Open Book Exams
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My Favourite Textbooks
This may be the FIRST and ONLY blog post on the internet about … Favourite Textbooks! Textbooks are usually the bane of most students! LOL!
But I really enjoyed getting new textbooks, especially in Grade 12! For the first time, we had to venture to DOWNTOWN CALGARY to actually BUY AND OWN our textbooks! Previously, we were issued them, had to guard them throughout the semester and RETURN THEM at the end! But now, we could OWN THEM!
And what a great textbook for Grade 12 Math – ‘Modern Intermediate Algebra‘! And the trick was, to buy the book that had the ANSWERS IN THE BACK! Only a few of them DID have the answers, and I was lucky enough to get one of those! Quite an adventure for me at the time!
And if you haven’t figured it out by now, I still have these textbooks! Yup, weird, but … I collect books of all kinds! A future post will be on REALLY OLD TEXTBOOKS that I have!
The next 4 textbooks are all from when I attended the University of Calgary from 1975-1982. Yup, some gap years in there to travel, live and work in Banff and explore the world! Might sneak an old photo of me in there somewhere too! LOL!
And how boring – a book on .. evaluating student progress? And even more boring, THAT IS THE TITLE TOO – ‘Evaluating Student Progress’!
And here I thought I would finally find out all the tricks and secrets of passing exams … and for the most part, I did pick up some ideas, especially when my first job out of university was evaluating exams, something called Item Analysis! And it was fun! Basically, how does an exam actually MEASURE student knowledge! Yeah, boring, but at the time, I actually USED this textbook in a real life setting!
And then one of my All Time Favourite themes – STATISTICS titled ‘Elements of Statistics‘! All kinds of neat formulas, algorithms and magical numbers with REAL WORLD RESULTS! And for the first time – a new studying technique! We were allowed to bring in a small 4×6 recipe card with ANYTHING WE WANT WRITTEN ON IT! This was such a great learning tool, that I used it in all my future classes! This forces you to actually STUDY and WRITE DOWN anything you were not as confident with, thus FORCING YOU TO RECOGNIZE AND STUDY YOUR WEAK POINTS! And it worked flawlessly! (At least, for me!)
This has been a bit of a ‘Top 10 Favourite Textbooks‘ countdown, except only a ‘Top 5‘ of them! My bad! And the next 2 textbooks bring back fond memories … and some not so fond …. of courses I took … sometimes twice and three times! How about them apples!
The BEST stat course EVER was on games of chance! And the Instructor LIVED HIS TEXTBOOK – ‘Basic Probability and Applications‘! When introducing himself, he said he might be late for some Monday morning classes as he would be enroute BACK FROM LAS VEGAS as he spent most weekends there …. GAMBLING! That is one amazing course intro! And he had his own TEXTBOOK TOO!
And my FAVOURITE TEXTBOOK OF ALL TIME is entitled ‘Excursions Into Mathematics‘ for the exceedingly misnamed course ‘Elementary Mathematics From and Advanced Viewpoint‘!!!
I took this course
… THREE TIMES …
before I passed it!
HARDEST.COURSE.EVER!
First time was with a friend and BOTH of us dropped it at Christmas as it was just too freaking hard! Second time was with my entire Education Year colleagues (9 of us!) and the 10th student in the class dropped it too – and he was in Honours Math at the time! Why did HE drop it? It was lowering his GPA!
Finally, passed the course in the summer, and all I did was Math for a solid month, literally every day, and got a B+ on it! YAY! The Instructor apologized to me .. I was literally ONE POINT AWAY FROM AN A- …. but I did not care. I HAD PASSED THE COURSE and could now graduate! WHEW!
Still, the textbook is awesome and even though I may have ONCE understood many classical concepts – it is like Quantum Physics, another favourite topic! I may not understand ANY of it … but it is as close to MAGIC as we will ever get in this crazy world/universe/multi-verse we live in! LOL!
Oh, and whenever there was a so-called ‘Open Book Exam‘ – they were the toughest exams in the history of education. You better KNOW YOUR STUFF, because if you spent the time looking for the answer in your ‘textbook’, you wasted so much time, you never finished the exam!
