Intuitive Textbooks

• difference in volume between a math book and blackboard writing by a professor makes no sense when textbooks pile stuff on and on and an instructor always presents it in a few simple steps.

• instruction without hands on experience gaining is useless in education

• PI school goals: engineering, science, and technology. No electives crap. Career education starts in high school. All non-essential courses are not important and are not graded/evaluated. Consolidate high school and associate's program. Career evaluation/tryouts/planning/advice. Real-life projects required. Young “education-science”-trained instructors instead of old obsolete chalk-on-blackboard professors. All math is applied and heavily computerized and textbook-lookup based. Students are required to read the chapter before coming to class so instructor never has to write notes on the whiteboard. Additional online resources lk remote courses or online textbooks required.

• troubled students should be the one to improve teaching material. Idiots have not realized yet that asking students themselves is the best way to improve the education system instead of paying people to do “scientific research”. Especially idiotic is the “trick question” phenomenon where the instructor seemingly does a good job inside the classroom working on basic problems, but when the test comes much more involved problems with much more steps or unclear approach methods are shown. The biggest problem is the fact that students are taught basic methods duplicated in the most textbooks instead of showing how to breakdown the problem into the methods they learn in the course, or how this graphically fits in with stuff they already learned or need to learn in the future. More critically, this can be used to both enforce a will in the student to tackle the later material, or graphically find out which of the past material/methods they might want to revisit. Another interesting phenomenon is the “dumb question”, or more specifically, the lack of courage of good/above average students to ask the obvious dumb question. One more problem for the future is the inability and lack of guidance of an instructor by students while ensuring anonymity and low volume of questions. However, submission of such questions/suggestions/steers electronically and overview of them by a dedicated assistant/student can be made to work.

Syndrome of a 1000-page book. It needs:

• To be read many times
• Keep a notebook
• Listen to a lecturer (which automatically limits the amount of material)
• Retell everything yourself
• Make a couple of TI-89 progs
• Practice!