Crappy College Textbooks

[Iron Rooster]

Soooo, who here has ever been a victim of shitty textbooks? And by shitty, I mean the examples feel like they're missing 80% of what's needed to understand what's going on after reading the text several times. And no, I don't have problems teaching myself with a book; I taught myself multiple variable calculus by reading a good textbook. Please, indulge the details of your craptacular book adventures!

[Action_Bastard]

I have had shitty college textbooks, but I can't quite remember the names of them for obvious reasons. But what really gets me going is when you are taking a class that has like 4 books and you only use 1 the whole entire semester. What a waste of space that was in my freshman dorm room and now in my current apartment!

[Gilgamesh]

Honestly, no, I've never had any college textbooks that I felt were shitty in that manner. About the worst I can say for any of them is that my European history textbook wasn't very engaging, despite the fact that I love history. That was an issue with the style of the text, though, not the content.

[THE Hal E. Burton 9000]

I've always had more problems with the professors than I did with the textbooks themselves; after all, it is ultimately the choice of the professors, not the book publishers, on what would be used in the lecture hall and subsequent tests

there has also been the aspect of political correctness and general left-wingedness that's bothered me in more recently published textbooks (and some professors too)

[Dartz]

The worst professors arew the ones dumb enough to be completely incapable of finding the lecture room, or inconsiderate enough not to email and say that the early morning class has been cancelled.

If the lecturer is engaging and interesting, the topic will flow and is so much easier to understand. If we get a drone... Professor Ppt Karaoke... it's hard to do anything but sleep. It hard to take interest in the subject. Attention drifts, and eventually we just give up.

There's also the lecturers who assume students are printers in an exam... that we dont have to think about our answers before writing them, we can just regurgitate answers onto the page from memory. The worst example I've experienced being a 2 hour exam with 4 questions, each of which would take a competent student an hour to answer.

What do they care, they're oinly in it for the research

[BrikHaus]

And by shitty, I mean the examples feel like they're missing 80% of what's needed to understand what's going on after reading the text several times.

A lot of medical textbooks are like that. They give only one example, or assume you are already somewhat familiar with a certain topic. Also, they are written in the most boring style possible. While there are a few excellent ones out there, many seem to be very badly written despite them being about such important topics.