Laughably, if anybody wants a decent textbook to study with this year, the School will be of no help. Last year, having fallen short on AS textbooks they had to give us revision guides for free. The AS textbooks in question weren’t even the right ones for our specification and I’m personally not fond of revision guides as they are condensed versions of textbooks and sometimes leave out important detail – my notes will usually do, in that case.
Their reason for not buying new ones? The specifications for our courses have changed and there is no point in buying new books for only one year group. So every time I see the year 12s walking around with their pristine, new books I can’t help but glower, even if they’re bulkier to accomodate 2 years of A-Levels.
(If you don’t know, AS and A2 levels are now separate so there’s no point doing 4 and choosing to drop one at the end of Y12- it won’t count for anything. All A2 level exams are taken at the end of the course – i.e. the new Y12s have internal exams that help their teachers make UCAS predictions, and then they have twice as many exams in Y13. For this reason different schools are approaching this differently: my brother’s school has told them they can only do three subjects in Y12, but at my school they still do four and drop the subject with the worst end-of-year grade.)
Having received unsatisfactory AS results I am taking absolutely no chances this year and bought my textbooks out of my own pocket (I know, this is like, the parental area of spending but it’s easier to order them myself). Firstly, I bought AT’s AS biology textbook as she did well enough to not have to resit biology – the money will go towards her own A2 textbook! Then I ordered an AS CHEM2 unit guide. (I know what I just said about guides. But my notes are actually quite good so this is a little supplement, specific to the unit I’m retaking, that is easier to carry around than my huge lever arch folder. Plus it was only £3 with free shipping. I need all the help I can get.)
I did attempt to bid for textbooks on eBay but, when shipping was taken into account, I did just as well with buying it right away. Plus, I am awful at bidding. Sigh.
My A2 chemistry textbook was ordered new for a discounted price and arrived a day later than estimated, but it came with this lovely post it note scrawled in beautiful handwriting.
This note has made my day, and the star stickers are a cute bonus. Thank you, ebay seller. I will do my best. The note has gone up on my wall and fits snugly in a gap between some postcards.
Altogether, my educational spending came around to just over £61. At full price this would have been over £90 so every pound counts!
Secondly, Twerp and Dad harvested some of the apples and pears from our trees in the garden. Our apples are really sour and not nice unless you like sour apples or eat them with a little savoury dip, so we took two out of the three harvested and had a go at making apple sauce using a simple recipe on the BBC Food website. It was surprisingly quick and really really easy – all the time taken is through peeling and chopping the apples and cooking only took us 5-10 minutes.
Here is a really bad photo of our applesauce.
It was a huge hit with our roast chicken!
This has been a brief summary of my day… yesterday. Not much else happens now besides stressful things.
Until next time,
X
Twenty Swans 