It seems that I am finally becoming a graduate student and I’m not sure that I like it a bit!

This, my final (?) semester, took off like a jack rabbit.  I have been struggling to keep up and the work I was envisioning was crushing.  Once I realized that I was thinking of more work than was possible and talked with my metadata prof I calmed down quite a bit.

But my reading, and admittedly it is a lot, has been suffering.  I haven’t even been reading much in the way of "extraneous" materials.  I haven’t read a word of Buddenbrooks for my Mimesis seminar which meets next Monday.  So, even ignoring the loss of "extraneous" reading, I haven’t been able to keep up.  I didn’t get much more than 10% of the things for my 3 classes read this week thanks to the TEI workshop all weekend!  Guess what?  The world did not end.  Nonetheless, I do not like the situation.

Many of my peers make fun of me for trying to read everything.  Some of them have formed reading groups where they split up the reading assignments for each week and then meet the hour before class to go over them.  Makes sense.  Just not for me.  I could see reading them and then discussing them amongst ourselves first, but not relying on others to read them for me.

I know.  I know.  It is supposedly one of the elemental rules of survival in grad school.  It’s just not one of my rules for survival.  The important point though is, although I am unhappy about slacking in my reading, I am coping with it very well.

But then the coping worries me.  What kind of student am I going to turn into if I can live without reading what I’ve been assigned?  I have finally become an outstanding student; now is not the time to be learning that I can "berry pick" my assigned readings.

On a related front, I am learning to skim certain things.  And that is a good thing. 

In all of this, I am making two assumptions: (1) Instructors are assigning relevant readings, and (2) some things are meant to be skimmed.  This is not high school or even undergrad education; if my instructors assigned irrelevant readings they would hear about it from me.  Oh, I guess there is a third assumption.  Just because something isn’t discussed in class has no bearing on whether it was relevant to read it.  That little bugaboo is a major gripe of many of my peers.  They are of the opinion that if it isn’t discussed in class (or on a test) then it is irrelevant and just simply stupid to waste time reading it.  I understand that idea from an efficiency/time management perspective; but then I reject it on every other count. 

One is not able to read everything.  But that has no bearing on whether it is relevant to you or not.  And to deem something unworthy of your time because it is not to be discussed in class or on the test seems to me to be a serious form of self-denigration.  Are you not capable of learning from the text itself?