Teaching

So last week commenced the first week of teaching for the new semester. I'm teaching my first large lecture class this semester - I have somewhere around 100 students in this class.

It in my policy to always make textbooks optional. I know there are a lot of people who would disagree with this policy. My feeling is that textbooks are ridiculously expensive and new versions come out every couple of years with nothing but some prettier graphs and a new cover. My classes often roughly follow the textbook but deviate at points substantially from the book that I select as the optional reading. I am very free with the fact that I always test from the lectures and not from the readings. Whatever is in the book that is not in my lectures will not be on my examinations, period. And I know that when I was an undergraduate, I started the semester with the best of intentions of reading all of the required reading only to slack off midway through the semester, opening the books for the last time to make sure there were no syllabi stuck in them before selling them back to the bookstore.

Therefore the text is optional.

Every single semester students questions me about this. "What do you mean, the textbook is optional?" they ask.

I mean exactly what it says - OPTIONAL.