Read what Matters
Guess which university’s newspaper celebrates the fact that college students never do the assigned reading.
Behold the American University newspaper The Eagle, whose racks unironically boast that the paper is, ironically, “The only reading…that matters.”
Full disclosure: I read every word in college and grad school, except in that one class on international development I took in college where both the professor and the TA were so frustratingly stupid that I refused to read the books out of spite and instead just regurgitated what the instructors had lectured to us that they wanted us to know about the books. Other than that class, I read every word in my nine years of higher education, but that was because I had time, and that was because I had great study skills.
If you don’t have enough time to read everything, you probably need to upgrade your study skills.
But what if you have certifiably good study skills and play college baseball or are in the high school play, both of which take forever? Or what if you’ve just been slacking all semester and find yourself in April with four months’ worth of reading to do in four weeks? What then?
Then you read what matters. If it’s a scholarly journal article, read the abstract. If it’s a textbook, read the chapter intros and summaries. If it’s fiction, read your lecture notes. You did take notes, right?
Reading only what matters will help you keep your head above water academically long enough to get drafted, collect your flowers, or even graduate, if you’re into that. It’s a valid but shortsighted way to do school.
When you only read what matters you’re assuming that what “matters” is determined by contrived academic requirements, rather than the existential requirements of life on Earth as a person who may need to account for unknown unknowns.
It’s a tragedy that you don’t need to do the reading to graduate from college these days, so don’t make a habit of it, okay?
