I have as of today certainly become someone who will say, first, that he hasn't done the reading [...] and then talk more than anyone else.
Mouseover?
I have been astoundingly good about doing the reading for all my classes this new semester, but then again that's because I have Leechblocked Unfogged and most blogs between 10 am and 7 pm. Sigh.
It's a firefox extension that walks your dog and has seven configurable options.
4: don't sell it short. It's a firefox extension that teaches you to love you children again. It's a firefox extension that makes the sun shine. It's a firefox extension that saves babies from burning buildings. It's a firefox extension that makes driving 100% safe.
It's for the very weak-willed but not for the faint of heart. I've been noticing a decline in my fiction/poetry reading (on top of class reading/dissertation reading) because of blogs, so I'm like, do I really have to read so many law blogs? No. And yes. But no.
Yeah, but only if you configure it correctly, Sifu.
Is there a game called "I'd rather"? Because I'd rather _____ than write up this, even though this is something every article/book should answer, because this might be as hard as coming up with a research design or operationalizing your variables:
"Please write a brief overview of how you are framing this question. This is a trickier question than it looks like at first glance, given the interdisciplinary nature of much of the work that law and society scholars do. Questions to consider as you contemplate this section include: in general, what intellectual domain(s) does your question fall in? Who is likely to be the potential audience(s)? What kinds of scholars do you see, even at this early data, as your intellectual peer group? Who are they by social location--other social scientists, legal scholars, scholars in other disciplines, the educated public? If they are other scholars, what discipline are they mainly from? What journals do they mainly read? What books do they (and you) see as having made breakthroughs in this area? Please note that in a final proposal, this particular assignment usually fades into the background, informing, in different ways, all of the other assignments."
How does one cock a suck wizard? Is it like cocking a rifle?
Oh, and what I'm interested in, W-lfs-n, is the recipe for your apple quince tart.
1. peel, core and slice apples and quinces.
2. roll out some dough.
3. put the slices in.
4. fold the edges of the dough over. You probably want to dot the exposed fruit with butter.
5. put it in the oven.
0. preheat the oven to something that seems reasonable.
6. remove after what seems like a reasonable amount of time.
How does one cock a suck wizard? Is it like cocking a rifle?
It's kind of like sucking a fuck.
13 is, at best, marginally responsive to 11.
14 is, at best, marginally responsive to 12.
Huh. No magic spice mixture. Ok, that I can do.
17 is, at best, marginally responsive....oh, never mind.
Oh, right, I forgot that.
1.5 mix the fruit with some spices.
Don't forget to add lots of salt, and a handful of thyme. Thyme is very important to apple quince tart.
I like my apple quince tart with propionic acid.
You forgot the sauerkraut.
max
['And the potatoes.']
Quinces smell divine. It is worth purchasing a quince just to have it around, so that one can occasionally smell it.
I'm wondering if cheese might work in ben's tart (heh). Cheddar maybe?
Quince is poisonous to horses, evidently.
It's for the very weak-willed but not for the faint of heart.
The very, very weak-willed may discover that they can easily get around leechblock by temporarily changing the time-settings on their computers. I was really productive for about a day or so, though.
temporarily changing the time-settings on their computers
I just discovered this while visiting the west coast. Oops. There goes the dissertation.
Explain to me, exactly, how any of this bullshit applies to someone who has done the fucking reading. I take the Shearer approach to academics: engage in education and can't hack it? Fuck you, pay me.Can't do the reading? Fuckyou, pay me. And when it's all done, when there's nothing of your left to lose, you torch the place. It's a fuckin shame.
Fuck you, pay me
It would appear that FM has been reading "9 Life Lessons Every Guy Can Learn From Goodfellas".
30: I read more now that I have basically switched departments from law to sociology and organizational behavior/industrial relations. First year law students panic like crazy and read and case brief everything. Then, by 2L and 3L year, you learn that you can coast through most classes with a hornbook (a law equivalent of Cliff's Notes) and paying attention in class. Sad, but true. You might learn more that way, too, since law school doesn't actually prepare you for anything. Certain classes require more intensive reading though, like (and some may disagree with me) administrative law, which I'm taking now, and I'm finding it impossible to get by in this course, particularly the way it's taught, without reading/outlining everything. Last time I felt so engaged by a pure law course was employment discrimination, which is now the basis for my career.
But yeah, in other departments, reading is useful in those seminars. Certainly, for learning, which is actually not necessarily the case in law school! Sometimes, I think the reading and the classes get in the way of learning. But there was a thread about this in a legal academic blog, in which JD/PhDs will marvel at how _little_ law students have to read compared to grad students, and yet how much they complain and how long they spend. But then some of the social science PhDs piped up that they basically read the intro, conclusion/findings, and the tables of data and skipped the rest, and others said that you didn't have to read it as carefully because the unstructured seminar doesn't have the same specific cold-call questions that the semi-Socratic style of law schools does.
THe problem with grad school seminars is that most of the reading is not actually discussed in class (even for a 2 hour class, too short), and hardly any of it will be useful for the paper you have to write at the end, which is supposed to be of publishable quality but never is. Also, if you're an interloper like me, you don't need to read everything for a qualifying exam. I'm reading because I'm only taking classes that are useful to my dissertation, but I can sort of understand why grad students in other departments might gloss over some of the reading in their required courses. I knew lots of modernist English grad students who really hated having to take Chaucer, a hatred I didn't agree with but understand, as my senior year of reqs basically killed any desire of going to English grad school.
