Thursday, August 29, 2013

If It's Thursday, I Must Be Tingling.

60 of my students cannot find
the necessary text.

My colleagues have similar
stories for our large intro classes.

It shouldn't be a 
scavenger hunt.

Somewhere there's a number,
the number of spaces in our sections.

Somewhere a gleaming machine
contains this number. It's not a secret.

They make the book still, right?
Somewhere there are boxes of them.

Just not here.


5 comments:

  1. I have found that our SLAC's bookstore explicitly orders only about half the books required for any given section, since in their experience that's the fraction of students who actually buy a copy from them.

    Seriously. They think the answer to having not enough sales is to reduce their inventory.

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  2. Indeed! I told a student yesterday, when finding out the store had under-ordered once again, that most of the readings in the text I use can be found on the web. It's not what I wanted to say, but I'm sick of fighting the book store.

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  3. A similar downward spiral is in place at my institution. This is, of course, a major argument for affordable e-textbooks (and good annotation software).

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  4. I streaked by the bookstore when I was an undergrad, wearing shoes and socks. I think those bookstore people look out their bookstore windows at the world and envy the rest of us having fun (or, at least, being interestingly miserable).

    ReplyDelete

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