More time? Less reading? Oh, the places you'll go!

This weekend, I have a 170-page book, a 50-page chapter and five 13-page articles to read and analyze. After giving myself the day off today on Saturday, (correction: taking my God-given day off), I'll have to skim through all those pages tomorrow. Note the word skim -- and that's what I'll never understand about college: What's with the unrealistic reading expectations?

I'm a fast reader, and I have no problem with being assigned reading for homework. As a journalism major, there's no real way to study journalism other than to read as many styles of writing as we can. But to be expected to read an entire full-length book in two days? That's ridiculous.

I know that there are classes on campus that teach students how to skim assigned text for key themes and ideas, but for most reading, this idea is ludicrous as well.

If I'm analyzing reporters' styles, I'm going to need to read every word they write, with close attention for why and how they arranged the words the way they did. In great literature, every facet of the book matters -- from the inflamed pimple on a character's face to her unmade bed in the corner of the room. Skimming won't do the book justice, but if only given a few days, students just won't have time for a close reading of the entire thing.

If English and journalism teachers want their students to be absolutely engaged, frankly, they need to assign less reading.

Fernando Opere, a poet and professor at UVa. who came to Richmond for a poetry reading a few weeks ago, said that he only assigned four poems over the semester. He said he'd rather have the students overanalyze the poetry -- picking apart the most minute details -- than only read the titles, like they'd do if he assigned 50 poems.

Steve Volk from the Center for Teaching Innovation and Excellence agreed.

"Unhappy with how discussions went when I assigned a 200-page monograph in an intermediate-level class, ... I began instead to assign an article by the same author that (at least in history) is always published in a top quality journal prior to the book's publication," he said. "Discussions improved. Less can be more."

For textbook reading where reading every word isn't crucial, it's the teachers' jobs to be selective -- instead of assigning five chapters, they should be the ones sifting through the pages for key ideas and boiling down the assignment to those pages, instead of expecting us to muddle through the material on our own.

If the point of the course is to teach us how to read certain writing, and thus skimming is all that's required -- like psychology research, for example -- then we need to be prepped for it.

Before we're slapped with 500 pages of periodical text to read by the next day, we need to be warned that the purpose is just to grasp style, and then we need to be coached on how to do that, so we're not spending the whole night in the library poring over one paragraph on Prosopagnosia.

I'm writing this article not to complain about homework (although I wouldn't mind being able to sleep straight through until Monday morning, but we all face challenges in life). I'm writing because when I come across an assigned book or article that I actually like, I'm disappointed because I know I usually won't have time to read the whole thing either because the assignment is too long or I have other reading stacked up. I know I'll have to give the piece a quick scan when I'd love to sit down and absorb the whole thing.

There will always be people who skim because they simply don't like to read. And that's fine. But for those who do, it'd be nice to have the time to do it.

As my good friend Dr. Seuss always said, "The more that you read [not skim], the more things you will know. The more that you learn, the more places you'll go"