade, and all the rituals and ceremonies of organized academia, though most of us weren’t shown the educational hows and whats or engaged in reflective discussions of the whys.

So I ask, maybe for far too many of us practice makes imperfect. After all, does it make sense to stick to what we first learned about teaching when that learning occurred at the time we were most naive and least experienced and least informed and most narrow about the processes of learning or the methods and techniques of teaching and the purposes of an education? As we stick with and to what we’ve always been doing, we get locked into single-minded practices and views, call upon “I have been doing this for years” experience as vindication, and reinforce those views for each other in a supportive back scratching manner until we have a fairly mindless academic culture that lashes out at any divergence or query. And yet, in such an assured answer is a surrender of personal control for we have ceased to think freely for ourselves. Instead, we have unwittingly submitted to and mindlessly accepted the mouthing of the mouthings of other mouths under the delusion that such mouthings came originally from our mouths.

To be sure, it is easier to learn something the first time than it is to unlearn it and learn it differently after a long time. But, if we don’t ask the question, we won’t have an opportunity to hear the many answers that offer us insight and choice. If we are convinced we have the answer, we won’t ask the question and will only ardently defend our answer. I think it was John F. Kennedy who said something to the effect that the true opponent of a truth is not the premeditated lie; it’s the ingrained, entrenched, unchallenged, emotionally satisfying, and self-serving myth.

We human beings are doomed to live a life of conscious and not so conscious choices. We can choose to submit to the controlling black and white exclamation of an “is” or we can choose, as Steve Sample urges, think gray and free. To think free, however, means we must accept the questioning doubt and uncertainty of a “maybe” or “what if” and become questers rather than pronouncers.

If we can the accept the discomfort yet exhilarating challenge of doubt and uncertainty, we can exercise personal control, free up ourselves to creative thinking and imagination, offer ourselves to the opportunity to convert that too often mindless practice into a mindful one, be aware of the possibility of more than one perspective, be observant of the changes from minute to minute and the differences from person to person, experiment with alternative methods and approaches, to foster a continuous creation of newness, become open to an openness to new information, be free to discover concepts, philosophies, purposes, missions, and visions. It not an easy task and can be a lonely task. Nevertheless, if learning is reimagining the world, it is true for us, supposedly the purveyors of learning, no less than it is for students.

Make it a good day.

–Louis–

Well, the semester is over. I’m in an impish mood that’s going to get me in trouble. And, talking about trouble, there’s a riot brewing over by the bookstore. Students are lining up in moody hordes to sell their textbooks as fast as they can even to find to their displeasure and anger they’re being offered a penny on the dollar. It’s beginning to look like the storming of the Bastille.

Let me let you in on a well-kept secret. The conspiring military-industrial complex has nothing on the academic-publishing complex. So, let’s make proverbial hamburger from an academic sacred cow: the textbook, that tome whose sacredness on collegiate campuses rivals that of Scripture and the Koran. Digesting it may give us some food for thought. It most certianly will give us indigestion and clouds of gas.

So, here is one of my questions: why do the overwhelming majority of us academics assign textbooks for the students in our classes? That question I’ll let you answer.

I have another question. Why don’t the students generally read the textbook? Sure they use them as coasters, not to mention as proverbial door stoppers and paper weights. Put two each at the end of a bar and they make for good–though not cheap–weightlifting. Lug them around on your back and it builds up the muscular and cardio-vasular system. That’s why collegiate gyms are empty. The students get their workouts carrying around their ton of textbooks. But, why don’t the students generally read them unless they are under threat of execution. And then, they still don’t read them. For that question, I have a bunch of answers.

Several months ago, I had been pouring over textbooks for next year. What a ripoff! It seems the textbook I use, as well as its compatriots, usually goes through a new edition every 63 hours. But, don’t get me into this uneducational commercialization of education that borders on thievery and extortion. I’ve decided that to wade through this ponderous textual swamp is the ultimate act of academic masochism. At best, it’s a very second only to grading. Reading each text is like taking a cup of Nytol. I’ve had to slap my face and pinch myself more than once to bring me back from wherever I was driting off to. And, I was interested! Slowly, as my eyelids leadened, eyes strained, my muscles stiffened, my attention fluttered, and my head bobbed, I began to understand once again why students read as little of the textbook as they can get away with. Aside from the fact few teachers have taught students the difference between reading and highlighting and going back in a fit of cramming memorization for a test on one hand, and studying and understanding on the other. Most professors don’t know what SQ4R is. Most professors don’t help students learn how to study from a textbook. It’s one of those “it’s not my responsibility” things. No, students don’t read the textbook not because they’re slackers. Having gone through the tortures of writing a textbook and struggling to get it by the editors and then running into a wall of marketers, I understand that the answers are simpler than that. The textbook publishing business has nothing to do with the students’ education!

