The summer Greek Institute course is coming up in two days. For the next 2.5 months, I’ll be off the grid, mentally speaking. I’m expecting the glitz and grime of New York to pass me by in a haze as I stagger to and from school. Class gets out at 4pm, and weekends are free—well, as free as the homework leaves them.
Despite the shocking workload, I’m more nervous about taking courses in the fall. For all its arcanity, the transmission of Attic Greek must be a well-trodden pedagogical path. There’s a chance I’ll wash out of the course—the way they make it sound, people are lucky to survive. My difficulties there will have mostly to do with bandwidth. To some extent my capacity for memorization will be outside my control. Besides, I’m not trying to become a Classics scholar, just an American academic misfit recovering the Classical education denied him in his youth.
Philosophy, on the other hand, is what I’m here to do. I feel it incumbent on me to try extra hard, to think tactically about getting through my coursework and comps so as to fashion a philosopher out of myself. This should be easy, since all I need to do is carve away everything that doesn’t look like a philosopher.
One skill I can hone that might make a big difference to my academic success is my method of study. I believe that I may be what I detest most: a wonk. I may actually be too “detail-oriented” for my own good. It’s not that I can’t see the forest for the trees. In fact, I often see forests where there are no trees, but that’s a different story. My problem is that reading takes too long. I read at an average pace, and I stew over minutiae. There would be nothing wrong with this, if I had unlimited time. Of course, if I had unlimited time it would mean I wasn’t in a philosophy program, and I wouldn’t be nearly as motivated to do the reading in the first place. But this Catch-22 is also another story. The point is that, for now, I need to cover a lot of ground, acquire a broad background, more than I need to perfect my understanding of every paper I pick up. I need to pick my battles.
A flaw in my current method, I think, is that I take copious notes. The main advantage of this approach is that, by posing my own questions and restating the author’s arguments in my own words, I frame the paper and reinforce my understanding of it. I just take way too long to do it.
Another bete noir of mine is Paralysis by Obligation to Read Everything (PORE). I see allusions to literature or concepts I haven’t covered and feel I have to read up on that before I can take another step in the paper. Yesterday, while reading Putnam’s On Properties, I realized I didn’t know much about second-order languages, except that they allow quantification over predicates. There was also reference to Russell’s and Whitehead’s now-antiquated notion of first- and second-order properties, of which I know embarrassingly little. Normally, such lacunae batter me like giant wagging fingers. I put the paper down, finish my coffee, and resolve to educate myself the next chance I get.
This can’t happen anymore. I have to go on reading a paper unless absolutely stymied, then get on to the next, just as soon as I have some sense of what it’s trying to accomplish. Part of my problem is that I’m trying to settle the argument of each paper once and for all. Is that ever going to happen?
So I tried out a compromise on the Putnam paper that seemed to work. I stopped taking notes in lock-step with the structure of the paper. Instead, I read through to the end (it’s not a long paper), trying to have a little faith that the steel sieve of my mind would keep the gist alive in memory for the rest of the session. Before finishing my coffee, I wrote a few gisty paragraphs, noting the sections in the paper that I had found obscure.
I realize that some readings are going to demand that I pick up more background just to have the foggiest notion of what’s being said. Some papers and books, too, are so central to a course that they rate the full wonkish, anal-retentive mastery that only midnight oil will yield. I’ll have to deal with that when it happens. For now, I’m channeling Evelyn Wood.
Ephebe's Journal 