Reply #110: A LOT of this is ALSO lazy Profs/overworked TA/GAs

[Runcible Spoon]

I taught a huge section of Intro to Cultural Anthropology at a gigantic state school, and I had an average of 120 students. Teaching was in addition to Intensive Arabic classes I tool EVERY DAY at 8am and 3 PhD level seminar classes. Factor in my master annotated bib my adviser insisted I keep constantly updated as well as my dissertation proposal in anticipation of my comps, office hours for the little brats, "voluntary" visiting lectures to attend, and therapeutic happy hours. My first semester teaching, they just kinda tossed us in the deep end and saw who could survive; those who didn't got comfy but less prestigious gigs assisting full profs in their classes.

Anywho, the Textbook Company Whores (no offense Book Lover)would come in around ordering time and put out full buffet spreads for us, beer included! and show us their wares. Some of these "packets" included EVERYTHING-power point lectures, summaries to hand out to the class, critical thinking questions, video snippets, EXAMS. Of course I thought they were horrible, but they wouldn't exist if people didn't use them. I never heard of a PhD student being that lazy or passing up an opportunity to improve upon and find fault in a textbook; I used to give EC if students could find biased or unfair statements and write a reasoned 1 page argument-THAT'S how bad some of these texts were.

I finally honed my teaching style to include a core ethnography which changed every semester because I myself would get bored going over the same shit, and a textbook that was designed by the Marxist sympathizer author to be cheap, bare bones, and highly useful as a core for the instructor to supplement. I would occasionally assign a newspaper article or post articles online for students. Still, this book ran $45 and the ethnography around $15 but I allowed previous additions of both. Looking at the fat, sleek and glossy $250 "packaged texts" with the premade everything, it would be impossible to allow for any former editions or extra articles since the exam questions were verbatim out of the texts. Funny how freshman turn into brilliant little critical thinkers when they are challenging the wording, syntax, or factuality of an exam question :eyes: