Have You Read Through Page 359?
Over Thanksgiving break, Dylan and I were ordering his new text books for the spring semester, when he started to complain.
“I don’t even know why we’re doing this,” he said. “I don’t think I need to buy all these books. Sometimes I don’t even have to open them.”
“What do you mean, you don’t have to open them? How do you read them?”
“Well for some of my classes, I don’t have to read them.”
“Of course you have to read them,” I said. “Why would you have a book for a class if you didn’t have to read it?”
“Well most of my professors told us not to even carry the book to class! I just left them in my room for the whole semester.”
“Yeah, but you have to read for homework, right?”
“Not really,” Dylan said. “Sometimes they’ll tell us to read a few pages but most of the time, it’s just assignments and stuff.”
“What are you talking about, Dylan? You have to read your text books. Wait – can we find your syllabus online?” I asked.
“Yeah,” he said, and showed me how to find his syllabus for Introduction to the Bible.
“Here,” I said, pointing. “According to this, you were supposed to read the first 82 pages by the end of September. What do you think these numbers are? All these … look. ‘Pages 1 to 82, pages 251 to 302…’ Why do you think there are page numbers on your syllabus? By Thanksgiving, you were supposed to be done reading through page 359! Have you read through page 359?”
“Well he didn’t say any of that to the class,” Dylan said.
“Dylan, it’s college! He didn’t say it because he wrote it out for you, very clearly, on this syllabus that he gave you at the beginning of the class! Every assignment you had is on this syllabus! How many other books did you not read?”
“I read what my professors told me to read,” he said.
From what I can gather, Dylan didn’t even open at least two of his five text books.
His grades, however, don’t show it. He’s getting A’s and B’s, and he didn’t even know he had to read his text books.
This, I believe, is where being intellectually gifted has saved him – again.
But I sure hope he doesn’t depend on that giftedness next semester. I think, instead, he should read his text books.
We went ahead and bought them, just in case.