Before I go any further, I should point out that not only have I never taught in a high school myself, I never even went to high school. So I’m certainly no expert in what gets taught there. My perspective is that of a librarian who spends the first 10 weeks of every school year teaching about a third of our first year seminar students. Also, these are ideas, not a curriculum. I’m just thinking out loud here, as usual. So with that said, what should high school students know before coming to college?

Habits of Mind

1. A research paper is not (usually) a report. Very few reports get assigned in college. When faced with their first research projects here, students really really want to write what John Bean terms an “all about” paper — these tend to have “And then” as a standard transition and they basically summarize all known facts about a particular topic.
2. Curiosity, and high comfort with the idea of finding out what people know about whatever you’re curious about. I have a browser open nearly all day every day, and I can’t tell you how many searches I do in a day — everything from checking on the spelling of a word (Google is my dictionary) or figuring out more about something I saw on TV or something I’ve read.
3. Understanding that journalists, scholars, business people, etc don’t have their well-formed ideas drop on them from the sky. They do not utter Truth-with-a-capital-T. They offer perspective and (hopefully) support that perspective with some context/evidence/proof.  They, too, went through the messy process of figuring out what they even wanted to know about a given topic, and the uncertain phase of collecting and analyzing and rethinking and collecting some more. This is a really difficult lesson to learn, so the sooner you start thinking about it the better! And the better you know this, the easier it will be to engage with outside sources rather than simply report on them.
4. Gather information, THEN write the paper. The other way around is just painful.
5. Cite what you use. This is good for you (no plagiarism) and good for your reader (more context), and besides, you’ll be graded on it. This is a habit more than a skill because the individual rules for this citation style or that matter far less than the habit of bringing in and acknowledging the participants in the conversation that you’re having in the form of your research project.
6. Talking to people (especially librarians or writing consultants or discipline experts) is not cheating. It’s the way knowledge creation happens. And since this isn’t a “report” getting information isn’t the whole point. You’ll still be able to think about and communicate about your analysis and synthesis and conclusions. Those journalists and scholars who didn’t have their ideas fall on them out of the sky? They talked to people, too.

Research skills

1. I tend to expect students to have searched google. A lot. This is not always the case, but it’s the assumption upon which I build many of my classes and one-on-one instruction.
2. Books are good, and knowing the parts of the book (table of contents, the amazing thing that is the index, the introduction, the conclusion) will help you get the most out of a shelf of books in extremely short order.
3. Browsing is good. Search can only get you so far, particularly if you are a novice in the field (which is everyone in high school) and therefore don’t know the vocabulary that each field develops and uses to exchange ideas. I call this the Term Economy, and it’s what makes searches work or fail. If you haven’t paid much into that economy yet, browsing is even more your friend than it is for everyone else.
4. Call numbers mean a topic. You don’t have to know what topic any given string means, but knowing that really helps with browsing.
5. Find full text based on a citation. Only about 30% of our incoming students can do this and I would love it if all of them could.
6. Keep track of what you find. Whether that means printing stuff out, saving it to something like Zotero or Evernote or whatever, it will stand you in really good stead.

Tools

1. Word processing
2. Basic proficiency with a browser
3. Browser addons (so many library tools involve bookmarklets and browser addons)
4. Citation generator? Zotero is great and useful in many many more ways that just producing citations. Straight up citation generators? I’m neither opposed to nor in favor of them. The only thing I really care about is whether the student knows enough about basic citations to be able to look at a citation and use it to find the text. THAT’s what’s important about citations. The rest is periods and commas.

I’m sure there are plenty of other things high school students do and should know before entering college, but these are the things that trip up my first year students either consistently or spectacularly.

So I looked high and low for a copy, but it turns out that the book is only available as one ebook in a package of ebooks. So that’s a bummer. Nobody will be allowed to interlibrary loan it to us, so now we’re left with the choice of either saying “sorry, that’s just something you can’t see unless you take a field trip to one of the (few) libraries that bought that package” or else buying a whole package of ebooks, which would make this one of the more expensive books in our collection.

