10-25-2015, 04:22 PM
I've landed 74%. Thanks for your help, gingerbeefE!
For anyone else browsing this thread, here are the books I read and my thoughts about them.
Environmental Ethics: What Really Matters, What Really Works by Schmidtz. (2nd edition, Current edition as of this posting.) This was a good book and it gave me a lot of foundation on the theoretical and ethical proponents of environment. Very few of the essays were actually engaging, but I at least skimmed through every essay and took down the main element of each. Gave a really good foundation of justice, ecofeminism, and alternate views on environmentalism (eg, one essay proposed that nuclear energy is the greenest kind of energy because it takes up the least space and gives off the least amount of pollution).
Environment: The Science Behind the Stories by Withgott. I got the 3rd edition because it was cheap and I was running out of time. This was a good textbook, especially the first few and last few chapters. Some of the chapters on like, the biology of a cell, are kind of useless, so skim through those. It helped me understand things like what fossil fuels really are, and how the science part of the environment worked. The textbook was a little heavy-handed at times, but at the very least it gave me some really good examples to use in my essays. It's a big textbook. But thank God it has lots of graphs and pictures. If I were to re-do this with foresight, I would have rented the most recent version. The questions the TECEP asks you regarding international and American environmental policy are either the forerunners or the most recent laws. It said a lot about the Bush administration's effects on environmental policy--it would have been interesting to have a modern version talk about what the Obama administration had done in effect to the environment. Would have won me a few test questions, too.
Principles of Environmental Science: Inquiry and Applications by Cunningham. I got the 4th edition from my library. Skip it and get the book by Withgott instead. The one by Withgott goes over all of the same information with better depth and graphs that are easier to understand.
Other things I did was watch Erin Brockovich and a 1-hour documentary on Silent Spring I got from the library. I was glad I had watched these.
So the textbooks will mostly cover you if you're taking this TECEP. One thing that was annoying was that I was asked 4 different questions on religious stances toward the environment, which I didn't know, which were probably on the Saylor site. That's 4 points missed right there. But I had no issues with the essay questions. The essays were much longer than the Psych of Women essays, though. I read these books over about a 4-5 week period, focusing on this class only.
Good luck to anyone else taking it.
For anyone else browsing this thread, here are the books I read and my thoughts about them.
Environmental Ethics: What Really Matters, What Really Works by Schmidtz. (2nd edition, Current edition as of this posting.) This was a good book and it gave me a lot of foundation on the theoretical and ethical proponents of environment. Very few of the essays were actually engaging, but I at least skimmed through every essay and took down the main element of each. Gave a really good foundation of justice, ecofeminism, and alternate views on environmentalism (eg, one essay proposed that nuclear energy is the greenest kind of energy because it takes up the least space and gives off the least amount of pollution).
Environment: The Science Behind the Stories by Withgott. I got the 3rd edition because it was cheap and I was running out of time. This was a good textbook, especially the first few and last few chapters. Some of the chapters on like, the biology of a cell, are kind of useless, so skim through those. It helped me understand things like what fossil fuels really are, and how the science part of the environment worked. The textbook was a little heavy-handed at times, but at the very least it gave me some really good examples to use in my essays. It's a big textbook. But thank God it has lots of graphs and pictures. If I were to re-do this with foresight, I would have rented the most recent version. The questions the TECEP asks you regarding international and American environmental policy are either the forerunners or the most recent laws. It said a lot about the Bush administration's effects on environmental policy--it would have been interesting to have a modern version talk about what the Obama administration had done in effect to the environment. Would have won me a few test questions, too.
Principles of Environmental Science: Inquiry and Applications by Cunningham. I got the 4th edition from my library. Skip it and get the book by Withgott instead. The one by Withgott goes over all of the same information with better depth and graphs that are easier to understand.
Other things I did was watch Erin Brockovich and a 1-hour documentary on Silent Spring I got from the library. I was glad I had watched these.
So the textbooks will mostly cover you if you're taking this TECEP. One thing that was annoying was that I was asked 4 different questions on religious stances toward the environment, which I didn't know, which were probably on the Saylor site. That's 4 points missed right there. But I had no issues with the essay questions. The essays were much longer than the Psych of Women essays, though. I read these books over about a 4-5 week period, focusing on this class only.
Good luck to anyone else taking it.
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