Walked into my 8am philosophy class yesterday with the wrong textbook for three months straight

I had been highlighting and annotating a used copy of Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil that I grabbed from the campus bookstore, but during a group discussion the professor called me out for referencing page 47 that had nothing to do with our lecture on Kant. Turns out I mixed up my ISBN numbers (dumb mistake, I know) and the bookstore wouldn't take it back since it was past the return window. Has anyone else realized halfway through a semester that they were studying completely wrong material?

2 comments

2 Comments

jakewhite19d ago

Damn that's a rough one. My buddy once sat through a whole semester of American literature with a British poetry anthology, kept raising his hand about Shakespeare sonnets during discussions on Twain and nobody said a word until the final project when he submitted a thesis on iambic pentameter. Teacher just stared at him for a solid minute. The bookstore swap policy is brutal, they'll take back almost anything within two weeks but after that you're basically donating to their shelf.

dylan_green5819d ago

Is it just me or does that whole bookstore scenario kind of sum up how people handle being wrong in general? Like nobody wants to be the one to call it out, so everyone just sits there nodding along until it's way too late. I've seen it at work where someone spends weeks building a spreadsheet with the wrong formula and six people review it without saying anything because they assume someone else must have checked it. Then at the end you're all standing around the projector like, well that's awkward. The two-week return window feels like life giving you a grace period to catch your own mistakes before everyone else has to deal with them too.