The Textbook Costs WHAT!!@#$%^

I went down to Pima College's downtown campus to prove I was an American citizen. That went well. A woman at the "welcome" desk examined my documentation, signed the form and kept it.
I always like being at Pima College. It is such a different world than the one I am exposed to either with my friends or at work at the University of Arizona. I don't think there are any places in Tucson, or perhaps Arizona, were more different kinds of people hang in spot. Young, old, all different races, people from all over the world. People just trying to make their lives better through education. It's inspiring just being there.

I thought it would be a good idea to head over to the bookstore and buy my Math 122 textbook. I found the spot and a young woman offered me help. She walked me to the shelf. The book she showed me was Intermediate Algebra 3rd edition by Tussy and Gustafson. It was marked at $154. I couldn't believe it. She could tell. She, treating me like a nice older guy, certainly older than her father, was kind enough to show me the used versions. They were ONLY $115. I thanked her for her help and got the hell out of there.

(The following is posted about a day later than the words above. We had a huge storm that knocked power out for about 30,000 people in Tucson. We lost power at about 8:20 last night - as I was typing - and got it back about 3:00 this afternoon. We did fine, but in Tucson in the summer, life is better with air conditioning than without.)

Picking up the story, I headed down to the computer commons and figured out how to sign on. I immediately went to Amazon and found a copy of the book - I think the same edition as the one in the bookstore - for $1.99 plus $3.95 for shipping. I couldn't believe it and said, "What the Hell" and bought it with one click.

The bookstore price of the textbook convinced me more than ever that I don't want to ever force my own students to purchase textbooks. Obviously I don't know the finances, but it seems like a rip off on the face of it and I'm not going to be an enabler of ripping off students.

After I got home, it occurred to me that not every Math 122 professor would necessarily use the same book. I'd only invested about 5 bucks so I wasn't that concerned. I got online, and sure enough, the book listed for my section was different. Dang! But I'll deal with that later. There is plenty of time before class starts.

Meantime, I'm still struggling with exercise 13 in How to Calculate Quickly. I only missed 4 out of 25 today, 84 percent. But I'm not moving on until I can get better than 90 percent. That means that I'll only get to miss two problems which will give me a 92.