For Realsies

I am stunned by the lack of drive, ingenuity, intellect and general understanding in this school. And this is a *good* school. People that graduate from here go to Ivy League colleges. People that graduate from here also go to Community, but hey. Most of all, I am stunned by the generational gap between myself and these students. While I may have a solid decade on the youngest freshmen, I only have 6 years on the seniors.

Mostly, I am bamboozled by how lazy they are. They are lazy. Also, how do you make it to your senior year of high school and not possess the knowledge necessary for using an index? I am astonished. I am growing further under the impression that these students are not becoming information literate because their teachers assume that they are. The teachers, though information literate, are not technologically savvy, and few educators understand the difference, so the difference is seldom imparted to students. This misinformation on the nature and use of information and information literacy creates a dynamic of assumed competency. And then teachers wonder why student papers are lacking a certain something (though some don’t put their fingers on it, that “something” is good resources). While students are intellectually capable, technologically enabled and generally desirous of becoming information literate, the false assertion that they are at this level of scholarship because of their ready access to technology does not actually make this a reality.

Today, for instance, I had a class come in to use the library to work on a research project. For them, “use the library” is translated into “use the computers to use Google”. They were vocally complaining to their teacher using the now standard line “Everything is on the internet.” No, no it is not. And, just for your information, you cannot access approximately 95% of the internet. At least. We actually do not know how big the interwebs are, so that is a generous estimate. The most conservative estimates find that 0.002% is accessible to the common person. That is the definition of daunting. And these students think that everything that they need will always pop-up on the Top 10 of a Google search.

But, I digress.

They are complaining quite vocally to their teacher because their paper requires 3 book sources. Three! They each have to open at least 3 books out of five total sources for their paper. And they have to cite each resource at least once in their paper. “That,” as one student sagely pointed-out to the teacher, “means we have to use more books than websites.”

Image the stunned silence of the students when I informed them that I had not pulled any books off of the shelves for them like I normally would to make their lives easier because there were too many for me to justify pulling them. Because their papers are on World War II, only the most written about topic in the world. That, and Shakespeare.

I had pulled materials that were not from the 940s, but outside of that, I just pointed down the right aisle and told them to share. They. Freaked. Out. I spent the next 10 minutes explaining how to use the title to help, as well as reading through the table of contents and looking in the index for your topic. Things a 5th grader can handle.

Last library-heavy post for a while. Promise. Fluffy posts devoid of substance to come. . .