andor_drakon

Hi Dolph! You've been called one of the smartest people in Hollywood. I know you've finished a Masters at MIT (I think anyway) in chemical engineering (I'm a mathematics university instructor by the way). How has your deep education in a mathematical science affected your career as an actor. Have you been able to apply your skills to further your career in any way? I love your movies, especially Masters of the Universe!

Prof here. A big reason you see these huge and expensive texts adopted so readily is they come pretty much "plug-and-play" for the instructor. There are loads of resources/powerpoint slides/solution manuals/etc. that are available. Contract/adjuncts that usually teach the first year courses usually have zero time to prepare a new course (and are very often moving from university to university every year) and need this level of support in order to deliver an effective course, since they have no time to do anything from scratch or evaluate any of the cheaper books and augment them with other free resources online. They absolutely know these big books are a ripoff and would love to design their own, but they simply do not have the time to do so.

If you want better and cheaper books, hiring instructors for permanent positions is part of the solution

The thing is, calculus books could (and should) be vastly rewritten to incorporate the technological advances we've made in the last 10 or so years. Barring math and physics students that actually need the algebraic practice, we should be encouraging students to get derivatives and integrals via (say) WolframAlpha. We could spend way more time thinking critically about derivatives and integrals, modelling real-life situations with calculus, and other things that will come up in the non-academic real world, rather than becoming proficient in a skill any smartphone with a browser can now do way better than you.