As any student knows, college textbooks are expensive. Not matter what course you are taking, college textbooks are not cheap. So what do we do when we are required to buy these textbooks. Read the information on how to buy cheap textbooks below. And check out what  MASSPRIG has to say about this.

Where to shop for College Textbooks.

1. Bookswaps. Swap used books with other students. Ask around, check Facebook, or visit campusbookswap.org
2. Online. Search stores like amazon.com, comparison sites like campusbooks.com and used booksellers like textbooks.com.
3. Rentals. Websites like chegg.com rent college textbooks like netflix, and cost 50-80% less!
4. Library. If you’re really stuck, see if the library has a copy.

TIPS TO SAVE$

• Be prepared. The info you’ll need is the ISBN, author, title, publisher & edition.
• Search wisely. Search by ISBN to find the exact book. Use title & author to find older or unbundled editions.
• Do the math. Consider the up front cost and the cost after buyback. Loose leaf and ebooks can end up costing more!
• Start early. Don’t limit your options by waiting. Shipping can take weeks!

Garden Garlic

Mark your calendars for the phenomenal ‘Festival that Stinks,’ a fabulous celebration for the whole family. Looking for inspiration and practical skills to survive and thrive in tough economic times? At the North Quabbin Garlic and Arts Festival you can:

Support and enjoy the bounty of over 100 amazing artists, farmers and organizations; strengthen communities by purchasing locally grown and crafted. Gain skills for interdependence: learn to grow garlic, press cider, mill lumber, make paper, coil clay, grind grain, do tai chi, go solar. Nourish yourself through chef demos, fantastic food and the wondrous wood fired bread oven. Transform trash into compost (last year only three bags of garbage for 12,000 people)! Celebrate with friends old and new: enjoy rockin’ music and incredible entertainment on two solar powered stages, wonderful workshops and garlic games galore. There’s something for everyone you love, so bring your friends and the entire family.

On October 3 and 4, follow your nose to beautiful, historic Forster’s Farm, 60 Chestnut Hill Road, Orange, MA. Visit www.garlicandarts.org for directions, pet policy, and past years highlights. Inflation buster admission at $5.00 per day for adults, weekend pass $8.00, kids 12 and under free. Bike, hike, parachute or ride the Magic Bus–the free biodiesel shuttle from nearby parking lots. Wheelchair accessible parking and restroom facility provided. The 2009 schedule of vendors, music, entertainment and games, chef demos, renewable energy and healing arts workshops, and all you need to know to have a scent-sational time will be updated by July. Multiply the fun: enjoy CISA’s Eat the View and the Conway Festival of the Hills on this same glorious October weekend.

College life is a mixture of academic and social experiences. Knowing tips on how to balance these experiences will formulate your college life for better or worse. Hopefully for the better.

Social Experiences:

• Smile: Statistics prove people who smile attract attention and are more popular. And who doesn’t need a little popularity in their lives?
• Join a Study Group: This is a no brainer, you will meet new people andget some studying done!
• Rush a Fraternity/Sorority: If this is your cup of tea, go for it.
• Got Roommate? Get Alternative Study Space: See if you can work out a schedule, so each of you have the whole room to yourselves 1 to 2 nights each week. Post the schedule and find your alternative study space [SeeFind an Alternative Study Space below]. Plus, you get your dorm room to yourself some nights as well.
• Join Groups: Free food is just the beginning. You will find all sorts of interesting groups exploring different topics. Shop around!

Academic Experiences:

• All Semesters Count: Do not be lead to think you can blow-off your first semester or any semester, for that matter. Your grade point average GPA is calculated on ALL your courses taken within your entire college career. Oh, and prospective employers do ask for college transcripts.
• Schedule Your Time and Stick to Your Schedule: You are responsible for your study, work and deadlines. Once you have all your syllabi, chart your due dates on whatever calendar you will use: paper, PDA, your computer, which ever way you will remember. Then, check your calendar daily and plan accordingly. Don’t be tempted to party the weekend before a big paper is due. Stick to your schedule.
• Find an Alternative Study Space:It might be the library, an alcove in your dorm, the union, the local coffee shop, or maybe all of these! Where ever your auxiliary study spaces are, use them when ever you need to get away from your dorm room or just want a change of pace. [Tip: Your alternative study space should have an electrical outlet and you should travel with an power strip complete with surge protector].

Stealing these tips will help you have a great college experience. Check out the eBook for more college life tips. And visit often.

Authors in this Forum include U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan; Capitol Hill education expert Terry Hartle; Muriel Howard, the first minority woman to lead one of the big D.C. higher education associations; and Nellie Mae Education Foundation President Nicholas C. Donohue.

