:rolleyes: What, put it off until the last possible minute?
I would feel sorry for you, but there’s a 99.999% chance you brought it on yourself.
Ha! This always gets me. My Mathmatics teacher for instance will be writing stuff on the board and then ask the class how to do a simple problem, like distribution or something that we learned years ago. Of course the class sits there, dead silent, nobody answering due to the sheer inanity of the question. She then turn around when nobody answers in 3 milliseconds, and scolds us for not knowing simple Math 40 stuff. This happens about four or five times in a 50 minute class period.
Oh, and for Og’s sake, learn your classes. I know you might have one or two other classes to teach this semester, but at least know which class you are in for the day, what days that particular class meets, and where they are in the lesson. You get paid for this stuff Mrs Junior college Math teacher.
If anyone deserves to get drunk, it’s you. Congratulations!
Meh, back in my day, we had to read the entire Encyclopaedia Brittanica in a fortnight. And it was written on stone tablets. And we had to carry the entire set to class every day. My back kills me.
In the dark. With an oil lamp held between your teeth.
Bolding mine.
You suppose you should have been responsible, treis? You suppose? There would be substantially less tooth to your duck of a rant had you RTFM ahead of time.
Looks to me as though you were not, contrary to your OP claim, expected to read 202 pages in two nights, though you at least implicitly accept that fact later in the first quote. It still doesn’t validate the last sentence of the second part, though.
Given your definition of unreasonable (which is, more than anything, CYA for “I didn’t read the syllabus like a good little student!”), I’m gonna personally wait until the jury comes out on the stupidity of the assignment.
Oh, Derleth, here’s that .001% chance you were missing; I did put the reading off, but I knew full well about it (because A: the prof covered it in class, but more importantly B: I RTFM in class and more than once after that) and I set aside a night to do it and the incredibly annoying, but pathetic, journal entries expected of it.
I’m guessing Apos went to medical school. Now, in law school, we only had to read about 120-160 pages per day, every day. But then again, our reading wasn’t anything as interesting as a novel. Judicial opinions, day in and day out. Saying that the reading was dry and boring is like saying that the Elephant Man had a little puffiness around the eyes.
There are a few possibilities here: (a) your math is really bad, (b) you burned a day doing nothing knowing you had a reading assignment that you hadn’t looked at or (c) my math is really bad.
As a now-graduated English major, and as someone who has made friends with more than a few teachers, I can assure you that there is likely a perfectly valid reason why the teacher assigned the reading in this way. Professors are often hard-pressed to fit all the material needed to cover the course in the time allotted to them. I mean, think about it; you’re covering the bases of sociology in a mere few months. That’s a lot of ground to cover in a relatively short period of time.
The professor probably has a pretty good idea of how much time is needed to cover everything. If everything in the class works out that you finish the previous topic/book/whatever on Monday, the next reading is going to be due on Wednesday. Given how the novel might be arranged–what novel is it, btw?–it might make more sense to read the first 2/3 together than to read the last 2/3 together, especially in a novel where there’s a thematic shift or a shift in setting or time or what-have-you at that point. The end result is that 202 pages are due to be read in one night. That sucks, yeah, but it might be perfectly valid.
This isn’t to say that the professors are always 100% spot-on this way. Shadez and I had a class where we had to read 20 modern plays in one month. While it was nice to be able to compare all the plays for the rest of the semester, it did mean that I skimmed a lot of them the first time through (or, in the case of “The Ghost Sonata,” read about 1/4 of the play before throwing it across the room). Sometimes, professors can be misguided. I’ve learned to give them the benefit of the doubt on this sort of thing, though. They’ve earned it.
shrug I guess it depends what you mean by expected. The professor has assigned readings for each class that are typically 100 or so pages. I would figure that he expects us to read each assignment between the previous class and the one that its due in.
We had class today and he made a passing reference to the reading in an example he used. As far as I can tell there was no reason why we couldn’t have had just half of the book due for wednesday and the other half for next monday.