Please tell me this isn’t the wave of the future. It breaks my poor librarian’s heart.

So there I was, catatonic in front of the screen on Sunday evening. There may or may not have been drool. I probably hadn’t showered recently. There were probably orange peels scattered around my coffee table (I’ve been on a bit of an orange binge lately). Netflix was serving up endless episodes of one of my favorite genres: BBC mysteries. You know the ones. They have an interesting, complex character for the main detective, and then far more murders than any one tiny country town in the British Isles could possibly sustain without completely depopulating. I love them. Anyway, this particular detective (Inspector George Gently) has an annoying, immature jerk of a second in command (Sergeant Bacchus), Gently has to spend some considerable time explaining to Bacchus just how prejudiced and immature he really is. In this particular episode, Bacchus’ primary vice was “racialism.”

Hold on! Racialism? You mean, in the UK people are Racialists rather than Racists? Or at least it’s a totally accepted term for that form of prejudice?

So, being the librarian that I am, I told my coworkers the next morning about my startling discovery, and we started searching Google Scholar, as one does. Turns out, you get two pretty distinct sets of results if you search for racialism vs racism. So bear that in mind next time you’re searching a free-text database.

Next weekend I intend to continue my vegging… er… RESEARCH. For science.

[UPDATE: My friends in the UK say that "racialism" is an old fashioned term for the concept. It still yields interesting and useful Google Scholar results, should be in a dwindling minority for contemporary scholarship.]

Not that I want more email, of course. Then I’d never be able to keep up.

Basically, I’m impossible to please.

For the last three years we’ve been making a concerted effort to help students understand that they can ask many of their questions at the reference desk (especially students in first year seminars). We’ve also gotten more involved in curricular initiatives on campus, using more of our time to work on curricular-level projects than we used to. I think both of those changes are reflected in the downward trend in appointments. (And really, not a ton of change over time if you disregard that one weird year where apparently EVERYONE needed me.)

I think that curricular-level work, plus slow but steady relationship building with the faculty in my departments accounts for the upward trend in classes. This year I’m more than a standard deviation above the mean.

I’m sure my colleagues have very different graphs since our departments fluctuate in different ways. But I found my graph interesting, so I thought I’d share it.

My Facebook Network

The first week of this MOOC I’m taking has been fascinating. I’m in a class of about 1,000 people from all over the world and (it seems) all levels of experience with Social Networking Analysis, with computers, and with standard English. We watch short video lectures, complete homework assignments (graded by computer programs), and talk to each other on the class forum (where there are also “Community TAs” — I’m not sure how one becomes a Community TA).

Nothing about this format or topic is anything like previous college or graduate school experiences for me. I’ve never done online courses before, I’ve never done computer science or social sciences, I’ve never taken a class with more than 30 people in it, and I’ve never been in a situation where I couldn’t just ask my professor for clarification or help. As it turns out, all of these put together mean that I spent a good portion of the week feeling pretty lost. The lectures and homework were fine. I’ve done those two things before. But really, if I weren’t very used to self-directed learning (I was home schooled until college) and very used to the way college courses work, I’d be really at sea. And, indeed, it looks like several people in the forums are very much at sea.

It seems like this course, at least, requires some pretty firm previous knowledge about how to navigate a course. Knowing to look at the syllabus (and find useful things like the existence of homework, for example…), knowing to pay close attention not just to the blurb instructions of the assignment but to read the entire full assignment, reading about how the assignment was going to be graded, etc.

It also seems to assume quite a bit of technical knowledge, most of it pretty basic, but not all of it. Knowing that it’s possible to change file extensions, or that the “#” sign at a beginning of machine-readable text means that the machine isn’t reading those lines, knowing that if you don’t know how to change config files Google will probably be able to tell you, etc. As great as the Community TAs are, they haven’t been very attuned so far to the differing levels of the people asking them questions.

