Every year, nay, every term, there seems to be an affliction that spreads across campus like wildfire. I'm not talking about the infamous Dartmouth flu -- no, this is something far more serious. Common symptoms include curricula that include 10 or more books, over 100 pages of reading assigned between two consecutive classes and nightly groaning due to academic pressure, among other symptoms. This affliction is called a "reading course," and if you're like thousands of Dartmouth students, you might be at risk.
These literature-intensive courses are prevalent among most of the academic departments on campus, and like a deadly disease, they're killing off students left and right. The professors of these courses seem to think that if they assign more reading than students can possibly finish, then somehow they'll learn more than if the course has reasonable goals.
The lengthy reading assignments, however, only detract from the quality and educational potential of the course, even going so far as to hurt some students by teaching them that skimming important literature is all the effort required to properly analyze it.
During freshman year, one of the most common tips from upperclassmen is "you don't have to do all of your reading as long as you skim it." In many ways, learning how to skim your reading is an effective tool many use in their professions. Not everyone has the time to go through lengthy documents like the Report from the 9/11 Commission, so learning how to get the gist of things can spare you from countless hours of bureaucratic droning.
When skimming is practiced widely in a collegiate environment, however, it is far less useful. By the middle of the term, there is too much pressure from midterms and campus activities and not enough time for the hours of reading every night some classes demand. The '12s will quickly realize that learning to predict what readings are important is oftentimes more important than the reading itself. You only have to read enough to make up something to say in class and throw a few essays together, so why bother with all of those spurious pages?
This apathy toward completing the entire assignment is not the student's fault; it's the fault of professors who need to recognize that assigning exorbitant amounts of reading is not helpful in the least. Contrary to current policy, if the professors assigned less reading but asked the students to read critically, more ideas would evolve in discussion because the students would be far more deeply familiar with the text than if they skimmed through the entire thing. More importantly, students would retain more information from the course, as it's fairly common knowledge that throwing a laundry list of names, dates and facts at a person doesn't promote memory retention at all.
In their own defense, professors everywhere are apt to remind us that there's simply not enough time in the span of a single course to cover everything they want. The problem is that they're right, and this will always be the case. No matter how many weeks, months or even years are dedicated to a particular course, there will always be one more book, one more discussion, one more lecture they wish they could have fit in. When professors feel the need to educate their students on the entirety of the course topic at a blistering pace, students only tend to turn off, find a comfortable minimum of work and simply survive the class instead of learn from it.
What some professors need to come to terms with is the fact that they can't teach everything; there is not enough time even in all four years of undergraduate education to thoroughly cover everything. What professors should strive to do, though, is teach us how to educate ourselves. We're here to be given the tools and information we need to pursue an independent, self-driven education for the rest of our lives. Only through careful examination of a smaller number of pages can we learn the analytical skills that the liberal arts education holds in such high esteem.
Skimming literature and feigning intelligence in class are the tools inadvertently being promoted in too many of our classrooms. What we should be taught is how to analyze these texts for the rest of our lives, because ultimately, what's more important at the end of our four years than learning how to make our four years the beginning?
