Learning as a process of grieving

So I've been investigating philosophical discussions of grief, in preparation for teaching a course on death and dying this fall. And I came across this little tidbit from the Wikipedia entry on the Kubler-Ross model of grief:

Studies of epistemology, the process of learning, suggest that the patterns of grief are one way of describing the basic patterns of integrating new information that conflicts with previous beliefs. 

"All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident." said Arthur Schopenhauer of the learning process, which corresponds to the five stages of grief with denial being ridicule, opposition being anger and bargaining, and acceptance being depression and acceptance.

Wow. Could it be that one reason teaching is such an incredibly difficult profession is that, in inviting students to learn, we are inviting them into a process that, if successful, will catalyze grief? And perhaps students know this, and so they resist the seemingly violent intrusion upon their psychological security that true education involves?

The Seven Ages of Teaching

You all remember the speech from As You Like It — "all the world's a stage ...And one man in his time plays many parts/His acts being seven ages"?


Paula Marantz Cohen has identified the corresponding Seven Ages of Teaching (below the fold). Which age are you? (I fear I have an age-identity disorder, finding elements of myself in the second, third, fourth, and fifth ages)

"A normal student nowadays"?

In an evenhanded review of a number of recent books on higher education, including Academically Adrift, Anthony Grafton identifies a variety of factors that converge to create the current worrisome state of higher ed in the U.S.

This paragraph hit me hard, as a sad truth about the situation of many students:

Imagine what it’s like to be a normal student nowadays. You did well—even very well—in high school. But you arrive at university with little experience in research and writing and little sense of what your classes have to do with your life plans. You start your first year deep in debt, with more in prospect. You work at Target or a fast-food outlet to pay for your living expenses. You live in a vast, shabby dorm or a huge, flimsy off-campus apartment complex, where your single with bath provides both privacy and isolation. And you see professors from a great distance, in space as well as culture: from the back of a vast dark auditorium, full of your peers checking Facebook on their laptops. It’s no wonder, in these circumstances, that many students never really internalize the new demands and standards of university work. Instead they drift from course to course, looking for entertainment and easy grades. Nor is it surprising that many aren’t ready when trouble comes.

10-minute puzzle podcasts

Federico Luzzi and Aidan McGlynn at the Northern Institute of Philosophy have created a series of 10-minute podcasts on basic philosophical issues. The orientation is contemporary and analytic. I listened to the podcast on the trolley problem and found it clear and compelling. This might be a nice supplementary resource for intro to philosophy courses. They might also help students who have trouble identifying term paper topics. Definitely worth checking out!

Pedagogical New Year's resolutions?

So it's twenty eleven. Or two thousand eleven. 2011. Whatever.

A good moment to think about teaching-related New Year's resolutions (I asked a few years back. Do your remember yours?)

So for next time, read this fascinating article by Dr. Me!

ISW reader Gwen Bradford wrote me about something that was discussed, albeit indirectly, in the third ever post at ISW, (now over two years ago, if you can believe it!). Here's Gwen:

I'm a graduate student, and I'm teaching an undergraduate seminar on a particular issue in value theory - the value of achievements, to be specific. There isn't a great deal of literature that deals directly with the issues. In fact, this is precisely why it's the subject of my dissertation! I wasn't planning on assigning anything of my own for the class to read and discuss, but the directions that our discussions have been taking suggest that it would be interesting and useful for the students to read.

Here's the issue. I would really prefer it if the student didn't know that I am the author. I would like them to feel totally uninhibited and free to criticize my arguments, and I think they will definitely be hampered in their critical engagement if they know they're reading something of mine. The paper that I want to assign (a chapter of my dissertation), isn't yet published anywhere. Would it be wrong if I assign the reading, but under a pseudonym?

I'd like to hear everyone's thoughts about this, but here a few ideas to get things started: Gwen's clearly worried that students will be less critically engaged with her own work than they would with the work of others — hence, her suggestion of assigning it under a pseudonym. A small wrinkle is that pseudonymity probably wouldn't work for published work. But putting that aside, on the few occasions when I've assigned my own research, I didn't use a pseudonym because, in my estimation, students are more likely to mirror you, i.e., the engagement you manifest in your own research will engage them. I wrote this in the comments to the post I mention earlier:

An analogy: I often think of teaching as being a tour guide in an exotic city. I help the students navigate the intellectual terrain, pointing out the landmarks, explaining why they're landmarks, etc. This has the advantage (if you're a good guide) that students get a fair and reasonably thorough picture of the city. On the other hand, it conceals the fact that as a researcher, you're contributing to this growing city and that you care enough about the city to want to contribute to it. So what effects would students knowing the latter have on their conception of the instructor? Will they mirror the instructor by becoming less dispassionate and more engaged (since your research indicates you care, they might care more also) -- or are those gains offset by students' perceiving the instructor as less objective, as an interested party with an agenda?

