Word: textbooks
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Textbook publishers don't encourage college professors to teach from the books they've written--they just expect that they will, the Houghton Mifflin man says. "Almost 95 per cent of the books we publish are written by professors and various other academics, and as a tool in their profession, we just assume they'll use it. To use someone else's would seem odd." But Harvard professors are not known for their homogeneity nor their conventionality: there are some who characteristically veer from the norm to write a textbook they adamantly refuse to teach from. Stanley Cavell, chairman...
Regardless of the manner in which they use them, professors naturally enough take their own works seriously, and therefore tend to use them. Bernard Kummel, professor of Geology, who lists his "History of the Earth," the country's leading textbook on physical geology as the primary source for his students in Geology 18, says, "I'm a missionary--I had a goal. I'm trying to convert the world to my religion through the book. So if they read it, God bless 'em. If they don't, what the hell...
Perhaps the problem of whether professors should or shouldn't teach from works they've written has no "right" answer. Some mathematicians use no text--they just go to a board and invent a textbook on the spot. In some uncommon cases, professors feel it is immoral to ask their own students to buy their books. "Then what happens to the textbook that becomes a classic?" Cavell asks rhetorically. "Kant and Hegel would have used their own. Of course, they didn't have any competitors...
...Alert. Teachers lead the inmates, one by one, through specific textbook cases: "You are not married but are the mother of a child fathered by ..."; "You arrive at National Airport from New York, and a policeman finds a pound of marijuana by searching your suitcase ..." The courses wind up with mock trials, in which the convict-students prosecute and defend cases before actual judges from the D.C. bench. Says Garland Poynter, head of education at the District of Columbia Jail: "Once you learn the system, you learn to respect it. It decreases frustration." Thanks to street law's practical...
...years Vice President of the European Economic Commission, Barre was notable in the world of Gaullist grandeur for living in a small, book-lined apartment, driving an old Citroën and carrying his own luggage. A portly ex-professor, Barre is highly regarded in academic circles for his textbook entitled Economic Politique. Giscard called him "the best economist in France and therefore the best man to fight the inflation." Barre is expected to initiate spartan economic measures, like higher interest rates and guidelines limiting price and wage increases, in an effort to restore monetary stability. To that...