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 < back to authors list Paul Tippens:
Tippens, a teacher more than 30 years, has been at Southern Polytechnic State University since 1976. He wanted to be a teacher from the beginning. "Whenever I tell someone that I'm a physics professor, I can tell if they had a bad experience with it," he said. "I had so many poor teachers in that area -- as had many other people who may have liked physics. I want students to realize it's not so fearsome, that if they take the time, they can learn the principles." Tippens got his chance to expand his teaching philosophy on a large scale in 1971, when a publisher's rep came to him and asked him to write a book. Tippens said he had never thought about doing a book and didn't know if he could write a good one. The rep told him to show him what a good physics book is. Tippens went through his collection of physics books and realized most of them were not well written. The rep said, "What's one more lousy physics book? One other one's not gonna cause any trouble." Tippens wrote Physics "for the student." How was that different? "Most authors presented physics in a way that was out of reach for a lot of students," Tippens said. "Their books seemed written more to impress physics folks than to teach." His goal, in contrast, was to produce a readable, friendly text that gave students a solid foundation in physics without discouraging those who are easily intimidated by the subject. The emphasis was on applications and problem-solving. Tippens' approach was student tested in his own classroom. "The result was a very successful introductory physics textbook -- one written at a low reading level and yet still technically sound," he said. The book now is in its fourth edition and has been issued in Spanish, French and Japanese. Tippens also wrote a one-semester, introductory text Basic Technical Physics, in its second edition in 1989. It has also been published in Spanish. When he started teaching college physics, he and other instructors became frustrated with having to teach things that should have been covered in high school. Tippens came up with an idea to create computer tutorials that would interact with students, filling in the gaps for those who didn't get the information in high school. His four-volume series, Tutorials in Physics, published by McGraw-Hill, was well received by students, but eventually it was marketed primarily as an ancillary. "It wasn't what I intended," Tippens said. So he convinced McGraw to return the rights to him. He's now trying to market them through a different source. "So many tutorials are written by people who know physics but not computers, or by computer wizards who don't know physics," Tippens said. "I know both and was able to be programmer, developer and tester of my own software. McGraw took their 90 percent and gave me my 10. Once I got into TAA I saw that wasn't a fair arrangement. That's when I asked for my rights back." Tippens, a member of Text and Academic Authors since 1990, was elected to the TAA Council in 1997. He said being a member of TAA has allowed him to meet people who have a common interest with authoring problems. "I now have people I know I can call with authoring questions," he said. He particularly likes the way TAA is working to help other authors. "If I had known then what I know now, I would have done things differently," he said. "No one out there has represented authors like TAA." Tippens said some of the great things TAA can do for authors is let them know the going rate for royalties, make their contracts make sense, teach them about bargaining and the rights they have dealing with publishers. He gives this advice to authors just starting out:
When you finally go to a publisher, he said, have four to five chapters written and a proposal for the rest of the book. "Contact one publisher at a time until you can get one to listen to you," he said. "Although it's more difficult to break in now, it's still much easier to get non-fiction published than fiction." Tippens said he never writes on a schedule and never early in the morning. "I'm a night owl," he said. "I hate to wake up early in the morning." He said if he tried to make a schedule, it wouldn't work. "I'm a streak type of person and will obsess with getting through. When I get into a groove I may write until 3 or 4 in the morning." Tippens is active in local and state organizations concerned with the improvement of educational materials at all levels. He has also served as chairman of a state committee on articulation between high school and colleges in Georgia. Also, he is a member of the Science Academy for the Northwest Georgia P-16 Council, an organization of education, business and community leaders who are studying the pathways for success from pre-kindergarten through four years of college. Tippens' hobbies include tennis, surfing the net, computers, travel and teaching. "I really enjoy teaching," he said. "It's nice to consider my profession as a hobby." He and his wife Joyce Scott Tippens have three children and four grandchildren. The oldest, Scott, teaches with him at Southern Polytech. Son Mark is an electrical engineer with IBM. The youngest, Blake, is a high school English teacher and technical coordinator in Omaha, Nebraska. — reported by Kim Pawlak, 2000 |