Over time, I've begun to think that whatever the downside, it's outweighed by showing students that you're not just teaching material for the sake of teaching it — that you (and they!) are parties to a conversation, not just observers of it. But Gwen's concerns still strike me as entirely legitimate.

Sayonara to office hours?

I was surprised by this discussion of office hours over at Reassigned Time. Like I suspect is the case for most of you, I'm required to hold office hours in proportion to the number of classes I'm teaching (about four hours per week usually). I'm also supposed to hold them on at least two different days, etc. But I don't get a lot of visitors during those hours. Part of the reason, I suspect, is that my students (like me) don't want to be at the university nights and weekends and have other courses or responsibilities that conflict with daytime office hours. (I've also tried bribing them with cookies, provocative philosophical discussion, liquor, etc., to no avail!) But the discussion at RT suggests that in this e-age, scheduled face-to-faces with students may be superfluous. I always add "and by appointment" to my line about office hours on my syllabus, and some students do arrange for appointments to discuss specific concerns. But more often, I feel like the Maytag repairman, waiting forlorn for someone to patronize my philosophy shop.

So: How do you all feel about office hours? Useful, essential, indispensable -- or an inconvenient relic? Does anyone out there do anything unusual with office hours? Shall we write the obituary on office hours?

Should We Force The Truth On Others? Choosing to be Neo or Socrates

I am presently working on a paper that deals with the problem stated in the title of this post. I am presenting a brief outline of the main argument below and would welcome any comments. In so far as I do not know how to post the entire draft, if you would like to read it, please let me know and i will email it to you. You can contact me at alexajoh@gvsu.edu

Once while watching the Matrix with my son Micah, he commented that he thought that Neo would be acting unethically if he exposed the reality of the Matrix to others without their consent. Even though doing so would expose the illusion that they actually live in a world as it appears to them and act as they think they act, he thought that people have a right to choose to remain ignorant and that Neo’s proposed actions would violate this right. When I teach an intro to philosophy course I use the Matrix in discussing the nature of knowing and skepticism. I ask my students to write a short paper on which pill (the red for knowledge or the blue to remain ignorant) they would take and to explain their reasoning behind their decision. Inevitability about 1/3 of the students will choose the blue pill to remain ignorant. The reason most often given to justify their position is that they are happy with their worldview and lives and they do not want to consider the possibility that they may not be correct regarding the truth status of their beliefs about the way the world is and what constitutes happiness. For them, remaining ignorant of possible viable alternatives is the preferable alternative. They simply do not want to investigate their core beliefs and have them challenged. This is an understandable position in that core beliefs are these that form the foundation upon which we build our conceptual frameworks. It can be very difficult for us to put these beliefs under critical scrutiny. If a foundational core belief turns out to be false, then a major portion of our framework crumbles and we may be left “dazed and confused” without a concrete reference point to regain our intellectual bearing so that we can continue to knowingly and freely move forward in our lives.


According to Hope May, the Socratic method is designed to expose two types of ignorance; definitional ignorance where we do not end up with an acceptable definition for what is being investigated and inconsistency ignorance where the definition that we are investigating leads us to conclusions that are inconsistent, or contradictory, to what was originally stated. Consequently, there is an important normative, as well as pedagogical question that confronts us as educators; “should we force our students to accept what we believe to be true if doing so could radically change the way they view and live their lives?” Neo thinks that it is permissible to force the truth on others and is going to proceed to expose the existence of the Matrix to others without their consent. There is an alternative approach exemplified by Socrates. While agreeing that we should expose ignorance, he would act differently; he would simply offer us the opportunity to uncover the truth for ourselves through critical reflective dialogue around an important issue, but would not force us to learn the truth regarding that issue without our first giving our consent to follow where the argument takes us. Socrates would allow people to enter into, or remain in, the dialogue as they choose. Assuming that it is part of our duty as philosophers to expose ignorance (and I think that it is), if we, as educators, decide to follow the example of Neo, do we violate any ethical parameters that should define the pedagogical role that the teachers of philosophy should play in exposing ignorance?

