dragonbook

31 UNIT V LEARNING TO READ ALL OVER AGAIN APPROACHING PRIMARY AND SECONDARY SOURCES When I was an undergraduate, I didn’t much like lecture classes. Listening to a lecture seemed to me an awfully inefficient way of getting the information I wanted. Just give me a book! I’ll learn a lot more in an hour’s reading than I ever will listening to a lecturer. Besides, even if the speaker is excellent (and most aren’t), it’s hard to listen to anyone talk more than 30 minutes or so without getting bored. Now following the principle of “do unto others,” I probably shouldn’t base my classes so much on lectures. The odd thing is that most of my students have exactly the reverse opinion. They like the lecture format! Many of them would prefer that everything was lecture-based and that they didn’t have to do any reading at all. I am amazed at the number of students who never even look at the relevant pages in the Chodorow text—pages that I would have found more helpful than any lecture. Much less surprising to me is the difficulty students often have with primary sources. Even students who like to read sometimes find primary sources tough going. A few years ago, my daughter Miranda took by Western Civilization II class. Miranda is a bright student, and she reads everything. In junior high, she was reading Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy for fun. Certainly a student who would like things like Descartes’ Discourse on Method, yes? Wrong. She was furious with me for making her read the Discourse. Her quiz was a diatribe against Descartes, basically telling me the guy made no sense at all. And for months, if I so much as mentioned Descartes, I’d get from her a rant on how absolutely awful the guy was.