Agent Of L.I.B.R.A.R.Y.

TangognaT

March 30th, 2004 at 11:42 pm

stick a fork in me, I’m done

in: Library

At some point in the semester, I just run out of energy with the whole teaching thing. This is when, more than ever, I’m thankful for coffee. Sometimes I wish I could have a pot of coffee this big. I think that I only have around 4 classes left, and I teach 2 tomorrow. I’m just not looking forward to a class where:

1) I have to spend a little bit of time on internet searching/evaluation.
2) How to look up contact information for members of congress (quick and easy, but every minute counts).
3) How to find articles, and the students’ topics range across several totally different subject areas.
4) Hands-on time so they can actually have some time to locate some sources.

It is a little too much fit in to a 50 minute class that might show up a few minutes late :)
Usually I spend less time on certain things and try to put faith in my Super Happy Library Instruction Handout of Fabulosity! Well, most of the time I think that students probably don’t look at them very much. Or use them to take notes. Which is fine, but in a case like this I can use the handout as a class outline (good when I’m teaching in the morning so I remember what I planned to go over) and list of resources that I won’t have time to mention.

2
  • 1

    I know how you feel. That sounds a lot like most of the classes I’ve taught this Spring. Of course some are worse, like when prof hasn’t even given them the full assignment so they could think about paper topics in advance. Or my absolute favorite are the classes where prof’s themselves don’t understand the difference between an online index/database and “the internet” and insist that their students only learn to find journal articles using print indexes, most of which we have cancelled due to redundancy and budget cuts! Of course when students in a class suddenly “get it” and, say, start thinking in Boolean it can be so much fun that I forget the more frustrating times.

    wibald on March 31st, 2004
  • 2

    It ended up not being so bad. They had very minimal hands-on time, but they did have developed topics so I was able to find some useful sources as we went along…

    tangognat on March 31st, 2004