It is interesting to note that Neo would fail to give others the very choice that Morpheus, the true Socratic figure in the Matrix, gave him when he was first confronted with the opportunity to discover the truth concerning the nature of our existence. Socrates’ approach represents a more passive and nuanced approach then Neo’s in exposing ignorance because it rests on the belief that others do not have to participate in the dialogue, or can even leave the dialogical process, if they so choose. In fact, for Neo there is no dialogue, there is simply exposure to the truth, no quarter given to those to whom he would force the truth upon. However, there is an important moral constraint in the way the method functions when utilized by Socrates: it is not forced upon anyone. Those engaged in the dialogical process must consent to be part of that process even if they are bystanders. Socrates never gives an argument for not forcing people to learn the truth in undertaking his investigations, he simply incorporates it into the way he conducts his investigations. Although he is committed to exposing ignorance and discovering the truth about important issues, he never forces anyone into a discussion, or into remaining in a discussion. At any point in the dialogue we, like Euthyphro, are free to end the discussion and walk away. In fact, we are free not to enter into a dialogue. Even if we make a statement that was to catch the interest of a Socratic-like investigator, we do not have to answer the question posed by that person. Socrates believes that we will suffer a great harm by not investigating the truth of important issues, namely we will never arrive at a firm foundation for making the correct decisions on how to live our lives so that we can find true happiness, but we are free not to know and to be harmed by not knowing.

Neo, on the other hand, is like a freedom fighter. He knows that we are living in slavery and that slavery is an undesirable state of existence if people are to be self- determining moral agents. Neo assumes that there is a contradiction between being self-determining and choosing to become a slave. He must believe that no self-determining agent would knowingly and freely choose to become, or remain a slave. If people choose to become slaves, or to remain ignorant if the opportunity for knowledge is presented to them, they must be somehow being compelled or tricked into making this wrong life altering decision. How can we be morally responsible for our lives if we do not control them? How can we control our lives if we are in a dream-state like existence with our experiences simply being the result of a computerized program designed to deceive us into believing something to be true which is in fact false?

Socrates seems to be arguing that we must know in order to be free, while Neo is arguing that we must be free in order to know. This might be the real issue, the right to be free versus the right not to know. Neo sees the evil of the Matrix, not as a limitation on what we can know, but on our freedom to choose and to act as self-determining moral agents based on those choices. Socrates has a different agenda then Neo; he wants to expose ignorance to arrive at knowledge while Neo wants to expose ignorance to arrive at freedom.

The question we have been discussing is not an unimportant one. To bring in an example that you might face (in one way or another) in real life: suppose that you are a physician and that you have a patient who is suffering from an incurable terminal illness that will kill him in one year. The patient doesn’t know that he has this illness; but you know that the patient’s knowing that he has this illness will not help him recover (nothing will) and will bring him a great deal of misery for the remaining year of this life. Are you obligated to tell the patient? What if the patient is also your friend?

¬ (Ain't no cure for the sumertime blues)

It's midsummer, which for many people means we're out of the classroom until fall. But I thought it might be worthwhile to solicit suggestions about how to approach summer teaching, particularly the kind with the accelerated calendar where a quarter or a semester's worth of material is taught in about a month's time. I for one have had mixed experiences teaching accelerated summer courses. Some issues to think about:

• How does the student population change in summer and how should one's teaching change accordingly?
• Do you need to change your syllabus significantly to teach a summer version of a course?
• What other changes in course design (assignments, etc.) are prudent in summer courses?
• Are there any courses that work especially well in the summer? Any that work especially badly?
• Any tips about time management or (given the intense pace of summer courses) stress management?

Anybody with experience or ideas about this, please chime in.

Happy birthday to ISW!

A heads up to all readers: In Socrates' Wake turns one year old this week!

As many of you doubtless know, starting a blog is easy; maintaining it — much the less developing it into a rich and informative forum — is much harder. So I'd like to thank all of my fellow contributors and all of those who've visited and commented here. I think we did something good !

