Reading Assignments

Photo source: Portugalthegirl

If I had to give somebody one piece of advice about coming to study at Columbia College, it would be 'beware of the reading assignments' because there are a lot of them. And guess what - you kind of have to do them!


This is not to say that we do not get reading assignments at Bath Spa.  I was explaining just the other day that if you take Prose, Writing For Young People or Sudden Prose (to name a few) you will be expected to have read for each of the classes. Often times these will be whole novels that you are expected to read each week and so if you have more than one class with these requirements you can be tempted to bluff your way out of these situations.  I remember once in first year a friend of mine had not read the assigned book, not naming anyone Tom, but managed to talk at length about 'what he had taken from the text' and at one point managed to correct the lecturer on a mistake she'd made when referencing the one page he had glanced that.  As someone who genuinely had taken a lot from Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles it was all a little baffling. Not that I'm bitter or anything.
Something that I really enjoyed at Bath Spa were the discussions we would then have about the work, especially in my Writing For Young People class, when we got to discuss whether aspects of the book were appropriate for the audience, stylistic devices, why some people loved the work and why some people detested it.


In my Fiction 1 class we read the opening two movements of Richard Wright's Native Son, 50 pages at a time.  We did not always discuss what we had read but we are able to describe moments that caught our attention during re-call.  I could not tell you if everybody had actually done the assigned reading, or even why we were not expected to finish the entire novel, but reading it a small amount at a time did make it a lot easier. It also means we had a much more drawn out discussion period if we wanted to talk about the text as we had weeks and weeks instead one one. Something else I also really enjoy from this class is that as well as the long running reading assignments, Native Son and Writing From Start To Finish, we are also set at least two short stories to read each week.  This has the effect of breaking up the text and making it a lot less daunting.


Something both Bath Spa and Columbia have in common is the 'pop quiz'.  These are always often enough to ensure you have at least thought of doing the reading and sporadic enough that you never quite know when the next one is coming.  One class that did buck this trend however was Sudden Prose at Bath Spa.  The reading was required each week and (but I might be wrong here) I think there were reading quizzes every week.  One was definitely a written response, our own flash fiction inspired by one we'd read, but the others would ask a question and you were able to discuss a couple of flash fictions that had stuck most in your mind.  Unlike the other classes these were also counting toward our final grade rather than just ensuring we were keeping up with our out-of-class reading. As a student this did mean I was more aware of whether I had read or not and was also an easy way of spreading out the graded work through the academic year.


A lot of students complain that the amount of assigned reading they have to do for their classes and that because of the length of their classes they only ever have a superficial conversation. But there does have to come a point, especially as writing students that we have to stop expecting our class discussions to tell us what insight we've gleaned from the reading.  We should be reading everything we can, all of the time, without expecting to be spoon fed afterwards.


What's the old saying?  You can't teach talent?  Well it's true but you also can't teach 'how to read your assignments'.  You've just go to do it.