It's also worth noting that readings for a lot of humanities/social sciences aren't going to be like the "read x pages in the textbook" for, say, biology or math.
By which I mean: You are not trying to cram the entire reading's worth of information into your brain.
For a biology class, your assigned reading will cover a few topics, explain them, etc, and you're trying to learn those topics. Then you go to the lecture and the professor explains them in more detail and gives you some examples/demonstrations.
That's not how a lot of humanities classes work. When I assign my philosophy students a paper to read, I'm not expecting that they'll come back to me having memorized details or even necessarily understood the whole thing. I'm expecting that they will have a general picture of the structure of the argument, know what the author's point was, what the supporting premises were, and have some idea of how it all goes together.
The lecture is where I help them tease out the full picture of what's going on, evaluate the argument for strengths and weaknesses, and give more context for how the paper fits into the wider conversation of the discipline.
This is why your readings for humanities classes are going to be so much longer! You're not expected to memorize shit from the readings. You're not even expected to always come in having understood all of what you read. Hell, even in my graduate seminars I'd generally shoot for about 70-80% understanding of readings, and then go to class and work with my classmates and our professor to get the rest of it nailed down.
Also, having questions after doing a reading for a humanities class is a GOOD thing. Like, obviously coming to class with questions about the assigned readings is always okay, but in a humanities class it is actively good. And they don't have to be "deep" questions, either.
Examples of questions I'd love to see more from my students:
How did this premise support the argument?
What was the point of this analogy?
Was this referencing something else?
The author kept using [phrase or term] and I couldn't figure out why. What's up with that?
The author is acting like [premise or idea] is just widely accepted, but I've never heard of it before. What is it?
If [premise] were true, wouldn't that also mean [thing the author probably wouldn't like]?
I feel like something went sideways in here somewhere, does this argument actually work?
Hang on, where did that come from?
These are Good Questions, and they are the kinds of questions you should be asking yourself while you're reading!
Getting the answers to these questions, or having your prof help you figure them out, is how you're actually going to learn the skills they're trying to teach you!
jbbartram-illu
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