sheer potentiality

Textbooks are usually a major expense, but this year I’m taking another approach to textbook purchases. Simply put, I’m not. I’m not going to buy any textbooks unless I personally want them or unless I’m convinced that they’re absolutely necessary. In lots of classes I can concentrate and take good notes and not really need to read the book, so why should I bother buying it? This is particularly true of some MIS classes. If you’re relying on physical paper for information about technology, you’re quite often a moron. Books aren’t updated when reality changes, and reality changes far too quickly and far too often in this field for it to be worth printing a book about. (It’s true that some things stay constant long enough to write a book—I’m not making broad generalizations here.) Anyway, I haven’t bought any textbooks yet, although I’m probably going to eventually.

I’ve also decided to get into better physical shape this semester. My energy level is lower than it should be even though my thyroid levels are at pretty good levels, so maybe getting into better condition will help with that. Well, that, and I want a toned muscular body for reasons of sheer vanity. (Don’t tell anyone).

So aside from classes and personal growth, what else am I doing? Well, as I may have written about before, I’m working at the AML. There’s a one-credit class, English 300, that basically covers how to use the lab and lab software, and the course is now taught by the consultants in a series of workshops. So I’ll be teaching people how to use the video editing software we have in the lab. Towards the end of last semester I worked up a workshop outline with a couple other consultants and this semester we’ll be teaching it. This should give me more hours of work and more interesting work to do, so that’s a definite positive.

I have a few other ideas and ambitions for self-improvement, but I’m a little anxious to see if I’ll have time for them, and if so, how many of them I’ll have time for. I do know that I’ll make more out of this semester than I’ve made out of past semesters. I’m mature enough now to meet the challenge of life and to make the most out of it. So be it.

Tags: textbooks

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 11th, 2006 at 10:27 pm and is filed under College, Daily Life. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.