NEJHE also explores the future shape of education policy-related publishing in an age of blogging and Twitter with articles by social technology guru Brian Reich and two NEJHE editorial advisors: Robert Whitcomb, vice president and editorial pages editor at the Providence Journal, and Ralph Whitehead, a journalism professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

Among articles in the Summer 2009 NEJHE:

Educators Without Borders · Since teaching is a highly mobile profession, the New England states would benefit from a common licensure test and reciprocity policy. Salem State College education professor R. Clarke Fowler explains how.

Learning to Eat · Many college students reared on fast food miss out on the benefits of healthy, local food and the intellectual exposure of a broad palette and good conversation. “For many students, college offers development of a sometimes-overlooked asset: taste buds,” writes Bowdoin College associate director of dining services and executive chef Kenneth Cardone. “How can they not become more adventurous when everyone at their table is enjoying the sweet and sour tofu and the kimchee, especially if their Korean roommate helped the chef perfect the recipe?”

Double-Teamed · Amherst College athletic director Suzanne R. Coffey says college coaches and faculty share a joint interest: the development of student-athletes. “Faculty colleagues covet the passion plainly exhibited in the eyes of an athlete attentively taking in every word during a 30-second time-out. They begrudge the voluntary extra workouts. They envy the edge-of-the-chair eagerness athletes demonstrate in team meetings,” writes Coffey. “It’s up to the athletics community to create the bridges between two educations, to move faculty friends from dismissive to collaborative.”

The Dark Ages of Education and a New Hope · A law requiring Maine schools to teach about Native American history is leading us out of the “dark ages” of education, according to Donna Loring, who served in the Maine Legislature as a tribal representative of the Penobscot Nation for 12 years. Loring is the author of the 2008 book, In the Shadow of the Eagle: A Tribal Representative in Maine.

Re-engineering Engineering Education · Too often, U.S. engineering is not cost-effective because the majority of today’s engineering graduates do not have the broad background necessary to understand, take charge of and drive large-scale projects to completion in an economic fashion, write Bernard M. Gordon, chairman of Neurologica Corp. and founder of Analogic Corp, and Michael B. Silevitch, director of the Gordon Engineering Leadership Program at Northeastern University.

Education Policy Communication in a New Media Age

• Prepare for Impact · As media digitizes, information and experiences become more a reflection of the community than a product delivered to the audience. Brian Reich, who recently created a new venture called “little m media” borrowing from his 2007 book, Media Rules! Mastering Today’s Technology to Connect With and Keep Your Audience, explains.
• Policy Publishing in a New Media Age · Readers in academia are probably the most “Interneted/World Wide Webbed” group of all, according to Robert Whitcomb, vice president and editorial-page editor of The Providence Journal. But warns Whitcomb, “using an old-fashioned library with books and periodicals on paper can be a more disciplined and orderly way to research than using the Internet. And reading and putting things on paper tends to encourage more intellectual rigor than using the attention-deficit-disordered computer world.”
• An Educated Audience · “A typical reader of a hard-copy publication belongs to a mere audience. A typical reader of a website can belong to a community,” notes University of Massachusetts Amherst journalism professor Ralph Whitehead Jr. The former political writer at the Chicago Sun-Times explains the distinction.

FORUM: Higher Education Attainment: The Obama Benchmark

NEJHE asks the U.S. secretary of education and others to offer a prognosis on President Obama’s pledge to help the U.S. achieve the world’s highest proportion of college graduates by 2020.

• Historic Opportunity for Action · In a single generation, the U.S. has fallen from second to 11th place in the percentage of students completing college. U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan outlines President Obama’s goal to make the America No. 1 in the world in the percentage of adults with college degrees.
• Driving American Economic Renewal · Muriel A. Howard, president of Buffalo State College, State University of New York since 1996, who begins in August as president of the American Association of State Colleges and Universities, calls for bold actions to make the U.S. first in college attainment, including expanding Pell Grants and education tax credits, streamlining the federal student aid process and facilitating college access for undocumented students.
• Ambitious Goal · “There’s no way to produce 700,000 more college graduates a year if we keep cutting funding,” writes Terry W. Hartle, senior vice president of government and public affairs at the American Council on Education.”We will need to increase higher education’s capacity, and that will require more money.”
• Our Most Valuable Population · Currently, 22% of 25- to 29-year-olds are unemployed and out of the labor force nationwide. These disconnected young adults are at high risk of spending the rest of their lives as members of the working poor. Nellie Mae Education Foundation President and CEO Nicholas C. Donohue describes some of the model programs that are trying to engage New England’s disconnected young adults with postsecondary opportunities.

Strategy to Maintain New England’s Education Advantage · NEBHE President and CEO Michael K. Thomas lays out ways to capitalize on the region’s historical leadership in education. Among them: require rigorous statewide curricula and adopt graduation requirements aligned with entry standards of colleges; use statewide longitudinal data systems; engage low-income students and their families in making an early commitment to college readiness and success; and articulate statewide targets to expand postsecondary attainment.

