I sat down tonight to do my reading for class tommorow and I discovered that the reading was ** 202 ** fucking pages long. All of this for an introductory sociology class granted it is a honors class but jumping jehovas witnesses 202 pages! It is a novel so its not like its a textbook but it is unreasonable to expect someone to read 202 pages in a mere 2 nights. On top of that I know the most that you will use this reading for is 5 minutes out of a 108 minute lecture as a specific example. Which would be fine becuase I would just not read the material or do so at a later date but you will give us a quiz on it at the beginning of class.
Now the other assorted college rants:
To my fellow students: For the love of christ will you please get to lecture a few minutes early so you can get yourself situated and ready for lecture. It is fucking annoying as hell to listen to bags being unzipped and rezipped, binders opened, and other assorted noise when I am trying to listen to the professor. And for the love of all that is good and holy when the professor is talking sit your asses down and shut the good god damn fuck up.
If homework is due at the beginning of lecture make sure your ass is there on time so you can turn it in. If you are late do not I repeat do not fucking walk your ass up in front of the entire class and turn the assignment in during the professors lecture. You are annoying as shit and I am trying to concentrate so I can you know get the education I am paying thousands of dollars for.
This is similar to my get there early, sit down and shut the fuck up rant. The lecture is scheduled for 48 minutes not 46 and a half. The last minute and a half of lecture is just as important as any other minute and a half during lecture. This means that 2 minutes before the lecture ends do not pack up your shit and begin talking. My expectations of your behavior in lecture are not that high. All I want you to do is sit down, shut up and don’t fucking disturb me.
Professors: This is called a lecture for a perfectly good reason. You are supposed to stand at the front of the class and lecture us on whatever topic you are teaching. Do not ask simple fucking questions that everyone knows the answer to. All this leads to is an akward silence in which everyone knows the fucking answer but just doesn’t want to respond. In fact I would prefer it if you did not ask any questions at all. If you want to ask a rhetorical question to illustrate a point but this is not fucking question and answer.
Many of you are wonderfully talented teachers and experts in your field. I thoroughly enjoy learning from you and I do in fact learn a good deal. However if you know you are not going to be there don’t send some fucking TA grad student who knows jack shit about teaching and on top of that barely speaks english. I know that you will just go over the material again becuase you know as well as I do that this TA is not able to teach. Furthermore if you know that you are not going to be there send out a fucking e-mail. You have access to all of our school e-mails and we check it regularly. This will greatly decrease the amount of time I waste listening to shitty TAs or showing up to find lecture is cancelled.
You can’t read a moderately sized book in less than a week? :eek: Sheesh, give me an afternoon and I can voraciously finish a book of that size. I can see your point in the rest of your rant though. That’d annoy me too.
Your class isn’t issued a syllabus? You didn’t know until two days before it was due that you needed a 202 page book read? I call bullshit. You knew well in advance what was required of class. But what are you doing? Typing on a fucking message board how you don’t have any time. Pot, this is irony, uh…something. Get your ass off the computer and start reading. 202 pages is not unreasonable.
Lessee, 202 pages…Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe?
202 pages in a novel unreasonable? Not at all. Last semester I had to read all of Moby Dick in a week (granted, though, we knew about it ahead of time and could plan for it). Now that was hell. In all of my English classes, 100+ pages per class is the norm, and the 202 pages you speak of is far from unheard of.
Cry me a river, ya baby! Suck it up, and welcome to college. Sorry the prof doesn’t teach exactly the way you want him to. Pity. Do try to keep the tears from staining the text, won’t you?
All this for Intro to Soc.? You are going to fucking DIE in a real class, bucko!
I have been on both a professor and a student. The best teaching is the EXCHANGE of ideas and thoughts on a subject. Class in not just about facts. Any nitwit can get facts from a textbook, film, websight, etc. It is how one uses those facts that is important. Discussion is incredibly important to intellectual development. IF you really want to learn, answer one of the professors questions with “Yes, but… if that’s true wouldn’t it effect such and such?..”