At the rising prices–21$ increase just this year–I wonder if these weighty tomes are really worth their intellectual weight beyond added income for professors from book buyers crawling over campuses like ants. Here are a few, a very few, of my many objections:

1. Most textbooks, written years before they are pushed, are often obsolete by the time they hit the desks. They may have been up-to-date when they left the authors’ hands, but so often they are out-of-date by the time they’re in the student’s hands and certainly are useless by the time the students graduate years later. Morever, the supposed up-dated new editions are still more often than not behind the information curve.

2. Yeah, I know the arguments about students needing a structured reference, although I thought that was one of our major tasks. So, I’m not sure who or what is ancillary to whom or what. Anyway, we’re up on the material more than is the textbook. Most textbooks’ cutting edge is as dull as the proverbial doornail. They come wrapped in a condom. Everything has to be safe. They have to be so politically correct, so up on the latest fads, so totally uncontroversial, so inoffensive, that it’s hard to tell one from the other. Uniformity and conformity, not originality, is the order of the day for any hope of profitable book orders. That’s why textbooks won’t stand up! They’re published to lay down.

3. Most authors are selected on the basis of their scholarship, not whether they are master teachers or master writers. Here is a replay of the the old adage, if you know it,you can teach it. In the publishing game, if you’ve got a long scholarly resume, you know the material. And, if you know the material, you can write it for students. The problem is that writing an article for a professional journal or writing a book for interested fellow-professionals is a far cry from writing a teaching textbook for a novice, uninterested or disinterested student. Readability is never a true requirement. In my field, most of the first year survey textbook writers haven’t seen an undergraduate, much less a first year student, since they were one a millenium ago.

4. The textbook contributes to the illusion that we’ve met the requirement of having “covered the material” and having offered the students the opportunity to “master the material.” After all, all we have to do is assign chapters 40 through 66 on the next to last day of class to pat ourselves on the back.

5. Contrary to righteous self-proclamations, the publishers are adopter-oriented, not reader-oriented. I haven’t read a textbook that is written for the students who supposedly have to read it. I haven’t read a textbook that isn’t written for the professor who has to adopt it. The publishers will use every merchandizing trick in the book, even devious and bribing ones, to grab the professor and will devote very little time to grabing a student. Test banks, CDs, DVDs, instructor manuals, websites, powerpoint presentations may be tasty to professors. Nevertheless, the textbook remains tasteless to the students and hard to swallow much less digest.

6. So, I can’t remember the last textbook I read, either as a student or professor, in any subject, that was readable. And, God forbid a textbook should be enjoyable. After all, getting an education is serious business. These textbooks aren’t exactly attention holders, eye catchers, spell binders, cliff hangers, or heart throbbers. They’re not exactly going to make the NY TIMES best-seller list. Hemmingway these authors are not however they may pride themselves and publishers tout them to be. The textbook is not a book students or most anyone else would read under the covers. The textbook isn’t a “you gotta read it” book. The textbook isn’t a book that will bring a tear to a student’s eye and a pang in his or her heart and a heave in his or her chest and a sigh in his or her throat. The textbook is never a peak or memorable experience that will be life changing and stay with you throughout your life. In fact, in some educational circles readability is the antithesis of scholarship; readability is condemned as amateurishly “popular.” No, the textbook is as an exciting read as the legalese of a warranty or a credit-card contract.

7. And finally, most of us use a textbook because it is the thing we academics have always done and had done to us. The students have figured out that while many professors require them to spend an outrageous amount of money either because it’s the traditional thing to do or a department requirement (same difference), so many professors spend outrageously little time using or referring to it. Or, if they do, their lectures are virtual carbon copies of the textbook. How many students do you know who have aced a course without ever having buying the text? How many professors’ lectures consist of reading from the textbook? To be honest, I know a bunch.

8. And finally, dare I talk about the financial investment collegiate institutions have in the survival and profitability of their bookstores? Administrators revile off-campus competition and do eveyrthing within their power to stifle if not eliminate it, some going so far as to forbid faculty from handing over reading lists to off-campus competitors. Publically they discount the internet, but privately they pull their hair out when students buy books on the internet at discount. So much for red, white, and blue American capitalistic free enterprise and free competition. They want to hold up the students by not having to hold down the prices. They sell the books at outrageous sums and then demand they be in pristine, unmarked, almost unread shape before they buy them back at outrageiously little sums. This selling and buying is such a money making business that it almost makes the business of football and basketball seem penny-ante.

The textbook glitz is fool’s gold. Professors may be lured, but the textbook is not alluring for a student. Oh sure, we can require them to purchase the textbook. We can demand they bring their purchase slip to class as proof they have obeyed us. Yes, some do. Some academics even engage in the questionable activity of requiring their own texts. We can threaten the students to read the text with a “there will be six questions from the textbook on the test.” We can plead and bribe students by saying “if you include material from the textbook in your test essay you’ll get extra points.” We can be devious and ask trick questions, as I know one professor had done in a freshman English class, from the backnotes.

We can do all this. All this, however, begs the issues. Putting unthinking, stagnating “it’s always been done that way” tradition aside, after due honest reflection, what makes the textbook educationally sound?.

Make it a good day.

–Louis–