Certain classes require more intensive reading though, like...administrative law
Who do those unelected bureaucrats think they are, anyway?
The approach in 32 to law school makes sense, if the purpose of law school is to get out of law school. If, on the other hand, one wants to be able to handle whatever situation clients not yet imaginable might bring to the office, doing the reading -- and following up with the note cases -- is a whole lot more useful than listening to one's fellows talk about how skimming the reading made them feel.
For four or five years, I read every non-criminal decision from the DC Circuit, as they came out. (That was back in the old days, when opinions were printed on a substance called "paper.") That's a great way to learn administrative law, but, you know, only for someone who's actually going to be doing it.
Not that I don't think BWo's contributions to class discussion are riveting.
I've heard several of my English friends who take classes in the Philosophy or History departments claim that students from those departments never seem to have done the reading, like, that it seems to be expected that they will not have done more than skim the material for the day. I have been chalking this up to the fact that English students read differently from other kinds of humanities students, and, accordingly, English profs don't tend to assign a thousand pages a week. I don't think we're necessarily "better" readers, but if what you're used to looking at is prose and its relationship to meaning, there's no way in hell you're going to even peek at a "guide" to Hegel when you've been assigned to read Hegel.
I had a friend in college named Quince. Then I lost track of him for a decade before I noticed him in a bit part in Shortbus.
re: 36
I'm not sure. I've studied both English and Philosophy and I don't think you can generalise that easily. I did a lot of skimming in English classes -- 10 - 14 novels over a 10 week term will do that to you. Equally, there are pieces of philosophy that I've read more closely than anything I ever read in English.
It depends on the material and the course.
At graduate level I probably skimmed a lot more just because the quantity of material to get through was pretty huge. I _wrote_ nearly 200,000 words over a period of about 18 months. I have absolutely no idea how many words I read, but a fucking lot.
Skim, note the hard bits, go back, read them again. Doesn't everyone mostly work that way?
counted average how many words i wrote last 11 mo of my unfogged participation, got something 82080, if to multiply the monthly output to 18 mo, something like 125K, wow, nearing graduation
i've read an article on procrastination and AWARE study, got really like calm now so sitting reading unfogged
from that article Death is a moment - you know you're either dead or alive.
nice funny sentence
Quince makes lovely schnapps.
I have a half-empty bottle of Quittenbrand not four feet away from me! It has a very curious flavor.
I don't think we're necessarily "better" readers, but if what you're used to looking at is prose and its relationship to meaning, there's no way in hell you're going to even peek at a "guide" to Hegel when you've been assigned to read Hegel.
I'm sorry, are you saying that the English students do better on this score?
I'm sorry, are you saying that the English students do better on this score?
I said, in the line you quoted, I was not saying they were better. I was just noting that there is a difference in how we read, but that it seems to be related to what our disciplines typically expect during classes.
The relevant score need not have been "being a reader".
From what I've gathered, English profs come far closer to assigning a thousand pages a week than a Philosophy prof ever would. Your comment reads like one from Bizzaro U to me.
Sounds like Ben needs a bit of quince schnapps.
I used to really piss off a classmate for engaging in the behavior ben describes (although I would never admit to not having read the material). Usually it only took about 3 comments from others before I was able to talk about the article itself, not just its larger implications.
This was an architectural history seminar, btw. I was quite diligent about reading for English classes, but then I was taking them as an avocation, so it made no sense to scrimp.
re: 44
From what I've gathered, English profs come far closer to assigning a thousand pages a week than a Philosophy prof ever would. Your comment reads like one from Bizzaro U to me.
Yeah, that was my experience too [having studied both subjects].
The option was there in philosophy to read a lot but it wasn't expected that you would. If you read literally everything on a course reading list it would take superhuman effort to do so and not skim. But the expectation was you'd read the key readings -- clearly marked -- and dip into some of the other stuff.
Whereas in English there was no way to avoid it, if this week it was some brick of a novel, that's what you had to read.
IME, philosophy profs assign a lot of reading, but not ludicrous amounts; it was nearly always possible to read the whole assignment and even re-read the hard bits if I applied myself (which I didn't always do). By contrast, the political theory seminar I took from a famous political science prof who shares my last name involved absurd amounts of reading, and it was even worse that most of the students in the seminar were from the poli-sci department and pretty scared of reading all that philosophy. You can't make Arendt's Human Condition a single week's reading and expect people to read the whole thing. And apparently poli-sci students aren't as practiced at bullshitting as philosophy students are, because I ended up doing what Ben describes in his post for most of the semester.
You have arrived, Ben!
I love you now.
36: History students are expected to be poring through primary sources at all hours to establish their cred. The assigned readings are important, but the research much more so. (There's research in EngLit too, but it's a different beast entirely.) In History, any kind of readings on "theory" and textual interpretation and suchlike is at best a chore, at worst something that the profession itself regards with no small amount of suspicion and disdain. I remember once participating in an interdisciplinary discussion about Edward Said's Cultural Imperialism with a group of History profs who very clearly hadn't read beyond the preface. I was shocked at the time, but that was before I realized the full extent of the angst (overblown but not always unjustified) that historians feel about the encroachment of Cultural Studies on their turf.
I once told a philosophy seminar about a political science syllabus I had seen where someone had assigned Hume's Treatise for the week. Everyone laughed, and then I had to explain to the English Ph.D. student why that was funny.