More on college textbooks

Anyone who goes to college or pays for someone who goes to college knows that the tuition is just the cover charge, just the amount that lets you get in the door to start the real payments. Fees, of course, are the major breath-taker, five or more times the tuition figure.
And then come the textbooks. In one class a couple of years ago, I paid $185 for one book. Typical charges are around $100 per book. They're like bridesmaid dresses, expensive items good for just that one occasion. Good study habits would have a student mark up a book with underlines and marginalia. If you hope to resell your book, though, you have a strong incentive to keep your highlighter holstered.
Textbook quality trades in a narrow range, from C+ up to a high B or very low A-. The publishingook  process has a fundamental contradictory set of goals - provide the most timely information, but don't revise the book too often. (The publishers aren't being charitable. It's expensive to order a new printing, even if they get to charge fresh prices.)
A good textbook will lead you through the material in way that fosters good retention. You'll get the key concepts as you need them, often as sidebar definitions. There will be example to illustrate complex points, study guides to help you review, and a good index to help you locate information quickly.

Even among good textbooks, there can be failings. For example, in my current real estate law text (Daniel F. Hinkel. Practical Real Estate Law. Delmar Pub, 2010.), there are 13 pages(!) of a mortgage amortization schedule. What's worse, one of the columns shows the per diem rate (the amount that would be charged per day if the loan was paid off before the end of a billing cycle) is .0000 for each line for all 13 pages. (The term per diem, it should be noted, doesn't appear in the glossary or index.)
Granted, 13 pages of stuff that's useless because it only shows the amount for one mortgage price at one interest rate for one term isn't a big deal in a 700+ page book. It does, though, make you wonder how much other filler material could be jettisoned in an effort to save the student a few bucks.
And, oh, by the way, there's a small section on subprime loans, the kind that have been in the news so much. Well, because laws and practices are changing so fast, here's what the book has to offer:

More information concerning subprime lending can be found on the Internet using a keyword search on a search engine such as http://www.google.com.

p 261

It might have been better to use Let Me Google That for You: http://lmgtfy.com/?q=subprime+lending

One alleged spring day

[This post originally appeared in One alleged spring day on the Telegram Towns site.]
We got out of town without a moment to spare. It was Personal Document Shredding Day in Holden and you can never be sure if things might get out of control.
The road through the woods, well-sheltered by a tent of evergreens, still had snow and ice. A lot. A couple of feet thick in places, mushy and rutted, but still snow and ice. Our Subaru, sure-footed, could still easily slide off the hard pack in the middle and into the culvert. We stopped the car mid-way and went on foot.
Between these mini-glaciers was soft ground where your feet settled in for a few inches. We turned the corner and walked into a patch of sunlight. There the road was firm and dry, making the walking easy. A hundred feet later and we're back into winter.
The ice-out contest on Queen Lake takes place at the north end of the lake. Two things happen there - the sun shines strong and the prevailing northwest winds generally push the ice toward our cove. So, while Queenie fell into the lake last week, we still have a half a foot of hard ice around our dock.
Things are in good order. Some branches came down, but nothing major and no damage.
We have a lot of work planned for this year. Knowing that but also knowing that the snow and ice and mud will hang on through the rest of the month puts us in an odd space. It's spring, but it's not. We have much to do, but not yet.
To every thing there is a season, right? If the seasons are muddled, then the things can be muddled, too, I guess. There's a lot of work to do, but not yet. Don't you just love those life lessons?
From the public beach, we look north and see plenty of ice remaining. A few ducks have come in to enjoy the patches of open water. They've got duck things to do. They're ready for spring as well.