Comic Strips

You also had the work/life experience by then to be better able to filter out pertinent information from the material.

Most college textbooks are written in an overly complex manner and require some skill to extract and process the information from them.

So right out of highschool you could have read the textbooks but gotten very little out of them.

Some of that speaks to your maturity and drive too tho. You clearly had a desire to go back, a will to learn, and hopefully a purpose to use that degree you were earning.

At 18 years old, so many people just go to college because its the next step or their parents told them they were. They dont have the passion, maturity, or vision of how their life can be different with a degree

in Germany*

Here in the Netherlands we had some teacher who wrote a (small) book on “How to write professionally” and of course that book was mandatory.

My favorite was when I took Calc 2 and the teacher just told us if we knew someone who took the course in the last 7 years ask if you can get theirs. The new version just deleted 4 chapters and didn't even change the chapter numbers. It just went something like Chapter 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,13,14,15.. brand new price tag though.

This guy also found a pretty nice (similar) solution for this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x3CY6RR4uns

They basically wrote their own textbook through class assignments, students are co-authors, seems to work great in their case. At least that's how he presents it.

I'm still a bit unsure how to handle that in my own classes. There are not always suitable OERs or the ones you find come with licensing issues (CC-NC and afaik it's not clear if you can use them because I do teach for the money).

I had one professor who did this but spiralbound for our only course textbook but it was mostly just pulled from other sources and they only charged like $20 for it. It was great. Another one of my professors got in trouble with the on campus print shop because she was sending students there with her personal copy of the textbook to make photocopies of like 50 pages at a time lmao. One thing I appreciated about my school was that our professors seemed generally aware of crazy textbook prices and did what they could to help make it more manageable.

One of my professors wrote a major engineering textbook for his topic. It sucked. I value having a textbook written by someone other than the professor because that way I have a chance of encountering 2 ways to learn the concept.

Many people learn better if they both read something and have someone teach it to them in their own words, which is kind of the whole basis of a liberal arts education. Your learning mileage may vary.

Different prof here, but a few thoughts:

• academia is not as shiny as it sometimes seems, but it can be great. You can have a lot of freedom to do what you like, work when you like, how you like... do meaningful things. Not always, but the chance is there
• it's not to get rich. Selling expensive textbooks is rookie level exploitation compared to what people do in the industry, and most of the profit doesn't even go to the prof

The book to read for this is "the professor is in". The author takes quite a cynical perspective about academia, but in many ways it's true. Worth a read (and probably you can get it for cheap second hand)