Wednesday, September 3, 2008

Is reading work?

I ask because when students show up at the door to my office, and see me reading a journal or a magazine, they think I am not working. Colleagues do this sometimes too. And if I spend the afternoon in the library, browsing through journals, that can't possibly be work. Can it?

I have this latent guilt whenever I sit around all day reading journal articles. This isn't REALLY working... it's... I don't know what it is, but it's not work.

Where does that come from, I wonder? I certainly don't read them for the art form! If I had some other job, I'd probably never pick up “A model for the formation of large circumbinary disks around post-AGB stars”; Akashi, & Soker, 2008, to read in the hammock on a lazy summer Sunday afternoon. It would be pure insanity.

Reading must be work. I think.

1 comment:

jcaastro said...

It is. I just had a student come in to "talk" while I was reading...because I was just sitting there, doing nothing.

Maybe we should have time-clocks.