Mike Abasov

I’ve seen them all: high quality textbooks, not-so-good ones, and super-crappy textbook parodies (hello, homeland). Almost every official textbook I’ve seen was a proud representation of bureaucracy, misery and dust of academia. Most of them felt like empty vessels waiting to be filled with tears and blood of students.

Well, you get the point. I hate textbooks. And I believe that they were sent from hell to make us suffer. Wanna know why? Read on!

Why Textbooks Are so Evil

They are very unbelievably extremely too long
Textbooks are long and wordily. Every paragraph throws a good hundred of words at you, which become blurry and scary from the first seconds of reading.

Human attention span is short, and textbooks seem to be laughing about this important fact. Today, as we become more and more distracted by Facebook, texts, hunger and sleepiness, textbook authors come up with new ways to make our existence that much more miserable.

Evil Highlighting
Yes, there are normal designers that would use side notes, as well as bold and colourful highlighting for important points and definitions.

But then there are others: the ones that highlight 3 words out of 1,000 and think that that’s enough. Or even worse, the ones that would highlight some stupid things like companies’ names used in examples, making you concentrate on irrelevant parts.

Boring content
A rare textbook would contain some exciting information or, for god’s sake, be fun to read. Sometimes, even your interest in the subject is not enough to get you through a chapter without yawning.

Intentionally complicated
I think that textbooks are intentionally made so tough to read. The authors know that students don’t have any choice, so they make sure students would read every word without skipping irrelevant crap.

But the truth is that you usually don’t need to read the whole thing to get it. Get it, you, demonic writers?

The issue is that the authors can’t get by without filling their texts with bullshit. It would seem like if they didn’t work enough. Therefore, they won’t get payed as much.

What Can You Do

Other sources
I love resources such as Academic Earth or iTunes U that you can use to learn additional information, as well as relive your lectures from a bit different angle. Even TED is full of interesting perspectives on your boring textbook content.

Besides, you can try buying other books. The ones that become bestsellers and are created as any other product—according to customers’ wants and needs.

These books are different from the mandatory textbooks in one critical aspect—they are not mandatory. People are not going to read and buy them, if they don’t have to, so the authors work hard on pleasing the buyers.

Apply
Nothing works better for me than applying textbook content to a real-life situation. For example, I had made learning financial accounting fun by using it to analyze my personal financial situation (wasn’t happy about it though :-).

Suffer through it
As much as you can hate a text, it’s not going anywhere for at least the next 4 months. So just read it and forget it.

Signs of The Crisis

The fact that students would run around to buy used textbooks and then resell them; the fact that teachers reteach us again and again the same basic concepts every course; the fact that students look for ways to get by without using a text, all these facts indicate, in my opinion, that the system is failing.

I believe that with the new e-book technologies and the demand for high-quality texts, the situation will change for the better soon enough. 

Until then, textbooks will always be remembered as my personal educational hell.

What do you think?