7/9/2023 0 Comments My reading listBy graduate school, the advanced student has developed strategies for reading and patterns of making sense of what has been written in a field. Yet graduate students are not just older undergraduates. Here are the books that are central to the course. In graduate school training, which is fundamentally pre-professional, that sense of the reading list feels reasonable. That gesture reflects the mimetic model of teaching: Be like your teacher and immerse yourself. Reading an entire book feels like it should be the gold standard, and in many ways it’s what we hope our students will want to do, devouring a text, page after page after page. There are pluses and minuses in the week-by-week breakdown. Even the same course, taught by the same teacher in different years to different populations of students, can require adjustments to a reading list that seemed perfectly calibrated to its subject-or at least it did the first time round. So, one gets down to work in choosing materials that are right for the institution, the course level, the class size. The more variables, the more complex the equation, the more connections to examine, the more questions to pose and perhaps solve. Entries in a reading list are variables in an equation. These readings, chosen by this teacher, will open up the class in unanticipated ways. By its existence, the reading list says that the course prizes its uniqueness. The modern reading list is designed to enable teaching that cannot be done by a textbook: If everything you wanted to teach in a class already existed within the covers of a book, you would assign that book and be done with it. Time, life, students, experience, and disciplines all change, so why not the readings? The work of textbooks, however, has only become more sophisticated and demanding. Modern pedagogy doesn’t depend heavily on imitatio, and Cicero’s glory days in the classroom are past (meanwhile, we’re poorer for the decline in oratory and rhetorical skills). In the 21st century, we’ve become used to the idea of the reading list as the course, as the syllabus, even as the object of study. A century and a half on, the reading list is almost identical to that course of study, in which the course is something that moves through time and space, like a stream, or that runs its course, like a fever. By the 1880s, a reading list was specifically connected to a course of study. Was it a bookseller’s list of materials for sale, as an 1859 example would suggest? That would make it something close to a catalogue. The OED traces the earliest uses of the term reading list to the mid-19th century. That concept enters English only in Victorian times. With the mechanical reproduction of texts and, later, with the invention of photography and other recording devices, a course of study could be structured around a more expansive and more individually inflected idea of what had to be read. Medieval pedagogues, for whom the university was a new invention, operated within a restricted universe of texts and an even more restricted universe of materials and approaches with which to teach them. But even if we had them, those works would be subject to two millennia of thinking about the world, including the world of these ancient texts. Or, swipe all the way to the left until the webpage summary disappears.Where do reading lists come from, anyway? Wouldn’t we love to know exactly what Plato’s students were required to read? In Aristotle and other ancient writers we have tantalizing glimpses of works and writers now lost. You can also swipe left over the webpage summary, then click Remove. Remove a webpage from your Reading List: Control-click the webpage summary in the sidebar, then choose Remove Item. To automatically save all webpages in your Reading List, choose Safari > Settings, click Advanced, then select “Save articles for offline reading automatically.” You can also swipe left over the webpage summary, then click Save Offline. Save a webpage in your Reading List to read when you’re not connected to the internet: Control-click the webpage summary in the sidebar, then choose Save Offline. To hide the list, click the Sidebar button again. Show or hide your Reading List: Click the Sidebar button in the toolbar, then click Reading List. You can also Shift-click a link on a webpage to quickly add the linked webpage. In the Safari app on your Mac, do any of the following:Īdd a webpage to your Reading List: Move the pointer over the Smart Search field, then click the One-Step Add button that appears at the left end of the field.
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