And as Steve Jobs liked to say … ‘… one more thing….’! 
My favourite math book was my ‘Mathematical Handbook‘ that had all kinds of formulas and simplified explanations of my favourite theorems and numbers! Served me well all through High School and University!
And one more …. one more thing! If I didn’t include a dictionary … ANY DICTIONARY in this list, then I would be remiss! I had ve saved many of my old dictionaries, including my pocket French/English dictionary, but I now tend to use dictionary.com and thesaurus.com on an almost daily basis! Big thumbs up to both of those sites!
Enjoy!
And not that many funny extra sites out there. I found most of them quite rude and in bad taste and many offensive. The only funny one is above. And just doodles on existing images in each book. Sometimes you win. Sometimes you lose. Sometimes … it rains! (Ask me about THAT quote, which literally comes out of … right field!)
And same with videos. Lots of bad taste ones out there, sand offensive ones, so today, only a compilation of Steve Jobs ‘One More Thing‘ below, to wax nostalgic today!
As long as there are words out there, there will be a site that Google finds!!
ENJOY!
TTFN!
Steve Jobs …..
History of One More Thing
And some Classic 
Some future posts will be about ‘
One of my favourite movie computers is WOPR (pronounced ‘WHOPPER’ in 
Secret computer designed to run scenarios of ‘games’ including ‘Global Thermonuclear Warfare’, except … they aren’t GAMES! His hardware – a modem and smarts to figure out what the backdoor password is! There are SO many memes about this movie and it is a hoot to watch. And the ending is actually very good! I highly recommend it!
absolutely amazing! Simply put, Obie is designed by an ancient race called Markovians … to manipulate the basic fabric of the universe. Imagine the monthly updates with Obie!
Another helpful computer is HOLMES IV (Mike), in Robert A. Heinlein’s ‘
And perhaps one of the most obscure computers comes from the first ever release by, of all people, George Lucas!
Arthur C. Clarke wrote
through the youth program at my church. We were in this huge room and a giant golden tube was behind glass. The ‘terminal’ was a teletype style typewriter and … we played 
Turns out, I used it in my student teaching practicum year and absolutely transfixed all the staff and students in the school I was a Student Teacher in! 
And my first ‘real’ job was working with the finest (and cheapest!) home computing power that has ever been used in the history of computing – COMMODORE COMPUTERS! My first classroom had 
echo …. I STILL HAVE IT AND IT STILL RUNS!
Fast Forward to working at home now! Thanks to Allison, Patrick, Adam and everyone AT CHD and I have a nice Dell Latitude laptop, my daughter’s old ‘
Full Disclosure
Yes, the first ever computer program that was used in The CALL Facility was a package of 4 languages – French, German, Italian and Russian! And the operating system used was called 
How can an operating system from the mid-1980’s, still be operating on MACINTOSH COMPUTERS, which did not even EXIT until 1984, and still be useful? It is technological MAGIC!
And this computer record will never be broken – McMaster French has been running for over 30 YEARS and has never once crashed! NEVER! And it has served its’ purpose well – Beginner French, simple text correction, grammar rules and instant feedback! ALL STATE OF THE ART back in the late 1980’s and early 1990’s!
I always enjoyed introducing this software to French students as they would be ‘Time Travelling’ to a distant past where Bill Gates was only a MILLIONAIRE, when the only mouse in the room was a biologic, and that they really needed to know where the arrow keys, CTRL, ATL, DEL and ESC keys were on an ACTUAL CLICKY KEYBOARD!
fonts, .exe, .bat and .cnf files and making sure our ‘network’ of computers were all working! AND THEY DID! Mary did back then, what Patrick does no! LOL!
Once you booted to DOS, you than would ‘run’ WINDOWS as an executable file! WOW! And then, the rest is history!
And I even own a book on puns, entitled ‘
At the point of hesitation, I repeat the request, ‘Count for me”. Now, about 50% of the time, I get the same response, but the fascinating part of this is that now, I can get a 
You now need to see the ‘new language’ (code) that I was introducing to my computer science class at the time.
The hardest premise to learn, is always the 
