I think, though, that you’ve side stepped my point a little, which was more about the effects of unrealistic expectations combined with unrealistic work loads than about the objective value of teaching students to quickly grasp the gist of an academic argument (I agree with you on that point).

From my perspective, the one-hour reading timeline is ridiculously over-optimistic. I got some new books today, and I tried a perusal of the index, not actually writing the page numbers, but noting the entries according to your steps 2-4. It took me 8 minutes to get from A to C. Optimistically this leaves me 1/2 an hour to read the introduction and the conclusion (a total of 63 pages) “carefully”. I take “carefully” to mean, basically, that you have a strong grasp of what the author is saying, understand to some degree why they are saying it, and grasp the logical processes of their arguments. Honestly my “careful” reading speed is around 2-6 minutes per page, depending on my familiarity with the material, which puts me at 2-6 hours just to get through the intro and the conclusion. I have really tried to increase that, but the truth is that my comprehension plummets at 30s-1minute per page.

The reason that I brought up the whole emotional/educational demands argument was because of your own description of your course load as an “otherwise gratuitous display of pedagogical power”, and I suspect that it is the rather cavalier attitude towards your students needs (which in turn I suspect was more to add some humour or levity to the article than any actual callous disregard on your part) that has left some of the commenters here making such strong statements.

However, there is something there in your first paragraph that I think needs to be addressed generally. I think that what we lose touch with as we progress through the academic ranks is how poorly prepared we often are for what is expected of us after transitions (1st year undergrad, 1st year grad, etc.), and how difficult the process of learning how to learn can be. The sentiment behind what you’ve said here is good–students should get some guidance in how to aproach the mounds of information in our world–but the way that we take this sentiment and turn it into teaching needs to be done with careful attention to the level of the students, to the tools that we can realistically expect them to have, and with attention to where idealized methods for learning break down. If you suggest to your students that they should be able to read a book in one hour, you are placing a tremendous personal responsibility on them to handle what you admit is an ambitious course load at best. When they are unable to do it (a near certainty) if you haven’t laid a groundwork for more reasonably expectations, you risk teaching them that they are failures instead of that they need to learn (or how to achieve) efficiency in reading.

I feel like I’m going on at way too much length here, but it’s an issue that I’ve given a lot of thought to on my travels through ridiculously unrealistic course loads. I really don’t mean to be insulting, and if you are sensing anger or frustration, it is directed at my own experiences, not at your course.

I also object to your taunt that I am teaching a broad shallow course. If you only knew how little I was teaching them ;)

but seriously, there are some important disciplinary differences, I think, in that in history courses what looks like broad and shallow is in fact an attempt to array a number of different perspectives– so about 5 of the 13 required books in my class rehash exactly the same material, but in different ways– if my students don’t have a deep understanding of that material by the end, i certainly will have failed. By contrast, in this course, the focus was on carefully reading texts (and only 4 of them!) that proposed innovations in a theory, and the historical aspect of “public spheres” about which there is a GINORMOUS amount, was left out… I think those students also went deep, but in a different way…

If you’re assigning so much reading that the first pass becomes the only pass, then I disagree that Edward’s method is a good way to read ethnography. I feel that what gets lost is the interaction between the ethnographic details and the theory, which is where the strength of ethnography lies. If it’s an undergrad class, you deprive them of the opportunity to discover what makes ethnography great, and if it’s a grad class you encourage the kind of over-theorizing that is the bane of early grad studies in anthropology.

I’m replacing my snarky last paragraph with it’s essential observation: I think a syllabus that pushes the limits of possibility in terms of reading, especially coupled with the (in my experience false) promise of Edward’s method, has a high risk of conveying a strong sense of failure and inability to students. This can be heightened by things like the difficulty of the material or one’s isolation from one’s peers.

There is certainly a benefit from learning to get a broad but shallow grasp of a topic quickly, and I wouldn’t suggest that ambitious reading schedules or some training in how to quickly assess the arguments of a book is bad. However, I think that such a pedagogical approach needs to be applied carefully. Profs need to acknowledge the kind of demand that this places on students, both educationally and emotionally. Students need to know that this kind of course is an exercise in broad, shallow learning, and given course goals and objectives that match the approach. The limits that this approach places on learning should also be acknowledged, either by incorporating other approaches over the duration of the course, or by letting students know upfront that there is more information than they will be able to fully process, and that the course acts as an introduction and guide to their further studies.

and then there’s my method for teaching them to reason by avoiding valid inference of any kind and my method for picking a research topic by using the LOC Wheel of Fortune, and my method for reading by running an automatic co-occurence algorithm on a text and talking only about the top five results.

don’t you people read Derrida: il n’y a pas d’hors du text dude. Move beyond hearing-youself-read…join me, together we will rule the galaxy!

That said, I teach similar tactics, but for very different ends. I teach my students to use similar skimming and evaluation techniques to decide if a book or article will have something important to offer them and their given research project. I’d fail any student who did this and claimed they were “reading” a book.