By any measure, ISW has been a spectacular success. Some numbers to chew over:

• ISW has had over 2,500 unique visitors since last June.
• Our visitors have come from 82 countries and 49 of the 50 United States. (What's goin' on, South Dakota philosophers?)
• There are over 220 readers subscribing to our e-mail or RSS feeds.
• We've published 153 posts and received about 680 comments overall.
• We've achieved a Technorati blog rating right around #250,000 (I know that doesn't sound impressive, but it actually is —Technorati ranks at least 112 million blogs, putting ISW in the top 1/4 of 1% of all blogs) and an 'authority' of 27 (that's the number of blogs that link to ISW).
  

Obviously, I hope future years are as bright as this one.

I leave you with our top ten"greatest hits," our most popular (commented upon) posts from the past. The diversity of topics in these posts is a real tribute to the scope of ISW.

1. Evaluating teaching credentials
2. Business and ethics: A disconnect, part one
3. Does philosophy provide any answers?
4. Recommending students do what they shouldn't do
5. The reading brain
6. Should professors share or advocate their views in the classroom?
7. Once more into the breach: Getting students to read
8. To attend or not the attend, that is the question
9. Managing the classroom
10. Death to the syllabus?

The eros of teaching

William Deresiewicz' "Love on campus" attracted a good bit of discussion in the blogosphere when it was published last summer, but I've not posted about it because (a) I simply don't know how to react to it, and (b) I'm not sure what it tells us about the art of teaching. Deresiewicz offers a compelling cultural studies-like analysis of how popular culture depicts the (male) humanities professor: a useless, demasculinzed, lecherous parasite who enjoys a sense of potency and significance only when seducing his female students.

So far, so ugly. Of greater interest is Deresiewicz' proposal (familiar from Plato's Symposium) that teaching is a quasi-erotic activity that is poorly understood in our culture because we lack the conceptual resources to understand intimacy that is neither familial nor carnal. People should read the whole article, but a few of his choice words say it best:

The relationship between professors and students can indeed be intensely intimate, as our culture nervously suspects, but its intimacy, when it occurs, is an intimacy of the mind. I would even go so far as to say that in many cases it is an intimacy of the soul. And so the professor-student relationship, at its best, raises two problems for the American imagination: it begins in the intellect, that suspect faculty, and it involves a form of love that is neither erotic nor familial, the only two forms our culture understands. ...

...the great majority of professors understand that the art of teaching consists not only of arousing desire but of redirecting it toward its proper object, from the teacher to the thing taught. Teaching, Yeats said, is lighting a fire, not filling a bucket, and this is how it gets lit...

Can there be a culture less equipped than ours to receive these ideas? Sex is the god we worship most fervently; to deny that it is the greatest of pleasures is to commit cultural blasphemy. In any case, how can you have an eros of souls if you don’t have souls? Our inability to understand intimacy that is neither sexual nor familial is linked to the impoverishment of our spiritual vocabulary.

What attracts professors to students, then, is not their bodies but their souls. Young people are still curious about ideas, still believe in them — in their importance, their redemptive power. Socrates says in the Symposium that the hardest thing about being ignorant is that you’re content with yourself, but for many kids when they get to college, this is not yet true. They recognize themselves as incomplete, and they recognize, if only intuitively, that completion comes through eros. So they seek out professors with whom to have relationships, and we seek them out in turn. Teaching, finally, is about relationships. It is mentorship, not instruction. Socrates also says that the bond between teacher and student lasts a lifetime, even when the two are no longer together. And so it is. Student succeeds student, and I know that even the ones I’m closest to now will soon become names in my address book and then just distant memories. But the feelings we have for the teachers or students who have meant the most to us, like those we have for long-lost friends, never go away. They are part of us, and the briefest thought revives them, and we know that in some heaven we will all meet again.

I'm inclined to think that Deresiewciz (and Plato) are correct that great teaching has an erotic element, a kind of fevered grip on the mind. Is it possible to acknowledge this in our present culture without inviting sexual overtones? And it is appropriate or sensible to think that the creation of this quasi-erotic fervor should be what we aim at in the classroom?

Preventing Plagiarism

A perennial problem, no doubt, is plagiarism. My approach to this has been to point out my university's academic integrity policy, and, as we are required to do, include it on the syllabus. I also mention it the first day. I've wanted to avoid making a big deal of this issue, especially on the first day, but I'm now rethinking this.

