Bookless buncomb

Dear textbook-free student:

Textbooks are expensive--I get that. My ability to obtain desk copies insulates me from textbook prices, but I do pay attention to prices and try to order only the books you'll actually need for my class.

And I understand that sometimes you can save money by ordering textbooks online instead of buying them from the bookstore, and that sometimes the mail can be slow. I totally understand that you're just doing your best to save money and that's why you still don't have the textbook for my class.

I suppose it's possible that you could pass my class without buying the textbooks. I've had a few students try it, but they've had to work really hard: ordering books well in advance through interlibrary loan, hunting down obscure online sources for out-of-print texts, or even photocopying pieces from classmates' texts. (Copyright violation + expensive, but I'm not here to manage either your morals or your checkbook.)

What I truly don't understand is where you got the idea that lacking the textbook gives you an excuse to avoid work altogether. You've submitted so little work and skipped so many classes that I thought you'd dropped the course, but no: you assumed that you could just make it all up after you got the textbook.

That's not how it works. If you lack the textbook, you'll have to work twice as hard: haunt the library, search out the original sources for these anthologized works, hope that the poems we study are available online, make friends with classmates willing to let you borrow the book.

What you can't do is simply goof off for a few weeks and then blame the post office. If the post office is responsible for your academic performance, you're in pretty sorry shape. So do yourself a favor and stop mailing it in! Buy the book, read the assignments, and come to class--unless you want that absence of textbooks to translate into a zero in the gradebook.