ENG 330: Readings by Time Spent

I assign medieval text readings by time spent, not by pages covered.

Medieval performance seem to me to have been, for the most part, made to be enjoyed in part. Spectators might wander by well after the action had begun; they might leave before it ended; they might attend to the entertainment in varied and variable ways throughout. These are not novels: their meaning and power does not rely on any revelations toward the end. The undergraduate pressure to “get through it and get it done” is ill fit to these works.

And even if I were teaching novels, I would prefer to have my discussions populated by students who had engaged closely with most of the text than by those who had skimmed quickly through all of it. See here for a fuller description of engaged reading.

On our course schedule, each reading has an average reading time assigned, along with a “no more than” time limit and an “at least” time minimum. There’s no enforcement for these reading policies, but if you don’t follow them steadily, you’ll fall irretrievably behind and mess up some core learning objectives — trust me. Set a timer and keep to it.

If you reach the “no more than” time limit and aren’t done with the full text, stop anyway.

I’ve been teaching this course for a long time now. Students who obsess over getting the text “fully” to the point where they spend hours parsing Middle English — or students whose low-key shame about being a slow reader drives them to just “stick it out” until they drop — end up burning out, hating Middle English, and losing the spirit of the readings to the degree that their Middle English comprehension plummets. Overdoing it just doesn’t help. Be patient and trust in the process.

If you reach the end of the full text before the “at least” time, go back and read more deeply.

Speed-reading is generally inimical to close reading. The kind of work we’ll do in my classes relies increasingly on the latter. You may get the gist of the reading if you go quickly (you probably won’t with medieval plays), but you’re not in a university English course for gists — getting the gist, or the basic Sparknotesy summary, is akin to the heresy of paraphrase. Learn to enjoy literature, to relish in it — otherwise, what are you doing here?

This method also helps me avoid over-assigning readings and forces me to leave time for writing assignments.

There is no set university standard for how much work to assign in an undergraduate class. But it seems to me that a student who has enrolled in 5 university courses should expect to be putting in hours of work equivalent to a full-time job — that is, a 40-hour week — which, divided across 5 classes, means 8 hours of work per class per week, inclusive of time spent in class.

For a class with 3 hours of weekly meeting time, then (say, a two-hour class on Monday and a one-hour class on Wednesday), it seems to me that there should be 5 hours of reading per week, spread out so that there is more reading to do during longer weekly breaks between classes (say, 3.5 hours of reading before the Monday class, but 1.5 hours before the Wednesday class).

From there, in the weeks leading up to an assignment deadline — when time should be subtracted from reading to allow for time put in on writing and researching — I gradually ease off of the reading requirement, assigning less and less reading, until the final week when a project is due (when I assign minimal or no reading).