Do You Actually Need to Read Your Textbooks? - College Info Geek

Key Takeaways

hey what's up everybody I'm Thomas from college infogeek and today we are not going to be talking about probability Theory we will be talking about reading assignments so the question of the day is should you do all of your assigned reading and there are a lot of different answers you'll find out there some people will say no it's useless some people will say yes obviously you should do all your reading it's the stuff you're supposed to be learning and you are stuck in the middle trying to figure out which one of these answers is right so hopefully in this video I can give you a little bit of guidance to make that decision for yourself based on your own set of specific circumstances so here's the thing about reading reading assignments help you learn the material that your professor wants you to learn obviously however when you're in college your time is very limited and your class work and reading are not the only things that you should be doing with that time you've also got part-time jobs building relationships with other people networking extracurriculars all this kind of stuff and you can't really afford to sync all of your time into reading and studying and specifically only learning activities so here is my initial tip for figuring out how much of your reading to actually do triage your assignments now triage is originally a medical term and it's used by doctors and field Medics and Wars to assess the number of patients they have at any given time and figure out which one they should focus on first however triage is applicable to many different fields and you can use it when gauging your reading material because it's really just prioritization with an emphasis on doing the most important things first and possibly having to let certain things go so the thing about reading assignments is that not all of them are required for you to get a good grade in a certain class for one a lot of the reading material will be covered in class on lecture slides and you can learn it while you're sitting in class during the time you've already dedicated to learning by paying for classes and for other classes there's just a lot of the reading material that will never be covered on tests so you don't need to learn it in order to get the grade now unfortunately not every class is like this and a lot of classes do require the reading material so the tip here is to gauge your classes throughout the semester learn which classes require a lot of reading and which classes you can safely skip a lot of the material for and when I say skip sking it's not just a binary choice between skipping and reading there's actually a spectrum of focus that you can apply to your assigned readings and for Simplicity sake we can break this spectrum down into three specific choices skip skim or read when I took my marketing class during my junior year I started the semester off by reading every single assignment however I quickly realized that I could just go to the back of every chapter note down the vocabulary and study that and do just fine on the tests so that's what I did for the rest of the semester and I got a great grade in the class so if that's what you can do for a specific class it's going to save you a lot of time in other classes just skimming the material alone isn't going to cut it so you're going to have to find time to dedicate close reading to that material but the key here is to remain mindful when you're in class gauge the amount of effort you need to put into the class and the readings as the semester goes along and adjust your effort accordingly another thing that you can focus on is the type of readings that are assigned so each of your classes will most likely have a primary reading source and this is usually going to be the assigned textbook primary reading sources should be a high priority item for you and you should do most of your reading assignments in them those however a lot of classes have secondary reading sources maybe articles that the professor finds interesting or historical documents things like that and a lot of times these readings are not actually that important so if you find that you don't have time to do reading beyond the primary sources you can usually safely skip these however you decide to prioritize those readings the one thing I will say is to always have that material available in class if you're able to dig into your primary sources while you're learning from the lecture slides then you're going to be able to solidify Concepts in your mind a lot better also the professor might want you to look in the textbook every once in a while so just make sure you have it with you and the last thing I want to cover in this video is the idea of your time so reading assignments are so numerous that they often get the excuse of I don't have time to do all of these and often that's valid but I want you to think about it specifically I want you to make sure that you're not interpreting a lack of efficiency as a lack of time if you're just trying to read straight through all of your reading assignments then you might not be tackling them in the most efficient way and that may be the true problem when you think that you don't have time to get them done next week's video is going to be all about strategies and techniques you can use to do your assigned readings more efficiently so if you want to get that make sure you subscribe to this channel but for this video The Main Idea here is to be mindful of each class's required readings as you go through the semester try to decide which ones require your attention more than others and then adjust your investment of time for each one accordingly hey thanks for watching my video If you enjoyed it then you can support me by giving it a like on YouTube or sharing it with a friend if you want to get more videos just like this every single week on being a better college student then click the Subscribe button right there if you missed the 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