Jeebus you people are being assholes to poor treis. You know, it ought to possible for someone to vent about having a lot to do, particular if they are getting it done in any case, without that person getting any of the following responses:
(a) oh, so you ASSUMED you had to do it after this class. ASSUMED! ASSUMED ASSUMED ASSUMED!!!
(b) I read twice that much every morning before breakfast
© You’ll never hack it in the real world with that attitude, you stupid loser who is stupid
(d) Your writing and grammar suck
(e) I mean, they really suck, you stupid loser
(f) Why the fuck are you wasting time posting? You could have read 583 pages in the time it took you to read this post!
(g) Everything else you said is wrong, also
(h) What, you didn’t preread the syllabi for all of your classes and plan everything by divvying up heavier assignments and doing them ahead of time, at the minor cost of having no social life or meals or sleep? Well, YOU’RE certainly doomed to a life of poverty and failure in the real world, you stupid loser
(i) I hate you
It depends on what you mean by continuation of action. If you mean staying in the moment and experiencing the book I would say one or two sittings is best. However this is predicated on the book being well written with a compelling plot which is not the case in this book. If the point of the novel is to glean some sort information and critically analyize you can only read so much at a time. In this case I sat down and read for about 4 hours with one or two 5 minute breaks. There were instances where I was reading but I wasn’t exactly comprehending or thinking about the text. Its as though a fog descends on my brain and information just doesn’t get to the right place to be stored. I am fairly confused on the nature of relations between the writer and the other charecters in this book. The worst part of it is keeping straight who belongs to what ethnic/social class
My suggestion, and you can do with it as you wish, is to find a redacted version of the book. I somewhat doubt, for this particular class, that remembering what color someone’s hair was (unless it’s symbolic) is as important as remembering the key issues in class struggles or whatnot. Perhaps there’s a sparknotes do-up of it? Granted we’re not talking graduate-level analysis, but it’s at least a decent starting point assuming you’ve read the book (which it appears you have done, from this thread:D).
Since you’re wondering about the reason for the readings as they’re scheduled, I’d go to the prof and ask about it. It might be that same prof figured you’d be swamped with material for other classes and was doing you a favor by assigning something bulky when your courseload was otherwise light. Or it’s possible that same prof scheduled it for a time when he’d have enough time to properly schedule a lesson plan to reflect the bulk of material.
It might interest you to know that people do not so much react when they see someone whining as when they see someone whining for less than a good reason. I pitted an english prof of mine (more on his own behalf, really) a year or two ago … his take-home final consisted of fifteen essays. You read that right. 15. By the end, they were more thoughtful considerations than anything (200 words an essay does not make, unless you’re six). I got some support, but the thing was that 1) “The exam will be take-home, and it will be structured like this:” was not on the syllabus and 2) it was really rather sprung on us and 3) it made life difficult for him, since we had essentially a few days to do it and he had to have grades in the day after (if that late) the finals were due. By my figuring, I believe there were 15 students in the class at least. Assuming they each took the “easy” road (15 essays instead of 16), that’s 225 essays to read in 24 hours. Assuming 300 words per essay (my beginning ones were more than mere thoughtful considerations, but toward the end I was essentially short story-dropping), that’s 67.5K words to read in 24 hours. Assuming 250 words per page (he didn’t impose page limits, he figured when we were done writing, there was no point writing more), that’s 270 pages. And that’s not professional writing, that’s undergrad writing. That’s in addition to whatever else he had to do. I really pitied him more than I pitted him.
Seriously, though, if you learn nothing else: read your syllabi (I’ve heard the proper plural is syllabuses, but I’ve yet to see confirmation) ahead of time. Ask questions about stuff outside of class. Contact and develop rapports with your profs and they will likely be more lenient with you if you have several pressing deadlines/issues (especially if one of them is personal), because they like you are human and they recognize that life does not always go as you plan it out. Do yourself favors and you might not next time find yourself skimming 200 pages of a novel in a night or two:)
Treis, the more you practice reading, the more your reading skills will develop. The same can be said for time management skills, adaptation skills, etc. Rather than gripe about the unfairness of having to read under time pressure, look at the assignments as challenges that will help you develop important skills.
Frankly, your complaint is laughable.
