College students are often required to read a great deal for their courses. No one is a stranger to complaints about excessive work loads. The work piles up so much that the pages often become a blur of words. Page after page, book after book is read, until ones feels the process is only so much meaningless "factory reading" -- a mass production of how much can be crammed into memory, repeated, and forgotten so you can get to the next reading. The question is, what are we learning, and at what rate do we learn best? At some point, comprehension must inevitably fail. There is too much to absorb, and rather than really mastering the material, we are only skimming and sampling bits and parts.

There is a dilemma here -- one which does not have an easy answer. On the other hand, less reading could be assigned, and more comprehension therefore expected. Yet if professors assign less, they may worry that their students are not working hard enough, and that they aren't preparing them for the hustle-bustle world. From the student's perspective, he or she is mastering a smaller part of intellectual ground, but not being exposed to a fuller world of ideas, which could at least be sampled. On the other hand, professors who assign too much may blunt student motivation by imposing too much of a burden. In exposing the student to more work, in the hopes that these scattered seeds may later grow and flourish into student wisdom, the professor may in fact be assuring that fewer seeds come to fruition.

So what is the answer? Fewer seeds, and more attention to each? Or massive amounts of seeds -- in hopes that a few or all of them may grow. The question may not have an empirical answer, but as the reader might guess, I favor a ground of compromise.

The answer may involve a better dialogue between student and teacher. On the part of the teacher, a conscientious effort to emphasize the essential core elements of the course, and an introduction to further background reading. On the part of the student, an honest effort must be made to meet course demands, and not dismiss extra reading as superfluous. Finally, we must all ask, when we lift our heads from our books: How are our efforts bearing a meaningful impact on our lives?