Monday, May 17, 2010

Encouraging students to start their library

Today, I posted an entry at The A&P Student blog encouraging students to begin a personal library of professional books.  I encouraged them to start with their A&P textbook.

Many students sell their textbooks back to the bookstore as a regular thing . . . without stopping to realize that SOME textbooks should be going into their individual professional library.
 
A professional library is the set of references that a student can begin to build NOW and continually add to throughout their professional career. Such individual libraries serve as indispensable tools to help professionals survive and excel in a health-related career.

For health professionals, the A&P textbook will be needed for  upcoming health professions courses and clinicals/practicums. It will also serve well later, when students finally begin their careers.

You may want to post one or more of these links to share with your students:
[Recent blog post from The A&P Student]
[Blog post from The A&P Student from May 2009]

[Brief article from my Lion Den collection of Study Tips and Tools]


2 comments:

yellow stone passer said...

Textbooks loose their value quickly, so I say sell them asap, and then if you need the textbook, buy one on the market, an older edition, which can be obtain for almost nothing. Besides, most professors teach stuff that is old, and most textbooks don't update that much anyway.

Kevin Patton said...

Yellow stone passer, that's an interesting perspective!

I agree that textbooks lose their monetary value quickly. Which is why it doesn't make sense to sell it for a pittance.

But the value of a familiar, hopefully marked up, resource to the user is tremendous. If one needs to quickly consult that resource, it does not make sense to then go buy it back. Especially if it's an older edition than was previously owned.

I strongly disagree that "most professors teach stuff that is old." I'm sorry that you've had that experience, but that's not typical.

And I know for a fact that most A&P textbooks are updated continually in key areas that are important. My last edition had over 10.000 textual updates and thousands more updates to images and graphs. I realize that the casual observer flipping quickly through a new edition may not see it, but someone who actually uses the text will eventually realize it.

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