Heavy workload turns well-rounded students into squares

If you take a lot of humanities classes like me, the following will be a familiar scenario: After reading over your syllabi, you realize your professors want you to read four books this week, among other assignments. If you're an engineer, you might have to do a handful of four-hour problem sets. Either way, you have a lot on your plate.

I usually do one of two things: I try to read all four books that week, or read only a portion and save the rest for later, when it must be done (i.e. right before midterm week or during reading period). But my professors expect me to keep up with the reading so I can be an active participant in precept and fully understand the lectures. If I were to do this, I would be doing my homework nearly all the time, and who wants to do that?

The point is that because of the amount of work my professors expect from me each week, I am encouraged to become either a workaholic or a procrastinator - two unproductive and im-balanced lifestyles. If I work all the time, I neglect my social life and extracurricular duties. If I procrastinate, a cloud of guilt hangs over me until it pours down last minute suffering, when I can no longer delay my work. In this type of situation, it's more difficult to experience carefree fun.

This feeling of constant work or eternal procrastination, I think, is familiar to most Princeton students. The important question is how to break this cycle. The most obvious solution is for us to try to be more balanced - in other words, to work a fair amount of the time but then to set it aside and have fun with our friends and colleagues.

This advice is simple to prescribe, but devilishly hard to follow. Even if you abide by it for a week, a paper, sports tournament or weekend of partying is all it takes to destabilize you. Consequently, I am caught up in an everlasting struggle to maintain this balance, though I rarely achieve it.

The other solution rests in the lap of our professors. Just as we should be mindful not to neglect our work, they should be mindful not to assign an inordinate amount to do. This is more difficult than it sounds. They don't know what kind of work we have in our other classes, but that's just the point. They should assume we have a fair amount of work in other classes and draft their syllabi accordingly.

Yet it's not uncommon for a professor to assign 300 pages of reading a week. This is unreasonable. Suppose it takes your average student one hour to read 40 pages. This is seven and-a-half hours of homework per week in one class. If all four of your professors believe 300 pages is a reasonable amount - which they often do - then you're likely to have 30 hours of reading a week. Sometimes the professor assigns fewer, but denser pages. The result is much the same. Assuming most of us do not work more than five days a week, this amounts to six hours of reading a night.

In some ways, I am complaining about the occasional deluge of homework we get. But in another sense - I'm not. I realize that most demanding universities require this amount of work, and I knew what I was getting into when I applied to Princeton. Further, many students have much more work than I do. Most of the time, in fact, I look forward to my reading. I get a kick out of learning for its own sake.

It's just that sometimes we get too much of a necessary thing. If we had a bit less to do on the homework front, all of us - students and professors alike - could enjoy a more productive lifestyle at Princeton, and could more consistently vary our activities between homework, friends and non-academic events. Homework should never become a predominant part of our Princeton experience. It should share the spotlight. Jeff Wolf is from Chevy Chase, Md. He can be reached at jeffwolf@princeton.edu.