School days….
Since school is out for the summer (in most places, at least), here’s a school-themed question for the week:
- Do you have any old school books? Did you keep yours from college? Old textbooks from garage sales? Old workbooks from classes gone by?
- How about your old notes, exams, papers? Do you save them? Or have they long since gone to the great Locker-in-the-sky?
It shouldn’t surprise anyone to know that yes, I DO still have my old books. College textbooks, for example (although that Astronomy book that talks about nine planets? SO out of date now that Pluto’s been demoted). Will I ever need my Macroeconomics text book again? Probably not. Euripedes’ plays? Doubtful. Analyses of the 1984/88 Presidential elections? Really unlikely. Critiques of the Soviet Union? Um, does anybody even remember the USSR any more? But still, they’re mine. I paid for them with my hard-earned cash, and it should be pretty obvious that, once I bring a book home, it’s here to stay.
Although, actually, I HAVE weeded out a handful of the more egregiously-out-dated texts. Really!
As to notes? I do have some, mostly from the classes I learned most from, worked hardest in, or got really outstanding grades in. But mostly? No, those have mostly been recycled to the great locker in the sky….
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I sure did keep my textbooks from college! They’re expensive no? I also found a few math notes and a draft for a paper I wrote. Seems like another life.
I still have some of my old texts. I threw out all the old notes about 10 years after I graduated. But the texts actually come in handy every so often.
One whole column of our bookcase is nothing but my old textbooks. I have all of my college texts since nursing texts are 1. expensive 2. are always useful. So why do I still have my Organic BioChem book? Sentimental I guess.
I do also have every note I took in college from my sophomore year on. Again the nursing notes are useful, but I could probably toss my Rock music class notes….
I have many old college books and notes, too. They’re treasures.
I finally got rid off all my old texts (which were too obselete to use as reference material, anyway) and university notes (likewise obselete) during the great purge of 2006. Pretty much every other book I’ve ever purchased went to the “keep” pile, though. Our livingroom and bedroom are still piled with book boxes – I suspect at least 50% of the wall space in our little condo is going to have to be bookshelves!
I remember the USSR – the Cold War along with “duck & cover” exercises at school though it was never explained how a school desk might protect us from an atomic bomb. Two terms of Russian History in college were pretty memorable too. {g}
In college, once the semester was over, I’d sell my books back so I could get some money for the next semester’s books. After exams, notes went immediately into the trash. I did the same with my law school and grad shcool books and notes. Sold them or trashed them. That’s a lot of textbooks! Plus, between 1983 and 2003, I moved a total of 19 times so I didn’t want to cart around mega amounts of old textsbooks and my own crappy notes.
After I had kids I got rid of all the stuff I was never going to need again, I’ve got the texts from my textiles course & machine knitting courses but nothing else.
I kept only my statistics notebooks, anova, multivariate, sampling. I occasionally go to them. And some abstracts from a topical discussion class…but recently I went looking for the abstract from MY presentation…I found everybody’s critique, but not the abstract! There are a couple miscellaneous books around, but not too many. What I did keep were the really old (like 1930′s) zoology type texts that I got cheap because they have such incredible line drawings of odd animals and their parts. Which I needed for teaching a zoology lab that I knew little about (and the new book didn’t elaborate on very well). Ditto old botany books with drawings and descriptions.
Deb: I love your subject here. Books are so sentimental to me. When I go to garage sales and I come upon a text book that is the same as one I used in my own heyday, I am just overwhelmed with a “need” to get it. One day, we were at such a sale and out on someone’s lawn I found the same book type as I had used for English literature, back in 1950′s mind you. I sat right down and began reading one of the stories we had “done” in class and I was so moved back in time I hadn’t realized it was raining quite a bit and I was getting wet. Nope, I wasn’t there then, I was back on the Vineyard, back at Tisbury School. Did I buy the (soggy) book? You betcha I did.
Like Kim above, I moved so many times I never considered keeping textbooks and I too sold them to pay for the next semester’s texts. But I did keep one: Norton’s Anthology of British Lit. I had a great prof for that class and I annotated the book with notes taken during class. Can’t bring myself to get rid of it even if it’s foxed and brittle.
Most of my Art History classes used non-textbooks and I’ve kept almost all of those.
My husband on the other hand won’t part with his molding Chem, Bio and Math books. I think it reminds him he trained to be a scientist.
Threw out almost everything from medical school. Medical knowledge has a halflife of about 8 years. Most of college stuff is tossed. I kept a few written things, my lab notebooks, and some science and psych books. Have ALL my medical school books. *sigh* And yeah, running out of room on the shelves now.