Yeah I understand that and like I said before I don’t mind the overall amount of reading for the class it was just this particular assignment. I can’t say I have been happy with the last two choices he has made for books to read. The first one Guns, Germs, and Steel is an excellent book that covers the basis of the roots of society. The last two books we have read don’t really seem to be adding anything to the class except providing a fairly interesting situation. The book we are currently reading is Life on the Color Line which is biography about a guy that was raised until about 8 as a white child and then was raised as a black child thereafter.
treis, you’re shooting your own argument down.
How does this:
even get enforced? Does the professor hang on to the material until the day it’s assigned and then hand it out? If it’s just a book you can get anywhere, I don’t see how they’d make you wait until the day it’s assigned. What, is there some sort of “reading ahead” detector on all the books?
So, since you mentioned it’s a novel, and you yourself said
this implies you can, in fact, read ahead. Again, this makes no sense, unless the first bit I quoted means “all material assigned for a day must be read by that day.” In that case we’re back to Monkey With A Gun’s hypothesis that you REALLY need to work on your writing to make it understandable.
And no, I’m not trying to be a smartass and pick out small grammatical errors in order to give myself an ego-boo or something stupid. It’s just that I honestly did read that, several times, as “readings assigned on a day must be read on that day,” i.e. - no reading ahead, you have to wait till it’s assigned. Maybe I’m stupider than anyone else because I didn’t get it while it was perfectly obvious to everyone else. But still - you need to be more careful with your words.
Oh, and 100 pages a night isn’t unreasonable at all. Not for college.
All I can add, it that anyone who thinks that 200 pages in 2 days is excessive shouldn’t plan on going to Grad School.
We normally have a sort of pop-quiz at the beginning of the class. I say sort of pop-quiz becuase we more often than not have a quiz and I think the quizzes are like 10-20% of our overall grade. When I say the readings must be read (past tense) on these days I mean that they must be read as in completed by these dates. I don’t mean that we must read (present tense) them on the assigned date.
Yes I can in fact read ahead but there its a fairly clear expectation that we are supposed to read the assigned readings between the class they are due and the previous one. We have had another fairly large reading assignment and the professor said something along the lines of I know it was a lot of reading but it had to be done some time. The difference in that case was that the assigned reading was due on a monday which gave us the weekend to finish it.
The other meaning didn’t occur to me when I was writing it and I see the ambiguity now. It would have been much clearer if I had said read by these dates as opposed to saying we must have them read on these dates.
So you assumed, based on what you had of yet read in the syllabus, that the assignments would be uniform in length? That’s your error, not his, and to rant about your prof for this is misplaced; you should be blaming yourself for not taking five minutes out of some day since you’ve gotten the syllabus and … reading it.
The prof may expect that you will do the reading two days before it’s due, but that doesn’t make that time frame a requirement. Would he have punished you for doing your work ahead of time?
Have you read ahead in the syllabus? Is it possible that there are several large assignments coming up and he wanted to try and break things down as reasonably as he could?
Weekend’s coming up; you might want to look further down the syllabus than Monday.
Good lord, you nailed it. Some of my graduate level English courses were excessive. On a light week, we’d only have about double that.
Reading 200 pages in two days?
Oh please!
I have to surf though Web ‘pages’ that, when printed out, are about 400 pages long, just to find relevant information.
Ctrl-F is your friend, my friend.
/d & r
Lucky me i just had text reading in my soc class, i doubt we covered 200 pages in the semester. I think colleges may do that because they think the humanities classes are too easy so they overload. My brother had to read a novel a week in his lit class but in the science classes there is barely 30 pages a week of material. Just hope you don’t get a science class with 200 pages in 2 days.
PS, the posters on SD are like sharks sniffing blood. if one jumps in pretty soon they all do.
I did look at the syllabus and the largest remaining reading of the quarter is the 100 pages due monday. After that the next largest is only 30 which causes me to scratch my head a bit.
Aww they’re not that bad just don’t expect any pity from them until you are moaning about dissertations or thesis papers
Thats the thing though these are intro classes and are mainly taken as GECs. By and large they are supposed to be fairly easy.
If you’re reading a book with a plot (as opposed to, say, a science text), which of the following manners of reading would cause you to retain more in the way of continuation of action:
- Reading it in two stints
- Reading it in 30-page bits
Hey, maybe I’m wrong. I just know that if read a 200-page book over two weeks I probably would be more confused than if I read it in one or two sittings.