OER: On a Personal Note

I enrolled in a Spanish 101 course my freshman year of college to ful ll a language requirement, and I gasped to nd that the required text Dos Mundos would run me about $180. This was in 2003, and my only income was a part-time job at the public library where I was making minimum wage – $6.75/hour at the time in Massachusetts. I was also trying to maintain my very used car as a commuter student and pay the litany of other expenses that started to emerge in my newfound adulthood. The acquisition of this book was a “core memory” (to borrow a phrase from Disney’s Inside Out) because of the mental labor it required. $180 might as well have been an immovable boulder for me (it’s about $300 today with ination) so I contemplated my options. I couldn’t lean on my immediate family nancially, but perhaps I could turn to a friend’s parent or a distant relative? I envisioned the awkward and pride-crushing possibility of asking to borrow money. I was already borrowing thousands from Sallie Mae to attend college in the rst place. I considered the avenue of foregoing the book purchase altogether, but I noticed some of the required assignments came directly from the text. I spent the rst week of the course not learning Spanish, but instead agonizing over getting Dos Mundos into my backpack. And could I get it into my backpack…without the campus store staff noticing? No, this was just an intrusive thought rather than an actionable one; a eeting thought from a person who would otherwise not pursue a life of crime.