I still take notes at times, but I much prefer the freedom of simple reflection.
I had the pleasure, while pursuing my undergraduate degree in history, to twice take classes taught by Dr. Alex Standen at NMSU. Alex, as he asked that we call him, taught me a lot of things–some of which he may not have realized he was teaching. I took Colonial Latin America in the Fall of 2023, and Climate, Disease and Disasters in the Spring of 2024 with Alex, and felt that I’d gained not just information, but also a friend. Even better, his methods gave me a process that I’ve recently started sticking to: the Reading Reflection.
In both classes, the bulk of our assignments were reading reflections. Alex would assign a reading, either out of the text, or from primary sources he’d provide, and ask us simply to reflect. He did want us to cite the work somewhere, pull a quote or the like, just so he could see that we’d actually read the piece, but for the most part he wanted us to think about what we were reading, and then simply write down our thoughts. An easy grade, to be sure, but also a good way to get outside the material–to put on paper the connections with the text and other bits of knowledge or learning we brought to the class from elsewhere.
These assignments were, to me, genius, and I loved them. Other classes were asking me to simply rewrite the thing that I’d read in order to prove I had “learned” it. Alex’s assignments asked me to synthesize and think about the lessons. No, I probably didn’t memorize a lot of names and dates while writing the reflections, but we have Wikipedia for names and dates. What reading reflections did for me was help me to see patterns and trends, changes and attitudes, bigger picture history than “what general did what to whom and when, and oh yeah, where and why.” Those types of assignments might be good for journalists or the writers of textbooks, but to understand history, the “big names and big battles,” to me, are far less important than the reasoning of the people that led to them in the first place. Plus, reading reflections have helped me make connections between Colonial Latin America, the Making of the American West, and the History of Science (and so many more), in ways that would be difficult to summarize for professors, since not all students have taken the same classes, and a semester is only 16 weeks long.
So now I do reading reflections on my own time. Not with everything I read, but with a lot of it. Until recently, I didn’t have much of a system for sorting my reflections, but I’ve decided to put them here. On this site, someone might get something out of them, and I can easily link them with tags. (I’m also playing with Notion to build an actual database, but I’m still on the steep part of the Notion learning curve at the moment.) I’ve recently begun attempting to read and write daily reflections, which has been going well, but it’s Winter Break. Time will tell if my daily goal is doable once school starts, but I’m going to give it a go.
So if you’d like to read what I’ve been writing, click below.
And if you ever get a chance to take a class with Dr. Alex Standen, do it! He’s great, knows what he’s talking about and is clearly very passionate about his craft. 5 Stars, wouldn’t change a thing. Thanks, Alex.
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