"The problem is I haven't got time to read it"

Do you know what your most important task is at the moment?

Your task as a student, I mean. Not the other stuff that you need to do like attend to children/husband/wife/cat (delete as appropriate) or hold down a job whilst doing this. Forget about that stuff for a minute.

What I'm interested in finding out is what do you do as an individual that turns you into a student?

Indeed, are you a student as soon as you sign up and money changes hands? Or is it something equally prosaic like turning up for lectures now and again, handing assignments in on time and looking at BREO when you're told to?

You see I think it's reading.

My job is basically to show you how to find things. That's the easy bit. After that things sometimes get tricky. And sometimes the reason they get tricky is because students try and bypass that whole 'reading stuff' stage.

It's reading that transforms us into students. Reading books is the single most important reason why I'm not a gardener any more. I mean I read before I applied for university, but it was systematically reading academic texts about psychology that turned me into a student of the subject. It made me feel I could hold my own in an argument with others and incrementally I became happy with this new, more informed me. The temptation is to only read for a specific outcome, a specific assignment. So can I suggest you make the time to just read a couple of chapters from your textbooks each week which aren't tied to any specific thing?

It might seem odd to think that reading is part of your job at the moment, but I do think it's that fundamental. And it's fun to have your mind blown by authors suggesting new theories that hypothesise society in new ways.
I'm having to deal with just such a theorist now called Thomas de Zengotita who thinks that the ubiquity of screens has turned life into performance. Now by the time I've finished his book (called Mediated-yes, thanks for asking, we do have it in the library...) I may have rejected the central ideas he puts forward.
But (and here's the crucial point) I cannot reject his theory until I've read it.

OK. Enough of this.
As always, if you want to contact me about anything you know where I am.