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  • Letter to Textbook Writer

    (I have grown. And I have changed. Whereas previously I might have engaged in an angry tirade about textbooks, now I instead try to do something about it. So when I came across a slight glitch in a textbook I was studying from, I sat down, thought about it, and wrote a letter about it [...]

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  • Letter to Textbook Writer by Rolando Alvares, June 15, 2008 in Textbooks

  • (I have grown. And I have changed. Whereas previously I might have engaged in an angry tirade about textbooks, now I instead try to do something about it. So when I came across a slight glitch in a textbook I was studying from, I sat down, thought about it, and wrote a letter about it[...]

  • More Textbook Humour by Rolando Alvares, May 23, 2006 in Textbooks

  • You know, as much as I hate studying (and ‘hate’ is an understatement of gargantuan proportions), I do try to get down to it and get it done the best way that I can at the last possible minute. Honestly, I do try to make the sincerest efforts imaginable to mug up just enough that[...]

  • Moneymoneymoney Makes the World Go Round by Rolando Alvares, January 10, 2005 in General Humour

  • Please let me know if you find the following the least bit rational: To enter into our dreary college, that is to get admission, we poor chaps are forced to strain our purses and pay hefty sums of hard cash. And I’m not talking about the fees. What we had to pay was something quite different[...]

I have already written about this new magazine called The Alarmist, which was the only magazine to do an article on me and my social activism. Well, in the most recent issue was a highly informative interview with a textbook writer - and as Textbooks and their writers is such an engaging topic, that I have brought up repeatedly here, I thought I should share it with you:

***

A textbook writer is a fascinating individual. It can be said without much doubt that textbooks are among the most effective instruments of molding the unformed, clay-like mind of a young learner into something resembling modern art. This in turn points to the highly important role a writer of such textbooks plays, and sadly, it is a role that has gone unnoticed and unappreciated for far too long.

To put an end to this, The Alarmist contacted one such writer - a topmost one, in fact - who readily agreed to an interview. A middle-aged balding pot-bellied man, he was very open and expressive in his answers, which proved to be of a highly intriguing and ground-breaking nature. The interview follows:

First of all, we must express our gratitude towards you and all other textbook writers out there. It is your textbooks alone that help gather the various strands of a learner’s mind and bunch them up into one confused mess.

Why, thank you. Our policy is to motivate the learners by confusing them as much as possible. This is easily done through throwing a vast quantity of unrelated facts at them, so that what sticks, if anything at all, is essentially un-relatable to anything else in their lives. This forces them to use their minds to un-confuse themselves - this of course results in just the kind of intellect we need - intellect that is constantly finding confusion where none exists and ignoring other more important matters, which goes a long way in helping us do our jobs with almost no distractions.

But has this been successful?

By all means, it has! See the kind of people we have around us. Switch on your TV and see the overexcited and shouty newscaster covering a pointless story that that has nothing to do with anyone. And that’s not all that these textbooks have given us. Of late, when switching on the same news channels, you will find two or more newsreaders sitting there, when it is obvious that only one is needed for the job. So while one reads the news, the other looks grimly at us like a nitwit. So this ‘nitwit-ization’ of new readers is also another valuable contribution of textbooks, as their brains are so overloaded with confusion, they cannot read more than two lines at a time without frothing at the mouth. But there has been one ill-effect, it must be admitted. Some students of these textbooks get so confused that they drop out of college altogether and take to prostitution, alcoholism and drugs. The first two we don’t really mind, but something must be done about the drug addicts.

Is there a plan yet?

Of course. We are dedicated textbook writers, we plan out solutions for problems even before they prove to be a problem. This leads to a misconception that we don’t do anything about other problems that do somehow crop up - we’re just busy preventing future problems, you see? With this particular problem, we concocted the blazingly good idea of hiring these drug addicts to provide our illustrations. ‘A bird which would have been killed by a stone in a bush has been instead trained in karate to kill two birds with its bare hands’, as they say.

Yes, who hasn’t heard that old chestnut before. But lets move on: So, what are the results of this blazingly good idea?

Oh, there are many. But to show you, I just brought two. Here’s the first:

As you can see, this is very good indeed for a drug addict. As seen in the illustration, these illustrators seem to think that cats go around performing acts of vigilante justice on poor farmers who depend on buckets of milk for their sustenance. Further, the cats actually talk to the farmer, but being mere cats, they have been unable to master punctuation. As if that wasn’t good enough, the pot-smoking illustrator is so wrapped up in his own created conundrum of whether cats can actually think of such things, he sits and wonders for hours about it, even doing a self-portrait in the process, illustrating how confused his curly haired head is. Which, it must be admitted, is a very good point to bring up in a textbook.

Yes, it is rather good. What else have these pot smokers come up with?

Ah, here’s another:

The illustration, I believe, says it all.

Yes, it does. But just for fun, explain to us what it says.

Well, it is basically just an extension of the first illustration I showed you. See, these illustrators are so darn good, that one illustrator wants to illustrate further on another illustrator’s illustration. While the former brought forth the point about vengeful cats who talk, this one goes this other way and illustrates a bird actually talking to the illustrator. Therefore, even as the illustrator is thinking about whether traditionally non-speaking things can talk, a bird flies in and actually talks to him directly! But ironically, as he is busy thinking, he does not notice that this bird is talking to him.

Yes. It is really quite illustrative - perhaps the most clearly illustrated idea I have come across. So what do you hope to achieve with this plan?

The goal is simple: firstly, to reduce our own workload. As a picture tells a thousand words, so merely five illustrations in one textbook means we need to write 5,000 words less than we would normally write! Secondly, when a learner comes to know that a drug addict is responsible for the illustrations, they obviously wouldn’t turn to drugs themselves if they decide to drop out of college. In fact, all of them would now enter into only alcoholism and prostitution. Which is a good thing.

Very well. So what next for the textbook writer? I mean, since your workload has been reduced greatly due to the illustrations, does this mean that you and our team are working in other areas?

Well…I can’t really say much about that. But I will say this: a man, unjustly imprisoned by the white man, is about to be freed by us. That’s all I can say. Thank you.

***

So there you have it. But also in the magazine, was another article which grabbed my attention, and since I’m on the subject already, I thought I should follow the wise old saying about the karate-trained bird mentioned in the interview above and share this other article with you as well:

Daring Prison Break-out in SA
In an incredible feat, a group of scholarly-looking men managed to break into a prison here and escape with one of its inmates. Sources say that the authorities are ‘completely befuddled’ by the incident, and most befuddling is the fact that the people who performed the daring escape repeatedly referred to the inmate as ‘Mr. Mandela’. Investigations are on to find out just how such an act could take place, and sources close to the investigation state that they are just beginning to uncover a sordid web of alcoholism and prostitution. Authorities are however quite certain that the lives of the members of the escape team are in grave danger, having just freed a violent and dangerous criminal who lacked even the slightest desire to reform himself.

THE END. I hope you enjoyed that. If you'd like to read more, there's plenty available in the archives