All Posts Tagged With: "AbeBooks"
Everything you learned suddenly doesn’t matter
Post-exam purge
I’m finally done all my exams. There are more than four months of summer vacation between me and next semester. It seems strange that all of a sudden, the material that used to seem so critically important- the stuff that I’ve been cramming into my head for the past 12 weeks- doesn’t matter anymore.
Since the first week of January, my day-to-day existence has revolved around my textbooks. And now, after weeks of procrastination, followed by a couple days of frantic “I-can’t-believe-I-fell-nine-chapters-behind-since-the-midterm” studying, it’s all over.
The day before my microbiology exam, with three more chapters to read and several weeks of lectures to memorize, I would have preferred trying to circumcise a T-Rex with a plastic spoon instead of writing that exam. The very next day, those three chapters are suddenly irrelevant and I’m selling my textbook on AbeBooks.
Sure, some of the courses I’m taking next semester will build on what I learned in anatomy and physiology. But words like “photophosphorylation” and “polymorphonuclear leukocyte” can be mentally purged forever, joining the ranks of all my other repressed memories.
Like that time in grade nine when I gave a girl a Valentine’s Day card, and then she ceased to acknowledge my existence.
Saving money on textbooks
Non-existent textbooks are the cheapest
I recently found out that my textbooks are only going to cost about $20 this semester.
The entire $20 of my textbook expenditures is from a single course, Studies in the Humanities. Technically, the book I have to buy isn’t even a textbook- it’s a novel that the class is required to read for the exam.
My anatomy course and both of the labs I’m taking don’t use textbooks, since all the material is drawn from the course notes. Although I don’t select courses based on textbook prices (or, in this case, a lack of textbooks), it’s always a nice bonus when things work out this way.
Three of my courses are actually using textbooks I already own. Two of the courses- Human Physiology and a French class- are continuations of courses I took from previous semesters. The third course, a microbiology class, just happens to use the same textbook, which luckily wasn’t part of my end of the year textbook bonfire.
And no, I can’t actually afford to set my textbooks on fire, no matter how terrible the course was. By “end of the year textbook bonfire,” I actually mean “sold on AbeBooks.”
-Photo courtesy of djfoobarmatt
