The latest storm in a teapot on Academic Xwitter is about how many pages students should be expected to read per day.
And I can't shake the feeling that the problem here aren't students, but the professors who think "number of pages read" is a good metric to measure anything.
@j_bertolotti
Minimum pages per day is important purely as a practical matter for anyone relying on textbooks for support: if students can't read books at all (the limiting case) the model with short lectures complemented by a book falls apart.
I suppose that these days a student might be able to get by just by searching for further lectures on a subject using the internet, but I'm not that hopeful: the lecture+book model is dominant across (theoretical) subjects and as far as I know also across space and back a few hundred years in time.
That said, I suspect there might be some unstated disagreements about what counts as "read" ...
@tobychev I agree on the "unstated disagreements". But:
* In any STEM discipline, the number of page read is irrelevant (spending days on the same half-page theorem is normal), so we can safely assume they are talking about social sciences and/or humanities.
* Even there, many texts are way too dense with information for anyone to read hundreds of pages per day (e.g. most philosophy, but also many very old texts).
@j_bertolotti
Sure, the appropriate number probably varies by subject, and I suspect also by author, which likely muddies the discussion even further.
But that's not an observation that means the number of pages to read is useless in principle, simply that in practice it might not be any good.
That does however bring up the question of what the number is supposed to be good for anyway? The answer, assumed from the context you gave, is that it helps lecturers plan their course, which is not an insignificant good.
However, what of you saw it as a way for _students_ to plan their work? It is certainly common enough that a student takes several courses at the same time, and thus need some way of estimating how much work is needed for each course ahead of time. Pages per day is a very concrete work unit, and likely to be more accurately estimated than some estimate of how much time in total they need to spend.
In any case, the discussion is probably better held in these types of practical terms rather than at some abstract level with absolutes. Going concrete does have the side effect of severely atomising the discussion, since everyone has their own course specific to them
