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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 6th, 2023

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  • Different prof here, but a few thoughts:

    • academia is not as shiny as it sometimes seems, but it can be great. You can have a lot of freedom to do what you like, work when you like, how you like… do meaningful things. Not always, but the chance is there
    • it’s not to get rich. Selling expensive textbooks is rookie level exploitation compared to what people do in the industry, and most of the profit doesn’t even go to the prof

    The book to read for this is “the professor is in”. The author takes quite a cynical perspective about academia, but in many ways it’s true. Worth a read (and probably you can get it for cheap second hand)


  • This guy also found a pretty nice (similar) solution for this:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x3CY6RR4uns

    They basically wrote their own textbook through class assignments, students are co-authors, seems to work great in their case. At least that’s how he presents it.

    I’m still a bit unsure how to handle that in my own classes. There are not always suitable OERs or the ones you find come with licensing issues (CC-NC and afaik it’s not clear if you can use them because I do teach for the money).









  • IMHO English is easier to learn in the beginning, but gets ridiculous later on. Pronunciation is completely random and makes no sense, vocabulary as well. German pronunciation is probably harder (maybe? The English “th” is a challenge as well!), and articles are stupid. But: once you have a certain level it gets way easier. Pronunciation makes sense, vocabs make sense.

    For example, what’s a “plane” supposed to be? Flugzeug (“flying thing”) makes much more sense, even if it’s the first time you read it.