When I looked up my professor for next semester's "Senior Math Seminar" (the 1-hour class I have on Fridays), I saw that he had written a book about wavelets. And apparently that is going to be the topic for our class, and we'll be using his book.
I don't think I've had a textbook written by my actual professor since...well, Rice. And I only know I had one at Rice because of Jason's famous comment (on a course evaluation he happened to be present for) that the lectures were much better than the textbook (which had been written by the professor). And come to think of it, that may have been Sally's class, so I'm not sure I've ever had this particular experience.
2 comments:
I've had that experience several times. The most memorable was the class where the 'book' was the chapters handed out by the prof as he was writing them. As in, we were receiving 1st or 2nd draft chapters as our text, sometimes scant hours after he finished writing them. This was a theoretical statistics class at Rice. I realized then that it was a bad idea to use your own book, because that means the students only hear the material in one 'voice'. Having the lecture present a slightly different perspective on the material than the text helps understanding, and this is impossible when the text and lecture notes are the same document written by the same person.
Yep, that was probably my social psychology class. I had a similar experience to Robert, only it wasn't even trying to be a stat book but was just various papers (and I do not mean to credit that with the connotation of "articles" - I really mean just pages of notes) put together.
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