Why Johnny Won't Read

I love the smell of a new textbook, the sort of bleachy, chemical headiness that comes only from the freshest of soy ink and the slickest of paper. I love the charts, the maps, the illustrations, the fonts, and the chapter headings. Then there's the promise that floats over every book, that by the time you finish reading through its pages, you will know something that is shared only by the people who have thought deeply about the subject of the book, whatever it is.

This love is almost undiscriminating. I adore history books, particularly those about the history of small things, like clothing or cookware or farming tools. I lust after cookbooks, much to the chagrin of one of my professors, and I long for books about Paris and architecture. I want every book on Greek philosophy ever written, and I have a panting desire for biographies of obscure poets and famous clothing designers. A used book store can make me almost faint from all the siren calls from the mystery and literature sections. Mathematics, on the other hand, are not my thing.

In other words, my T-shirt should read: "English Major: You do the math." I have no warmth for numbers and sometimes ask store clerks to count out the coins I hand them because I just never got the hang of counting change. But even I could tell when a social sciences professor tried to put one over on his class. Names are being withheld to protect the not-so-innocent PhD who had the nerve sometime in the past two years to tell our class that he would be assigning "under 100 pages every week, so you shouldn't have any trouble getting the reading done." This was right after he had distributed a syllabus that made it clear that the reading for the first week totalled over 130 pages. We could see in black-and-white that he seemed to think that if 70 pages were due on Monday, and another 75 were due on Friday, that somehow came to 100 a week.

Even to an English major, this seemed a little outlandish.

So, if you take my advice and enroll in even one class, consider your reading workload and make room for it in your life. Consider renting your textbooks and invest heavily in Post-its, so you can make extensive notes.

A lot of traditional students do the math, totalling up all their class reading assignments, and then hyperventilate for a while before they go off to buy some pizza and a few beers. Most of the assigned reading on a college campus these days doesn't get done because of professors like the one I mentioned a few paragraphs ago. Be prepared, do the page counts, and use the professor's office hours to help him check his math. And then discuss the reading with him, so he knows you're doing it. No matter what his research grants say, that's what he's there for, and that's what your tuition is paying for.

Looks like it's time for me to go read a novel.