I found that working on my BA they were teaching us to learn. In grad school they were teaching us to think.
Jebus kid. In college, I had over 3000 pages a week most of the time. Learn to read fast, process information fast, and you can do fine. The more you read, the more you know, and all.
If you can’t read a piddling 200 pages (of a NOVEL no less) in 2 days you don’t belong in college.
I hear there are some great vocational schools turning out some damn fine drill-press operators. Or you might want to look into business school (vocational school for slow-witted capitalists). Higher learning ain’t for everyone.
flamingbananas Well, I was giving a lot of time for interruptions, which I get a lot. If I’m un-interrupted, I can read that many pages in a couple hours no problem. Cue Gollum voice Being left alone in my lair, to read my preciousessss doesn’t happen often though. Gollum voice
For every hour spent in class, plan on spending two hours studying.
Given that most people should be able to get through 100 pages an hour, this isn’t unreasonable at all.
Unreasonable was arriving in a Comparitive Literature class, getting the syllabus and discovering that half the reading was in either French or German - reading either was not a prerequiste for the class (granted, it was a graduate level Comparitive Literature class I’d foolishly registered for as an undergrad – I understand that being competitent in several languages is common for CLit grad students) I’ll fess up, I didn’t do most of the reading, but some turned out to be available in translation.
This is true, Revedge. But what treis said was “Do not ask simple fucking questions that everyone knows the answer to. All this leads to is an akward silence in which everyone knows the fucking answer but just doesn’t want to respond.” That’s something different. A lot of professors ask very obvious questions like that in order to slowly drag the class along to the eventual point. It’s not an exchange of ideas, it’s just a waste of time. One of my profs this quarter - and I like him - does this a lot. It leads to long awkward pauses because when you ask such an obvious question, people tend to assume it’s rhetorical. Mix in the traditional fear of blowing an easy question and you get silence.
Well this has turned into quite a “I can read harder stuff faster than you” pissing contest.
I guess I should have been a little bit clearer. The class meets every monday and wednesday and readings must be read on these days. Usually the reading is 100-120 pages consisting of articles and novels. To this point we have read Guns, Germs and Steel, Ain’t No Makin It, and assorted articles in 5 weeks. I don’t think the amount of reading for the class overall is unreasonable. For this assignment 200 out of around 300 pages were due on wednesday and the rest of it was due on the next monday. The main reason I was pissed and I apologize for not making this clear was that there was no reasonable explanation to have the 200 pages due on the wednesday class as opposed to the 100 due on monday,
:rolleyes: Who the hell said I couldn’t read 200 pages in 2 days? Since you seem to know all about my academic abilities would you hazard a guess as to my current GPA, ACT score, or hell even my major.
You’ll forgive me if I’m a little skeptical but I highly doubt that you had 3000 pages of reading assigned per week.
I would have to think 100 pages an hour is a little high for someone doing a thourough reading. I can’t say I have ever measured myself but if I would hazard a guess I would say I am between 50-70 pages an hour.
I’m beginning to think I’m a much slower reader than I thought I was. I can only read 30 pages of a novel per hour max. Having said that 202 pages is certainly do-able in 2 days but if it’s a boring, badly written book and you have lots of other stuff on your plate as well then I certainly couldn’t blame you if you didn’t finish it.
I read between 50-90 pages per hour (90 pages more ofetn when it’s a fun pulp novel type of thing) and I know a lot of people who read faster than me. I think that 50-70 pages is the high end in most places (so many people read glacially slow) but let’s face it—a lot of people read much faster than that. I am by far not the fastest reader in my group of friends.
I’m with griffen2 on this one. I’m nowhere near 100 pages/hr. I’m about at the 30 -60 pages/hr mark myself (depending on the book). Buckle down Treis you’ll get 'er done.
Geez Apos, to read 3000 pages per week I’d have to read 14hrs 15mins every day.
