{"id":548,"date":"2023-04-20T09:58:47","date_gmt":"2023-04-20T09:58:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/illuminated-text.com\/cb\/?p=548"},"modified":"2023-12-06T14:14:37","modified_gmt":"2023-12-06T14:14:37","slug":"is-this-book-an-ordinary-textbook","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/illuminated-text.com\/cb\/is-this-book-an-ordinary-textbook\/","title":{"rendered":"Is this book an ordinary textbook?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Well, is it?<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Yes and no.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Yes, because it&#8217;s got a lot of words that explain broadly the same topic areas as most other books.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">No, because it is engineered to help students learn. It does that in lots of ways.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h4 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Organizing principles<\/h4>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">When you write a textbook, it&#8217;s natural to feel that you have to tell your audience everything of any significance about a field. If it&#8217;s a big field that people have been working on for a long time, then that is a lot of things. And when you start pouring them all into the pages that get placed in front of newcomers to the field, they quickly start to find the flood of details washing over them in a big sea of facts and explanations, until they feel nearly washed away#up.<\/p>\n\n\n<div class=\"brxe-div footnote_anchor\"><div class=\"brxe-div footnote_shifter\">\n<pre class=\"wp-block-verse\">#down. That's what this author finds. Your mileage may vary.<\/pre>\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">This book takes a different approach. It divides every chapter into a few different &#8220;organizing principles&#8221;. The idea is not to tell you everything, but to give you a tool kit you can work with. If you can wrap your head around these key ideas, then you may not have read every detail there is to know, but you have a functional understanding that lets you operate &#8211; to look around you recognize where you are, and be able to break situations into pieces that you can work with. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">If that analogy doesn&#8217;t work for you, try this one: Most books try to act a bit like a busy tour guide, whisking you through the big new city you have come to, pointing left and right as you fly past landmarks and interesting winding alleyways, and places where things have happened. The premise is that if they point you at enough places then you know the city, <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">This book tries to calm things down, picking out a couple of vantage spots where you can get up high and see the lay of the land, and how it all fits together. Once you get oriented that way, you should see most of the same landmarks, but you should also be better equipped to explore on your own, as you might be better able to link places up in your head. And maybe when you go explore you will find your own vantage points that you like better, and your own ways of seeing the city. That&#8217;s wonderful, teachers love it when you do that. But everyone has to start somewhere.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Just to be clear, this book doesn&#8217;t pretend that its organizing principles are the One and Only True and Correct Way to understand these topics. This is an educational book, not a religious tome. The idea is only that this is a better way of learning.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">We think that is pretty worthwhile, and we hope you will agree.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h4 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Accordions<\/h4>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">What do you do when different readers want different things from the same book? Is practical marketing insight the payoff, or the boring stuff you have to wade through? Are interesting side insights delightful or dreadful?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">This book is a web page, so we don&#8217;t have to choose. We&#8217;ve got applied bits, interesting bits, and deeper understanding bits, and many of them are tucked away in little &#8216;accordions&#8217; that you can unfold if you want (unless you are in a class and your instructor has assigned them, in which case we&#8217;ll unfold them for you).<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">How do you know which is which? With the labels!<\/p>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-gallery has-nested-images columns-default is-cropped wp-block-gallery-1 is-layout-flex wp-block-gallery-is-layout-flex\">\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image size-full\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"164\" height=\"60\" data-id=\"804\" src=\"https:\/\/illuminated-text.com\/cb\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/2\/2023\/05\/Understand_c.png\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-804\"\/><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image size-full\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"164\" height=\"60\" data-id=\"802\" src=\"https:\/\/illuminated-text.com\/cb\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/2\/2023\/05\/Applied_s.png\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-802\"\/><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image size-full is-style-default\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"164\" height=\"60\" data-id=\"805\" src=\"https:\/\/illuminated-text.com\/cb\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/2\/2023\/05\/Interest_c.png\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-805\"\/><\/figure>\n<\/figure>\n\n\n\n<div class=\"wp-block-pb-accordion-item c-accordion__item js-accordion-item no-js interest\" data-initially-open=\"false\" data-click-to-close=\"true\" data-auto-close=\"true\" data-scroll=\"false\" data-scroll-offset=\"0\"><h5 id=\"at-5480\" class=\"c-accordion__title js-accordion-controller\" role=\"button\">Bet you can&#8217;t figure out how to open this<\/h5><div id=\"ac-5480\" class=\"c-accordion__content\">\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">you clever clogs, you!<\/p>\n<\/div><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>You might find the shape of this book to be not quite what you are used to. It&#8217;s to help you learn. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":549,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"chapter":[7],"exclude_from_index":[15],"class_list":["post-548","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","chapter-0-intro","exclude_from_index-exclude-from-index"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/illuminated-text.com\/cb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/548","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/illuminated-text.com\/cb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/illuminated-text.com\/cb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/illuminated-text.com\/cb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/illuminated-text.com\/cb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=548"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/illuminated-text.com\/cb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/548\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":942,"href":"https:\/\/illuminated-text.com\/cb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/548\/revisions\/942"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/illuminated-text.com\/cb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/549"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/illuminated-text.com\/cb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=548"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/illuminated-text.com\/cb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=548"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/illuminated-text.com\/cb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=548"},{"taxonomy":"chapter","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/illuminated-text.com\/cb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/chapter?post=548"},{"taxonomy":"exclude_from_index","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/illuminated-text.com\/cb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/exclude_from_index?post=548"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}