On Reading I

Failing a course has, atleast partially, freed me from wanting to meet the expectations of the academic other. This freedom, outside of reducing test related anxiety, also has given me the room to read more. Not only for my educational program but more specifically to read more books and papers about topics that intrigue me or grab my attention. Before this release, I had a hard time picking up a book because I had convinced myself that all the reading I would do, needed to be extremely relevant for my degree in Philosophy of Science, Technology and Society. When I read any other books it would feel I would be wasting my time.

As said earlier, failing a course has freed me from the expectation to read solely for my educational program. The result was that I finally started reading books that seem interesting to me without regarding any possible usability for other parts of my life. So, after a couple of years of building a collection of books (just like many others), I started to read some of them. Soon after the realization came that reading, as an activity for leisure, is not as hard or scary as it had seemed. Indeed I was suffering from what Timothy Wilson would call a Affective Forecasting Error; I anticipated that the task would be harder and less enjoyable than it really was. Luckily, after finishing a couple of books, I let go of this error and I am now able to start reading a book whenever I want. 

What is surprising is that I am reading the same books I would need to read for my educational program, only now in my own (leisure) time. When reading for myself the goal is simple, read the book, think about it, make some notes and enjoy the ride. This, however, is still not the case for coursework. When I receive a reading assignment, with philosophy every class has reading assignments, I still find myself anxious. Not because I am not able to understand the text and the underlying meaning, as stated earlier the level of my leisure readings are similar, but mostly because I have genuinely no clue what a lecturer wants us to learn from the the text. In other words, there is during class yet another academic big other with expectations. Which, in the end makes, at least for me, reading less pleasurable.

Putting pleasure from reading aside, I also realize that I learn less from coursework if it mandatory versus being for my own gain, even if the reading is the same. For most academic readings a couple of chapters of a book suffice, most of the time there is no room to discuss a whole book. Which, ofcourse, makes sense from an educational point of view. There is no time and space to get acquainted with every philosopher or academic that have something meaningfull to say about technology.  Not reading everything, however, unfortunately has the downside of missing some important context, as I learned by now, the preface and introduction are way more important than I initially thought.  Not reading those two context-building parts makes me clueless and creates even more confusion about the expectations of the academic other.

In short, because I failed a course, I found a new passion in reading, I can genuinley say that I do no travel without at least having a book or e-reader at hand. On the other side, the freedom that I gained from the academic other, also made me more aware of the subtle ways the academic other is shaping expectations.