What Not Reading Did To Me

September 25, 2013

I am usually one of those students who comes prepared to the dialogues and has read all that was required to read. Today I wasn't able to participate in the Human Action dialogue because I had not read and it made me feel very bad and irresponsible. Even though I had not finished reading, I was looking forward for the dialogue since I had found it very interesting. So instead of participating in the dialogue I had to finish reading.

What made me feel the worst about it all was that I am the one who is always complaining and is always disappointed when my classmates don't read and are not prepared for a dialogue. I keep on comparing these situations with what happened last semester in our Words and Rules dialogue, in the Trivium dialogue and in the Well Educated Mind, and it gets me really frustrated. In those dialogues I was one of the only ones who was prepared for those dialogues, along with two or three of my classmates, and we would always have to postpone the dialogues. Sometimes we even had dialogues between two or three. The worst part about these dialogues was that they were books or chapters that I really enjoyed and I always arrived eager to discuss; I always ended up disappointed in my classmates.

So not reading this time made me feel really disappointed in myself, not only because I was acting like those who wouldn't read but because I would always complain about not reading and it was exactly what I did.

It is very easy for me to give excuses about the incompleteness of my work, but instead of doing that I would like to write about what I plan to improve in order to be prepared for future dialogues, in order for this not to happen again.

1. Every Thursday make a schedule to complete my readings for the upcoming week.
2. Try to divide my readings into a reasonable amount for each day in order to finish in time.
3.  Once I have a schedule keep to the schedule.
4. Try to finish the reading one day before the day of the dialogue
5. The day of the dialogue document and review the reading in my individual work time as preparation. 
6. Bring all of my questions and comments to the dialogue.

The good think about this happening to me is that now I know that I don't want this to repeat itself, that I have to improve the planning for my readings and that I need to learn how to be more efficient at time management. And not only do I want to apply this to my readings but to everything else, like the daily reflections, essays and any other kind of project that I have to turn in.