Revolution #61, September 17 2006
Follow-up and Follow-through on Campus
We received this letter from a reader, who is part of a team selling textbooks for Revolution Books at colleges:
We sold 43 copies of Bob Avakian’s memoir, From Ike to Mao and Beyond…, in three different classes yesterday. And there is a basis for more sales tomorrow in these same three classes. The classes are in the History of the Americas. After meeting several times over the summer with the professor, he rejected the book for this upcoming Fall but was strongly considering it for Spring. However, he stayed “open-minded” to hearing me out, and finally agreed to having it be an “option” for an Open Topic section of the class syllabus. With that, we seized the time. We followed up his supportive introduction of us in his classes with our own comments, and the overwhelming majority of the students ready to purchase books bought the Memoir. Reading the Memoir and writing an 8-12 page paper on it will be 35% of the students’ grade in class. It’s a real chance for us to learn what a cross-section of students thinks about the memoir, and to build off this to spread it further.
So, I wanted to pass this on. I’m still working with other professors with regards to the Memoir and its use as a text. But these are the first three classes we’ve got on the university level, although a high school teacher has ordered a classroom set of 40. I’m passing this on to the paper to give other people a sense of how persistent follow-up and follow-through can lead to good things, and to hopefully hear more from others on their experiences on campus.
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