Summertime is supposed to be filled with laughter and joy for those in the academic world. The summer is for resting, relaxing, and sipping on iced drinks from a folding chair in the sunshine. Summertime means you’ve completed that final test, graded that final paper, added those final grades to your transcript and have fewer worries until the fall semester begins those concerns anew. This is not true for me this summer and I only recently realized how bad it is going to be.
Over 5,700. Go ahead… read that number again. Feel it labor your mouth into forming the sounds with your tongue. This summer I’ll be re-reading more than 5,700 pages of material I covered sometime during the last number of years in graduate school. I’ll be expected to essentially be able to have all of the knowledge in those pages at hand for eight hours of written testing and some additional verbal testing as well.
Despite my general fears of re-reading so much material I’ve got to say that I’m already more than one book into my reading and I’m really enjoying it. In some ways there is significantly less pressure when reading a second time. I’m lazily taking notes after reading entire chapters but I’m learning a lot more from the second read than I ever did from the first.
All of this, perhaps, is to say that learning never stops. So go ahead and pick up that book off of the shelf, blow the dust off of the top, hear the binding creak as you peal the cover from the pages inside and absorb the knowledge you once knew. Allow your mind to once again swim in an ocean of previous thoughts. Did you write notes in the margins? Did you doodle on the side of the page? Did you write some note that has an unclear meaning now? Perhaps my “Summer of Woe” will be kind of enjoyable. Time will tell.