Readiness in Brief · With support from the Nellie Mae Education Foundation, NEBHE has published two new briefing papers with its partners in the College Ready New England initiative spotlighting innovative practices, policies and key steps to increase educational attainment for underserved students. NEBHE Chair and Massachusetts state Sen. Joan Menard explains.

Inspiration · How are campus dining, college athletics and Native American history related? In his quarterly Editor’s Memo, NEJHE executive editor John O. Harney discusses how mentor Bob Woodbury sees them as chapters in the eclectic story of New England higher education and economic development.

This summer 28 eighth grade students are arriving in Western Mass from Ota Ku , Japan on 7/19/09. They will be visiting for 9 days. We are looking for host families for students to stay with in this area.

The families that participate in a homestay program are special. They represent the part of our population that is curious, kindhearted, responsible and not afraid of new experiences. The host family plays a major role in the success of the homestay experience. It is through the family that the visitor learns the greatest amount of culture and language. 

What is a Homestay? Simply put, a homestay is when a foreign visitor stays with a host family. An educational homestay program is designed to allow the foreign visitor and the host family to learn and share their language and culture with each other. 

Host families open their homes to students. During the visit students attend morning classes where they study English as a Second Language and participate in cultural exchanges and activities in the afternoons. One day during the week is dedicated to touring the local area.  Evenings and weekends in all programs are spent with the host family.  These types of programs totally immerse the student in a culture and language different from his/her own. 

Host Families 
The following are the requirements of a host family:

Two or more related people in each family.
At least one native English speaker in the home (can be a child).
Family agrees to speak English only while the student is with them.

Family agrees to treat their student like a member of the family and have the student help with chores and participate in the activities the family has planned for this time period.
Family provides the student with their own bed. The student may share a room with a child of the same gender.  
Family provides all meals including a bag lunch for the day’s activities.
Family provides transportation to and from the Study Center in Deerfield.

Host families will receive $20 a night stipend

To sign up or for additional information please call/email

Robin @ 413-256-0285 or rbsm924@aol.com

Exhibition of Highly Unlikely Subway Maps at Artifacts 20th Century

This June 26, Artifacts 20th Century will premiere a special exhibition of faux subway maps. The exhibition, titled Transit Authority Figures: Highly Unlikely Subway Maps, will be on display until July 31. Many in the Valley may recognize the Northampton/Amherst Metropolitan Area Subway Map and this will be their first chance to get a look at the next eight maps as Transit Authority Figures begins their quest to design underground mass transit systems in unlikely places around the country.

The exhibition will kick off on Friday June 26 with an opening/launch party at Artifacts 20th Century in Florence from 6 to 9 PM and the public is invited.

Transit Authority Figures was conceived last winter when Northampton designers Rob & Damia Stewart mocked up a 4-line traditional-style subway diagram with Northampton and Amherst as twin hubs. The Stewarts made a poster with the diagram and gave hundreds away as holiday presents. The feedback from friends and clients was so overwhelmingly positive that they decided to replicate the model and introduce it to other communities. The new company they formed is called Transit Authority Figures.

The formula is simple – the map has to look real and the location has to be such that the idea of building a subway there is patently absurd. Heading into the summer of 2009, Transit Authority Figures has set its sites on East Coast beach resorts: Cape Cod; Martha’s Vineyard; Nantucket Island; The Hamptons, North Fork & Shelter Island; Fire Island; Bar Harbor, Maine; and Rehoboth Beach, Delaware. These are the maps that will be featured in the exhibition.

“When I think about getting around Boston or Washington, DC, I don’t think of the physical topography of the place. My mental map of those cities is the subway diagram,” said Rob Stewart. “In creating Transit Authority Figures, we thought about some of our favorite places and how they would be “improved” by having a full service subway system. Where would the lines go? What would the stops be? If those subways are ever built, these are the maps that will be burned on your brain for all time.”

The maps are hitting the scene just as overall interest in rail transit is peaking, with the possibility of Amtrak rerouting its Vermonter line through Holyoke and Northampton and the hope that federal stimulus money will bring high-speed rail service to Springfield.

Artifacts 20th Century is located at 28 North Maple Street in Florence, MA. Hours are 11AM-5 PM Tuesday through Saturday. For more information visit www.transitauthorityfigures.com.

Are you the first in your family to: grow up in this country? graduate from high school? go to college? speak English as your first language? be incarcerated? not be incarcerated ? be adopted? be drug free? be openly glbt? question your faith? choose a different faith? break the silence? be an artist? Are you First Generation?

First Generation is an intensive, arts-based and youth leadership-development program. It provides a platform for young people to have a public voice in their community, and beyond, through creative expression and thoughtful exploration of what it means to be First Generation.

First Generation began in the fall of 2008 in Springfield, MA with a group of 12 youth, ages 15-22, who are the first in their families to be growing up in the United States or who define themselves as first generation in other ways. For example, being the first to graduate high school, go to college, or to have shifted from a family culture of heterosexuality, religious affiliation or economic values. The group is multi-lingual group and includes youth who are court-involved.