Ah, what the hell. I am still procrastinating, and suddenly I’m in the mood for some freewriting.

I need to figure out some way to ensure that my students do their reading. I think I have two or three students who are actually doing the reading. I tell myself that the other students are making a choice for themselves - the choice to not participate. The kind of teaching I do really works best when the students have done the reading.

The course I am currently teaching, Modern American History, is very reading intensive. To be honest, I struggle sometimes to keep up with the reading. Of course, I have to read closely in order to teach it, and I have the habit of underlining and writing marginalia.

I love marginalia. I write in all of my books. The more densely packed a book is with my pencil scribblings and Post-It notes, the more closely I have read the book. Some books have only a few annotations. Others are so full of annotations that they are nearly unreadable. It slows reading down, which can be frustrating, but it definitely increases my reading comprehension while stimulating new ideas.

Sometimes I’ll comment on an author’s argument, writing something like “Ha!” in the margin or calling out some kind of bullshit. Other times I’ll quote something from the page, copying it into the margin. I think in instances like that it is not so much about reading the quote in the margin as it is about spending more time with a particular passage. The act of copying the passage makes me mull over what I am reading, passing back over it a couple of times.