Comic Strips

I went to community college out of high school and dropped out after a year. I went back when I was 35, got my bachelor's in 2 years, and was the best student in my major and got an award. All I did differently was read the books...

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.

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!

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.

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.

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?

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.

I don't know how long ago that was, but the hustle has long ago counter measured pirating or second handing the books by bundling the new books with a 1 time use code to make a profile into the online part of the course where you have to take tests. You could just buy the code on its own when I was going through this, but the code was like 80% the cost of a code and book.

They also do the thing where questions in the book will be scrambled from edition to edition, so using an older copy of a math book for example won't track because they've arbitrarily changed it just enough.

One of my CS professors was a top contributor to Wikipedia articles on graph algorithms and just told us to read those in lieu of a textbook

We had a prof who said he only used to book for the problems and they changed their order each edition. He would give us the previous years question numbers so we could buy the book used.

My friends and I ended up splitting a single copy of the book and texting each other the homework questions each week.

I had another prof who used an open source book and only charged us the price to print it. You could access it for free in PDF online, or even the source to generate the book in additional formats.

My maths prof wrote his own textbook, we had to buy it but it cost I think £40 new and covered everything we needed for a 3 year physics degree and you could easily find a used copy near campus. Still got my copy somewhere.

I think it was the only textbook I actually needed, all my lecturers wrote their own courses and extra reading tended to be from journals. Only other book I remember using regularly was the CRC Handbook and those were just scattered here and there around the department.

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

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

Oops didn't mean to! Sowwy I won't do it again. (Does it again)

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.

And it will never be illegal to do that because young people aren’t practically able to be politicians.

Wikipedia's entry on Z-Lib has its Tor address on it as well, so you can avoid that link too. Massive repository of textbooks and indeed books of any kind, all just available for free download. Makes me sick.

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

I had a professor get upset no one had the book on day 1. In her defense, she heavily used the book.

She couldn't understand that professors would make students a buy a book and never use it.

In another class a student had asked about the book a few days in, the professor's response was "we have a book?" He inherited the class last minute and didn't have time to look through all the materials.

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.