Textbook Selection
Introduction
An Esssay by Herb Rotfeld
INTEREST CATEGORY: TEACHING AND LEARNING
POSTING TYPE: Dialog
Author: Herbert Jack Rotfeld
Semester is completed, and you’ve probably already selected your books for Summer and Fall. In my last syllabi, I had a maybe-unique statement on book selection, explaining the choice and reading assignments. It is pasted in below. And you can see at the end some supporting references showing that the statement is research-derived.
Required textbook: NONE! All options reviewed were a collection of logical inconsistencies, self-contradictions and authors’ vexing inability to delete descriptions of business practices that ended in the last century, while retaining elaboration on theories that have long-since been falsified in the research literature. Instead of providing content that could lead to substantive class discussions, textbooks were written to provide instructors with slides to read to the class and data banks for multiple choice tests.
Instead of a textbook, there will be a much less expensive book that isn’t filled with irrelevant distracting pictures, cartoons, graphs or meaningless charts. It just has a lot of words to be read, including some interesting comments. At worst, reading the book might provide a drug-free cure for student insomnia. There are also some essays and videos linked to this syllabus, plus email lecture supplements sent out after class meetings. Because too many students go through years of college education foolishly clinging to the mistaken idea that copying from the screen is the same as taking notes on a class meeting, students are required to buy packets that contain all on-screen verbiage, thereby enabling everyone to take what should be the important class notes that would help them remember and learn the lessons conveyed in the discussions.
All class slides will provide illustrations designed to assist in understanding course content: no slides from a book’s publisher-provided collections will be used; no slide will be read to the class; and no test will ask for a recitation of a list. If there are any big words in the syllabus or assigned readings that you don’t understand, it’s assumed you haven’t lost your phone.
See:
→ by Debra Jones Ringold in International Journal of Advertising.
→ , in Journal of Marketing