Yay! (mostly)

Both my pre-semester meetings are done, and I've got all three of my syllabi to the point that I could print them out, but based on past experience I should go doublecheck the calendar and generally proofread first. The one I'm least sure of is Statistics, as we have a new book this year. There are some things that I really like about it. It doesn't take itself too seriously, has lots of examples, sidenotes and stories, and is chock-a-block full of illustrations. What I don't like are the chapter divisions. It makes much more sense to me to group related topics into one chapter, and then further subdivide. So in the old book, Chapter 10 was hypothesis testing for a singles sample. 10.1 - setting up hypotheses, 10.2 - testing proportions, and so on. Here, there are a ton of short chapters, grouped into units instead, but it makes it harder to see which chapters go together. Though the trend does seem to be towards increasing the number of chapters (from a sample of size 3 ;^) : In the first book I taught out of, we rarely made it past Chapter 7, and covered a good range of topics. In the next book, we generally made it to Chapter 10, occasionally to Chapter 11, covering about the same range of topics. In this new book, we're going to have to make it to Chapter 23 (skipping a few) to cover the same range of topics. *sighs*

I'm both looking forward to and not looking forward to the new semester. On the one hand, having a set time to have to get out the door tends to be a good thing for me. On the other... *shrugs*