And finally, it turns out that I answer questions for a living, and that I can’t seem to turn that off. If someone’s lost and gets “you’ll need to update the config file to fix that bug”* and the person is still lost, I swing into full librarian mode and write out all the steps in layman’s terms. If they’re still confused, I make a little Jing video. It’s pathological, I know, a hazard of the trade.

*All of us Mac users are having real problems running the software that does the network analysis. We’ve labeled it the Grey Screen of Death, and I spent a couple of hours today trying to figure out what causes it so that we can stop having it happen.

Anyway, the class started yesterday, and I started being behind yesterday. Today I watched the Day One lecture, which had two quiz questions embedded. And I got them both wrong. So this is going really well so far.

Why am I doing this to myself? Well, three reasons. I want to see what one of these things is like from the inside, I’ve always been kind of fascinated by social network graphs, and I’m curious to see if it’ll help me help students evaluate scholarly work. English scholars are a network, so where are the communities within that network? Interdisciplinary work would also be interesting to be able to graph. Seems like I should be able to find especially influential or well-linked nodes within those graphs.

Who knows if I’ll be able to do that kind of thing by the end of one course (probably not), or if I’ll even make it to the end of the course! But I’ll give it a good ol’ college try.

Except that that’s not right at all. That’s the wrong multiplier. Go down that road and you’ll start trying to develop new theories of renaissance post-modernism, or a comprehensive description of the minority female healer in the modern consciousness.

A better multiplier is nuance or detail. Four times as much nuance is a wonderful thing.

From Jean Berko’s classic 1958 paper “The Child’s Learning of English Morphology,” published in Word, volume 14, pages 150-177.

Sometimes when I ask profs “what will your students have read recently, and can I have a copy” in preparation for classes, I get best answers. “We’ll have been reading about Wugs!”

I’m thinking my new mascot may be a Wug.

Exploding a Reading

So last week was based on what I think of as a fairly standard class: exploding the article. Basically, you take any given reading. You figure out who the author builds upon (citations and allusions) to move backwards in time. You figure out who has cited the work (technically citations and allusions, but really the allusions are pretty hard to search for so you’re left with cited reference searches in Web of Science or Google Scholar) to move forwards in time. And you Read Instrumentally to figure out the language and methodology of this community of inquiry so that you can search for more people using similar language or methodologies.

For this class, the professor and I chose to explode the least explode-able of the day’s readings: and excerpted portion of a book theorizing the silences in history.* There weren’t any citations included, and the piece was difficult to begin with, so we thought this approach might help us all figure out his argument a bit by figuring out who he’s talking to and what his base set of information is.

Our class that day, held in the student union.

We started out discussing what outside voices the author included in his argument (and I’d brought the un-excerpted version from the stacks just in case we wanted to track down any actual citations), but very quickly started talking about how hard the piece was to read. We agreed (heartily) that this had not been written for OUR discourse community. In fact, it seemed bent on keeping us at arm’s length.

Talking over what made us feel unwelcome in this author’s world helped us think about conventions that we’re used to in American Studies papers that help us understand what’s going on. Some of that is vocabulary, some of that is topic, some of that is the dreaded citation (which everybody hates but which everybody really missed in this work because they felt like he was just name-dropping or referencing things and then leaving us without context). Basically, we talked about how discourse is situated within a community, and that following the conventions (of vocabulary, method, acceptable evidence, and yes, even citation) makes readers in your community more at ease — more ready to think through your thoughts with you rather than write you off or give up in frustration. Every piece of the work, from vocabulary to argument, has to work together to move your reader from thinking what they already thinking to agreeing that your way of thinking is interesting and useful. Every piece should help your reader trust that what you’re saying is reasonable. If you don’t pay attention to the rhetoric, your message risks being discounted or simply lost.

* Trouillot, Michel-Rolph, “Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History,” American Studies: an Anthology, Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009. 558-566.