I have had students simply turn in entire papers that they downloaded off of the internet. These cases are fairly easy to deal with. I have more trouble, however, when a student has a sentence or two lifted from a website that I find via a quick Google search, but the rest appears to be their own work. I also wonder how much our students understand about what constitutes plagiarism, as I watch my own children use the internet to look up words, historical figures, and so on for their assignments. I've decided to start using SafeAssignments, a service our university uses to detect plagiarism. However, a more important question in my mind is how do prevent this in the first place? I know some professors spend a day or two crafting a policy in cooperation with the class. Has anyone tried this, or something else that has been effective?

Leow and Liptoning

Rachel Leow's a historian, not a a philosopher, but she has a short post on teaching that I imagine will resonate with ISW readers anyway. Indeed, there are some challenges in the classroom that seem universal, regardless of the subject matter:

Things I should think about, though, for future teaching experiences: how to ask the right sorts of questions that make it easy for a student to elaborate a thought they’re in the process of having; how to encourage students to speak to one another; how to gently guide a wayward conversation back on track; how to tie threads of discussion into each other. How to speak in a way that helps students take notes; how to lace my opening comments with well-delineated points that can act as handles for the rest of the discussion that our thoughts can keep coming back to. How to give good ‘take-home’ messages: to think specifically about what I want the student to take away from the class. How not to talk too much.

Leow has also coined the verb 'to lipton,' in memory of the late philosopher of science Peter Lipton. It's good to have a name for this, since it's a skill that I wish I had in greater abundance and admire to no end:

To Lipton, I have told people, is to listen to the most garbled, incoherent, muddle-headed drivel that periodically emits from a student or otherwise member of an audience, and to restate it back at them in the most crystal clear terms, so that whatever point hidden in its murky depths is rescued & borne out of the swamps of obfuscation to receive enlightenment from high … seriously. Liptoning also involves clarifying complexity with enviable panache, but always without an iota of hubris — always that incredible modesty and respect for what one does not know — in short, to be an ideal teacher and thinker. What a gift!

A gift indeed.

List o' links

After too much procrastination, I finally put up a list of links to resources on teaching philosophy (scroll down, look right). I invite our readers to contact any ISW contributor if you know of a resource we might link to. Thanks!

Happy instructional new year

Seeing as we're approaching the New Year, I thought we could share classroom-related New Year's resolutions for 2008: something we'd like to be more conscientious about, improve upon, etc. I''ll go first:


Return student work in a more timely fashion. I'm usually good about this, getting student papers back to them within a week of the due date. But occasionally it takes longer than it should, and the longer it takes, the less students attend to (or can do much with) the feedback I provide. Sometimes this is just a matter of sheer workload, but (I admit) it's traceable to my dislike of grading. I actually enjoy reading people's work and providing comments, but the need to assign grades tends to kill my motivation for some reason. So let's see if I can be more on the ball in this regard next year.

What's your resolution?

Degrading on the curve

Since I believe that transparency and collaboration are values that promote student learning, I sometimes provide my students an opportunity at the beginning of the quarter to have a say about grading policies and standards. And I'm always amazed at how enthusiastic students are about curving grades. I'm opposed to curving for various reasons, but what really puzzles me is why students are enthusiastic about curves in the first place.


First off, I'm against the message about learning and achievement sent by a curve: that grades measure students against one another rather than against a defined set of benchmarks for learning. Life is competitive enough without my having to implicitly pit the students against one another. And notice that a curve gives students a rather perverse incentive not to work together on papers and assignments -- something that should be encouraged rather than penalized.

Second, I have an obligation to others that the grades I assign reflect student learning as measured against defined benchmarks. If I give a student an A in, say, a critical thinking course, a future employer has the right to infer that the student is likely to be a good critical thinker. (Yes, I realize that conclusion must be qualified in a hundred different ways, but bear with me.) But if I've used a curve that inference may not be warranted. That would be true if the student got an A by virtue of being in the top 10% of students in the course but the students in the course were extremely low achieving. In that case, the employer could infer that the student is a better critical thinker than most students, but I think the employer is entitled to make a judgment about the student's fitness for a position not just in a relative or comparative sense but in a more absolute sense — does the student have the critical thinking skills necessary for this position, period? And of course, if the employer doesn't know if I've used a curve or not, then any inferences become murkier. So given my obligations to employers, grad schools, etc., I should assign grades that don't carry a risk that students will be inadequate for the tasks or duties that employers, grad schools, etc. ask them to undertake. (And what holds for me, a mere philosopher, holds a fortiori for instructors in other disciplines: I'm pretty sure I don't want future structural engineers or surgeons graded on a curve!)

