Toward Learning Period

Reading period officially begins next Monday. But you won't be reading during Reading Period--at least for exams. Rather, you will be writing, and perhaps furiously at that. The reason is that all of your term papers for non-proctored classes, that is classes for which there is not a sit-down exam, are due on or about May 14--the last day of Reading Period. It is not a coincidence that all of your papers are due then. The Office of the Registrar has taken the liberty of slotting the date of May 19 (the first Monday of exams) as the deadline for all grades for non-proctored classes. Professors or teaching fellows use the weekend before to read (or, more realistically given the time constraints, spot check) your final papers and guesstimate a proper final grade.

Of course, not all grades can be due on May 19, for most exams have yet to be given. But the Office of Undergraduate Records feels it necessary to put the early deadline constraints on the non-proctored classes (which include all sophomore and junior tutorials) because "we need to graduate students and to get grades in as soon as we can," according to a worker in that office. Beside, the worker noted, you have to give professors the earliest possible deadline because invariably some will not hand their grades in on time.

Understandably, the Office of the Registrar would like to begin processing grades as soon as possible. And flexibility in deadlines is not appealing to any bureaucratic structure. But the pressure placed on students by the (ostensibly) inflexible May 19 deadline has an unintended and decidedly negative impact on the student body: The crowding of paper deadlines at the latter half of the second week of Reading Period. The problems resulting there-from are the massing of papers at a particular point in time and the effective elimination of Reading Period.

Students ought to be able to plan a schedule allotting enough time to complete their papers and their studying in the two weeks given to them in Reading Period, right? Well, not really. It is not that we are irrational. Rather, we are just so busy with the ordinary business of schoolwork and extracurriculars (not to mention living, lunching, loving and laundry) that we regard deadlines as due dates. It is difficult to finish papers ahead of time when there are so many things to do in between the perennial now and ever-too-soon then. The deadline-as-due-date is therefore rational.

The result of the crowding phenomenon is a dedication of Reading Period to paperwork and Exam Period to reading. This chronology defeats the purpose of the academic structure, in which Reading Period is a time to review and synthesize a semester's work, and Exam Period is for more directed study. Reading Period, then, is neither restful (as it was originally intended to be so that graduate students and professors had time to complete their own work) nor productive (as it might be constructed with a new focus on the importance of undergraduate learning).

Reading period ought to be about learning rather than paper writing. Learning is something which is often done without papers and without grades. In fact, all true learning is so accomplished, since learning only comes with understanding. We are no longer youth, so we gain nothing by mere mimicry, which not incidentally is the process induced by such things as Core final exams. Truth is not something to be copied from a textbook or taken from a teaching fellow. Rather, truth is found through the personalization of work.

At Harvard, self-teaching is most often done on one's own, though in the most useful instances it is aided by the advice of a professor or graduate student. A Reading Period centered around learning would be very much in the Harvard tradition. A first step in that direction would be the removal of paperwork from the two weeks of Reading Period. The University Registrar, Thurston Smith, can aid students in this regard by moving the deadline (perhaps for next semester) for non-proctored exams to either the start of Reading Period or the end of Exam Period.

Joshua A. Kaufman's column appears on alternate Wednesdays.