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Collge Textbooks: Pain or Salvation

© Flora Brown

College textbooks are at the heart of most college courses and therefore play a big part in your college education. While students may see a textbook as a hurdle or a nuisance, the alternative is not that appealing. In bygone days before textbooks were published, students had to take voluminous notes. Professors rambled from behind rickety lecterns pouring out the basic principles and details of their subject while students broke lead trying to get every word down. In other words, students had to create their own study materials. The modern textbook is a tremendous aid to learning, but only if you know how to obtain it, how to use it and how to expand on it.

The first challenge is to obtain your textbooks. This semester at our school student and teacher frustration reached a new peak as the bookstore ran out of books or students bought wrong editions or titles. At the same time, however, buying textbooks became easier. In addition to the discount textbook stores that manage to open up adjacent to college campuses, the Internet stepped in to save the day. This year college students could not only buy books online, but have them delivered to their homes thereby avoiding the long bookstore lines. To sweeten the deal, some of these online book services offered incentives and even commissions if you put a link on your website. The online-only text retailer VarsityBooks.com, made buying books so easy that on their home page you just selected your school and teacher and your required text was ready to be shipped to you in on to three days for a shipping fee of $4.95. College bookstores faced fierce competition so some of them "joined them " by signing up with private companies such as efollett.com where you could enter your bookstore online.

Second, after you get your textbook, you must use it well. Think of your textbook as a long letter from the author. It's what the author wanted to tell you if he or she could be there in person. You must approach it as you would a steak; chop it into bite-size, manageable pieces to ease digestion. Fortunately for you, modern publishers have already done this for you. The book parts such as the Table of Contents, Index, Glossary and Bibliography have important functions. More important you must note how the chapters are divided. Every heading if converted into a question is a potential test question. Therefore, when reading the sections under the heading look for the answer to your heading-turned-question. Don't ignore the bold or italicized phrases either. They signal significant concepts destined to appear on the tests as well. Forget your high school teachers' commandment to not write in your book . Make notes in the margin as you read. Your goal when studying is not to reread the text chapter, but to memorize the key points you made in your margin.

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