Sigh oh yes, yes. I’m glad I’m not the only one.
What’s really sad is that most of my fellow students fall behind in the reading (I’m not going to name names because you don’t know any of them anyway) and have to make up four or five hundred in a day or weekend.
I’ve gotten to where some of the judicial opinions will make me laugh. They are all so dull that when the humanity of the writer shows through I can’t help but laugh. And I like reading them, too, so I’m doubly crazy.
I was an English major in undergrad. I remember one memorable class where I had to read a novel by Mark Twain, research it, write a short paper, and know the book thoroughly by every Thursday. That was in concurrence with other classes like American Lit and Creative Writing, which had their own heavy workloads. Don’t even talk to me about reading.
Oh yeah, and they were all written on the backs of matchbooks and hidden in secret caverns, and I had to carry this ring and there were ogres and…
:rolleyes: Hey I know why don’t we take one rant and make a whole shitload of assumptions about my skills. There is no possible way that I could have been pissed off about finding that I had to read about 100 pages more than I expected. There is no possible way that I wanted to just rant and let off a little steam before sitting down to read right? Why don’t we also just ignore the other parts of the rant that show that I am actually in fact a good student?
Lets see what else people have assumed and told me about myself in this thread:
- I am just going to skim the reading
- I am going to die in a real class
- I should go ahead and drop out and enroll in a vocational school
- I expect everything to be spoon fed to me
- My writing is atrocious
- I need to improve my reading, time management, and adaption (whatever the hell those are) skills.
So lets see what we got here.
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Would I be bitching about how much reading it is if I only intended to skim it?
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Well sir, I think I have taken a few “real” classes up to this point and I think I am doing fairly well.
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I suppose I could do that or I suppose that I could stick to my plan of graduating in 3 years (total) with my degree.
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I gotta say that I found out pretty quick that if you plan on sitting in class doing the crossword puzzle teachers aren’t too gung ho on helping. That hasn’t stopped me from excelling and school and I don’t anticipate a down turn in my performance.
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I can’t argue that my grammar and sentence structure has been piss-poor at best. Its also quite a leap to assume that I can’t write essays with correct grammar and well thought out arguements from a single rant.
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My reading comprehension and speed is fine as it is. I thouroughly read 200 pages in a little under 4 hours with two 5 minute breaks. That comes out around 50-60 pages per hour which I would say is at least a bit above average. As for my time management skills you have no idea what other commitments I have, my class load, nor my schedule. I finished the reading well before when I wanted to go to sleep which in my book means good time management.
I bitched about the reading and I still think it was too much but I still fucking did it for christsakes. In fact there is a good chance that I was the only one in the class that did read it. Out of the 7 people I talked to in a class of 25 I was the only one that did. A lot of people in this thread need to be careful stepping off their high horse. Us lowly mortals that can’t read 4000 pages in a week or more than 100-150 in a night have a right to rant too.
Not when the words are misspelled.
But Treis, if your skills were up to snuff, an extra 100 pages of novel reading would not even make your radar.
The OP probably doesn’t want to hear from those of us who have been to grad school. In many of my urban planning classes, we’d have to read an entire book every week … and write a 15 to 20 page paper on an issue that is somewhat related to that book’s contents. Made me long for those 100-word paper days of early elementary school.
What the…?!? I’d guess the OP doesn’t want to hear about your 20 page papers because this argument was raised by someone on the first page a month ago, when this thread died.
Fucking zombie threads.
Actually, it’s not an assumption when the proof is sitting right in front of us.
You fucked up. You didn’t read the syllabus, the length of an assignment caught you off guard. Now you know what to do in the future so that doesn’t happen.
Go do your homework.
Ava
Doubt away. The whole point of my program was like a boot camp for academics. 3000 was the most I ever had, true, but usually it easily ranged in the 2000+ area, including several thick books and things like journal articles for analysis. This is because we were expected to read so many primary texts for several classes, and then condense that information down into short papers on the week’s theme. Given that most people can read comprehensively at 100 pages an hour, it really only boils down to 25 hours or so a week, which is pretty light work given that most real working people work at lest twice that amount a week.
Since this thread is nearly a month old I think it should sink back into the oblivion from whence it came.
TVeblen