So it's come my attention that there are a lot of students, particularly in humanities and social sciences disciplines, who need to hear this, so here goes:
Do the readings.
Oh my God, just do the readings. I promise, it gets easier once you get into the habit of it.
What makes a good student? Doing the readings. Literally just doing the readings is enough to make you a good student.
The readings *are* the course. The lectures are just priming you for the readings. The tutorials and seminars are just how we collectively process the readings. If the readings were intended to be optional, they would have been listed under the "optional readings" heading.
"Oh but I hate this reading! The author's an idiot, they're wrong about everything" Good. Do the reading and then tear it apart in class. This isn't high school, you're not expected to mindlessly absorb things anymore
If you're in physics, do the derivations. Don't believe that any equation given to you is true. Derive it. Convince yourself that it must be true, and understand the limitations of its truth.
The very first lecture I give my students emphasizes that they do not have to accept the readings as truth from on high. They don't even have to like them! Critical reading is perhaps the most important skill I hope they take away from my course, and you can't develop it if you're not doing the fucking readings!
#the number of ENGLISH MAJORS who refuse to read and then complain about not understanding the class discussions#I'm begging y'all. the information is in the words
No you don’t understand. This is so important. I’m a history major and my HST300 professor would intentionally give us contradictory readings all goddamn term.
All 14 of us had to write the same essay on the same topic and we had the whole term to formulate it. He would give us anywhere from three to five new sources each week and I swear to god only a handful could agree on anything about the event. People who “were there” hadn’t even been born yet, or were proven to be teenagers half a country away at the time. Years were misaligned, facts were murky at best.
I hated it. I raged against it in class. I was so goddamn pissed because how difficult could it be to give us good sources?!
And this bastard, this genius beautiful bastard of a professor, would just grin. He’d let me go off, full 23yr old tantrum, and use everything I said to prove a point in class. I loved him by the end. I was the youngest there and he treated me with so much respect.
But most of all, doing the readings and getting pissed off and fighting him about it taught me how to be a good student and a historian that thought critically about all my sources from multiple angles.
In that one class that single professor laid the groundwork for the rest of my degree, and lessons I would then pass on to other students in other disciplines. I’ve been out of college for three years and I still do essay readings for existing students.
Do the readings. Get pissed. Fight your teachers.
