Textbooks and Work loads...

How much work should students expect in AP Biology?
I tell students to plan on 1 hour per night.

I find that the biggest challenge is to get students to open up the dang textbook and read it! To that end, I switched last year from Campbell & Reece to Raven & Johnson. Yes, I know Campbell is commonly thought of as industry standard, but it does my students no good if they can't/won't read it. Campbell is a great reference manual, but it accentuates vocabulary a bit to much for my tastes and is written at a very high reading level and in a rather dense, dry academic style. My constituency is primarily from blue-collar, solid middle class families and they just found Campbell unapproachable. So I switched, and although Raven is not a panacea, I get more readers. It is a bit chattier style of writing and if I pick and choose my chapters carefully, we stay at a reasonable level of details. However, Raven is not without its flaws. My two major critiques:

• The writing is uneven from chapter to chapter. Some of the authors have targeted their writing and their depth to the right level and some dove into jargon waaaaay too much (Chapter 18 Control of Gene Expression -- someone really loves their motifs!). The book needs a heavy-handed editor to even it out across the board.
  
  
• I don't agree with the organization of a number of chapters. Who would start a discussion of macromolecules with proteins (Chapter 3)? Those are the hardest biomolecules to understand. Start with sugars and build from there, I say! pedagogical differences.

So the Holy Grail of the right textbook will remain out there. Just do the best with what you have.