Textbook Blues and Pink Folders

I started teaching for the summer today. Being an instructor is financially fun because you don’t get charged for the textbooks – the publisher’s rep just sends you a free desk copy. I have loads of instructors’ textbooks – no different from the regular textbooks other than the fact that they have “Instructor Copy” printed on the cover, or stamped on the fly-leaf. These are books that I could sell to reel in several hundreds of dollars. I wish so much I could bring myself to sell them, but I can’t. It is not illegal or anything, but if I do so, I contribute to raising the cost of student textbooks. And I cannot bring myself to do that. I know how hard it is to shell out good money at the beginning of every semester to buy textbooks – and I will not add to other students’ financial burdens in order to ease my own.

Not that some students mind shelling out money! As a 28-year old graduate student, I suppose I am more mature than most of the population in my small college-town. However, immaturity itself cannot be the sole factor in the reckless expenditure of most of my fellow students. I see people spend money on what I now think is the most ridiculous stuff – closets overstuffed with clothes, shoes, bags and other accessories that match them, $5 - $7 on “weight loss smoothies”, premium gym memberships when there are fiver perfectly well equipped gyms on campus, not to mention other sports facilities – and unnecessary trimmings on bags, folders etc. It has to be more than immaturity – vanity, maybe. I am chiding myself for saying all this because what got me into credit card debt in the first place was partly my own frivolity and vanity (and other unavoidable stuff too). Anyway, I just benefitted from one such frivolous act of another student’s spending. One of my students a few semesters ago turned in a portfolio of a semester’s worth of work – in a really lush and fancy pink leather folder with really fancy section dividers and additional folder pockets. I guess she must have spent nearly $15 on the thing. She has not bothered to pick it up in nearly two years now, so I suppose she has decided she doesn’t need it back. So, I took the pages out and turned the lovely thing into a financial folder for myself – it cost me absolutely nothing, and it brightens up the ugliness of my financial situation. :-)