That Randy Brown

Making Homework

I mentioned in reading habits that I sometimes have to set a book aside, even if I'm not done reading yet. Part of the reasoning behind this activity is so I can do homework.

For most of my adult, post formal education life, I have, when reading, made it a point to give myself homework about what I'm reading. It's part of why I write notes about the books I read. But beyond that, I try to find some activity or exercise that can be a formalization of what I learned. I don't always have the books later to refer back to, but I can capture more core learning and compare them to the core learning of others for opportunities to identify missed concepts and practices.

Practicing model applications are some of the most important homework exercises for me. When reading a book about, for instance, the half life of facts, I might want to find opportunities to classify some of the things I know, or create systems for updating my own understanding of the world. When I recently read the end of Cribsheets, my wife and I had a great talk about, and revised our stance on screen time.

I'm somewhere in on the origin of time (this link probably won't work unless you're reading this after I've finished the book), but along the way I've found the need to try to compile the work of Hawking's prior students to unfold the evolution of his understanding on time and our place in it.

Finding application is not always a chapter by chapter exercise. Sometimes it is a matter of adding new books and research papers to the backlog of things I need to read before moving on (as is the case with what has me currently paused on The Family Firm). But Homework--actively engaging with and applying what I'm learning from books, has become a core part of my reading habit, and has probably become the hinge between learning and doing.