Third, I suspect that curves contribute to grade inflation, which I gather most of us think is problematic. I have no specific evidence of this, however, and would be interested to know if I'm wrong about that.

But finally, it's hard to understand the student mentality that favors curves. My guess is that students think curves are somehow less risky for their GPA's, but that's only partially true. Yes, curves ensure that some students get A's. But they also ensure that some students get F's and they cap the number of students who can get A's at all. So no matter how hard a student might work or how much she might learn, so long as a predetermined percentage of students works harder or learns more, she can't earn an A. Perhaps students accustomed to A's think that a curve will preserve their high GPA's even in the face of difficult courses. But I've found enthusiasm for curves at all levels of preparation and ability. Yet it's hard to see how curves are inherently better for students from the standpoint of their self-interest.

All this being said, I'm not averse to adjusting my grading standards on a given assignment, which could be called a mild form of curving. Sometimes an assignment proves more difficult than I anticipated, a result that might well be due to my own unrealistic expectations or my own failures as a teacher. Still, in my estimation, the benefits of curves pale next to their clear pedagogical and professional shortcomings.

Homer redux

A nice follow-up to our earlier discussion about the use of popular culture to teach philosophy: This article from the Chronicle of Higher Ed by Stephen Asma. Asma says very much what I was thinking about in connection with Mike's earlier post. Here are a couple of choice quotes to whet the appetite.

On how recent philosophical work on popular culture differs from 'cultural studies':

Unlike the cultural-studies explorations of popular culture, these new philosophy titles have little interest in decoding the semiotics of the pop narratives. They do not play in the arena of associations and connotations to suggest possible readings of sitcoms or tunes, some "preferential" and some "engaging the margins." In general, these pop-culture philosophers don't "negotiate boundaries" or "problematize discourses." They do something much more refreshing and radical: They give arguments. They use TV, music, and movies to begin a discussion, but very quickly they start to generate premises, draw conclusions, check inductions against evidence, venture deductions, consider counter-instances, and so on.

And on the limitations of pop culture in promoting philosophical understanding:

In the end, I suspect that, despite these excellent new efforts, philosophy will remain intractable and estranged from popular culture. It will remain so not because it is biased or willfully elite, but because it is in an extremely self-reflexive relationship with its own history, and it requires highly disciplined, systematic, abstract conceptualization, a skill that does not come easily to most people.
One can barely make a move within the oldest academic discipline without understanding its past. People who don't know its vast literature feel excluded from the import of any particular philosopher or problem. That kind of exclusion can be remedied by doing the requisite study — by catching up, so to speak, on a body of knowledge.

Political philosophy readings

Over at PEA Soup, Matt Zwolinski has a post requesting suggestions for readings in political philosophy. The response has been good, with both some classics and some 'non-standard' items as well. Check it out!

Tiny revolutions

I enjoyed the insights by Melissa Ballard in this article at Inside Higher Ed. Ballard reminds us that effective teaching rarely involves dramatic breakthroughs but is instead a matter of facilitating tiny changes in students' performance, habits, and outlook on life. An encouraging message, to my mind.

Textbooks and the almighty dollar

I'm sure that most of us have noticed that textbooks costs are out of control. Though my suspicion is that costs for philosophy textbooks have not risen as quickly as they have in other disciplines (the sciences, business), this is a pedagogical issue in philosophy as well: Students certainly won't do the reading if they don't have the reading material. So what can be done here?


I'm particularly sensitive to this issue because our institution is on a 10-week quarter system. Since most textbooks are produced with sufficient material for a 14-week semester, I tend to assign an even smaller proportion of the texts I ask students to buy than I would were I teaching on a semester calendar. In some cases, I can only reasonably assign one-quarter of the readings in a large anthology. Furthermore, because of the quarter system, students take half again as many courses as they would on a semester system, which means half again as many textbooks.

So I'd be curious to know if others are sensitive to this issue, and if so, what you do to try to keep students' costs in check. I'd also be interested in learning from those involved in the production or authoring of philosophy textbooks why costs are increasing and their views on the matter.