I tend to add up my stats when I don’t think I’m going to get many more library instruction requests. Things are going to start to wind down a little bit after this week. Today was my last time having to teach three classes in one day, from now on I’m only scheduled for one or two classes at a time.
I just schedule all the classes for freshmen students, so that includes sessions of introductory composition and a few freshmen seminars. This semester I scheduled 56 sections of composition and 16 seminar courses, so at my library we had 72 total freshmen instruction sessions scheduled so far. I’m teaching 53 of these classes, and other librarians are teaching the rest. I think that 50 classes a semester is a little on the high side but still manageable. I remember someone posting a question about average number of classes taught to the ILI-L list and the responses ranged all over the place, from 15-60. I think it really depends on the amount of preparation required for each class and the type of classes you’re teaching.

Following the tradition of pranks on Halloween, I realized on Monday that I’d managed to trick myself when I added up the number of classes I was teaching this week and figured out that I was teaching 14 classes. That’s a bit too much! There’s no way I could teach that many classes if I was working with upper level undergraduate or graduate classes, but at this point in the semester I just need to take a few minutes to find some search examples and I’m prepared to teach a basic introduction to the library for freshmen. I taught 4 classes yesterday and 4 classes today. For the rest of the week, I’m teaching 2 classes every day. I can’t wait for this week to be over, because everything will start to taper off and I’ll start to have a more normal work schedule. At least I have some leftover halloween candy, so I can get bursts of energy from sugar.

I’d been hearing rumors about a horde of composition students with a tricky assignment descending on the reference desk. I ended up helping three of them last night, and boy did they need help – their instructor hadn’t scheduled a library visit and their assignment directed them to find scholarly articles related to a particular type of movie. They all were looking for articles about a specific movie, not a director or a theme expressed in film. It was tough to find any scholarly articles about the movies they picked, and I tried multiple databases that might have any amount of pop culture or film studies articles. It was really frustrating, both for me and the students, because the constraints of the assignment were making it difficult to find any usable articles for journals we actually had in the library. By the time the students came to the desk for help they’d already been searching on their own without much luck.
One of them asked “Are there classes we can go to where we can learn all this library searching stuff?”
And I said “Yes, and I usually schedule and teach them, but I don’t think your professor has contacted me.”
The other student said “He should really bring us into the library for one of those classes!”

This was the point where I wanted to slam my head into the reference desk 🙂

I’m going to try to send a diplomatic e-mail to the professor to encourage him to schedule his classes for next semester, it might already be too late for these students because their paper is due very soon.

Semester long information literacy courses get emphasized a bunch in the library literature, but this was a case where a quick fifty minute session earlier this semester would have helped the students make better use of the library, with enough time for everyone to be able to get articles from interlibrary loan.