Mail them to me. I will put them to good use.
First thing is to learn about the three basics of exposure: ISO, aperture, and shutter speed. Learn how aperture affects depth of field, and how shutter speed affects subject motion blur and blurring from a shaky camera. Learn how to use your T1i in full manual mode to set the ISO, aperture and shutter speed yourself. The camera is intelligent, but only you know what you really want from the photo, and you can determine that with your exposure choices.
Learn the Autofocus system and how it works. Change the AF points to all, to center, to each of the other points in turn, and try focusing on different things and see how it works. To take more interesting photos, a quick trick that I sometimes do is cycle through my focus points one at a time and place each one on my subject. You can get some interesting angles and framing that way. Also learn to shoot in manual focus mode. It is not really necessary, and it will be somewhat hard with your kit lens, but it will help you to get an eye for focus, which is important as sometimes the AF system doesn't always work the way you want it to.
Buy a $100 50mm f/1.8 lens. You will be able to shoot in much lower light settings with this lens. It will let in roughly 4 times the light that your f/3.5 lens lets in. This is a big difference. Also you can get some very narrow depth of field with f/1.8. Shooting with a prime lens (not a zoom lens) is an educational experience in its own right. You've got to "zoom with your feet" but if you're shooting in a fast-moving situation, you don't always have the time to do so. So you take the shots you can get, and that sometimes makes for interesting framing. If you have a zoom lens and you're taking a photo of somebody from a few feet away, chances are you will zoom out so that you get at least their head and shoulders. If you've got a somewhat long prime lens (as the 50mm will be on your T1i) then you might end up with just their face, with their ears or hair or eyebrows missing or only partially showing. This can help you break out of creative dead-ends, where you feel stuck because all your photos look the same. Add some constraints and see how they change the way that you shoot, and ultimately, your photos.
I usually shoot in RAW. IMO it can really help you fix mistakes. If you've overexposed a photo so that everything seems too bright, you can turn down your exposure in post-processing and make it look correct. You can do this with JPEGs too, but RAW gives you more headroom. But your camera's buffer can hold a lot more JPEGs than it can RAWs, so if you're shooting sports or something else where you're basically holding the shutter down constantly, you are better off shooting JPEG.
I am not much for photo editing. I usually only do it to fix obvious flaws, but there are times when it is necessary. Like if you take a nice photo of a street scene, but there are ugly telephone wires hanging across the sky. It is easy to copy and paste the sky to get rid of the ugly wires. Sometimes other stuff like that: an electric socket on the wall behind a person, or a crack in the wall that distracts from the main subject.
Get a person for a subject and set them down in front of a window that is not in direct sunlight. Sit off to one side so that, from your perspective, the light is coming in at an 90-degree angle to their face. This is really nice natural light and gives very professional-looking results for no money. Have them turn their head in different directions and see how the shadows move. Try it with the window uncovered, then try with the windows covered with white curtains or a white sheet, then try with a clear textured shower curtain, then try with a colored sheet. You can get all kinds of interesting looks.
Photography is all about light. Noticing the way that light works on your subject is one of the most important things you can do. Light and shadow give the perception of depth. If you ever take a figure drawing class, the first thing you learn how to draw is a sphere and how to shade it so that it looks 3-dimensional. Without the shading, it is just a circle. If the shading is wrong, it looks unnatural. There are ways to create hard shadows (small light sources) and soft shadows (big, diffuse light sources). Take a normal table lamp and set it right next to your subject, a foot or two away from their face, off to the side at a 45-degree angle to the camera. Then take the shade off the lamp and take the same photo. See the difference in how hard the shadows are and how much the feel of the photo is changed by changing that one thing. The lampshade effectively makes the light way bigger. Then get a big piece of white posterboard and hold it on the other side of their face, so some light is reflected back. There are all kinds of easy and cheap ways that you can experiment with light and how to set it up and modify it.
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