Here's a question: what are people thinking?
Let's consider the facts. I am a librarian at a university. At the university level, students should have basic research skills. Most do not. And it gets worse every single year. Instead of trying to fix the underlying problem and just teaching basic research skills, we've left it in the hands of individual professors to combat the problem.
Here is where we run into a bit of trouble.
Most professors handle the problem fine, but you get the occasional professor who "is really gonna show 'em" how it's done. Like they won't be satisfied until the students are lying in a ball on the floor, in a pool of their own tears, whimpering and swearing a blood oath to never use Wikipedia.
{Disclaimer: I LOVE Wikipedia. LOVE it. I think it is brilliant and wonderful and I wish I'd thought of it. It is not without its problems, but used properly it is an excellent tool. I just wish I could make others understand that}
This is what happened today. A professor assigned a research project to her class. Now, the project itself is poorly designed but that isn't the problem today. The assignment is to learn and present a basic overview of a Latin American country. Each student is assigned a different country and then given a list of questions that MUST be answered. There are 8 questions on the list. They are simple, basic questions. Literally, I could do this assignment in 30 seconds by using the CIA Worldfactbook (an amazing resource, btw). If that is as in-depth as she wants them to go (and from what I read in the assignment description, it is) then I don't know why she doesn't let them use the internet. But no. In this case, she REQUIRES that the students use 2 books and 3 academic, scholarly articles to answer the questions.
Obviously, when designing this lesson, she didn't think to get input from anyone. If she had asked ANY librarian, anywhere on the planet, she would have been told that this is terrible. Using books is fine, there are tons of great reference books out there, but to use scholarly articles to answer what amounts to a fact sheet is ridiculous and a waste of everyone's time.
This is bad enough, but, as I explained to this poor girl who was so upset she was practically in tears because she had been doing this from home for 5 hours with no luck and then drove in to the library to get help after she called her professor and was given terrible advice, the only way to make this feasible is to look up one question at a time and use one resource per question.
(BTW, the advice was "if you're having trouble finding articles, use Academic Search Premier"- which is exactly the opposite of what I would tell them. Terrible. Advice. The answer should have been "if you're having trouble finding articles, call the librarian" OR "if you're having trouble finding articles, it is probably because I made up the worst assignment in history" but that might be hoping for too much)
Fine, so you get the gist of why this is so awful. I helped the girl find in depth research articles that she will essentially be quoting one sentence from and citing it as a source. Absurd waste of resources. Busy work. Idiocy.
Now, we come to the kicker. When you're doing research there are tons of great reference books available that serve as an excellent starting point. For an assignment this brief, using one of them could do the whole thing. But this idiot professor has decided that since using a reference book would be too simple, she will BAN the use of reference books. Sort of. You see, if she had simply said, "no reference books" then I would have at least respected her a little bit. She wants them to learn to research and how to look up books and articles. That's good, she's just going about it in a terrible way. Well, instead of banning them all, she actually made up a printed list of reference books and banned the use of those specific books. Seriously, she sent out a list and told them they are not allowed to use (and therefore cite) those books. Well, that's just stupid. Because now it becomes a case of "who knows more about the library?" And in that contest, I am going to beat a professor every day of the week.
This professor has made this simple assignment so difficult that all day long students are coming in to ask for help in finding resources that barely relate to their topics. Which makes research frustrating and makes students learn to hate it.
So this girl needs books and she shows me how she already looked in the catalog (and she knew what she was doing...it wasn't her fault, there just aren't a lot of books for this sort of thing) and she is upset and frustrated because she can't find anything. Taking pity on her I tell her there are some great reference books we can use. She showed me the stupid list and tells me she can't use any of those. Ha! Like that deters me. I took her over to that reference area and found her two great reference books to answer her questions. Actually, either one of them would have answered all of her questions. And neither of these two books is on that list.
Stupid, stupid professor.
Can anyone tell me what this girl learned from all this? I am going with the following: librarians are awesome. Professor is an idiot.
Well, the girl left happy and with her assignment completed. But she didn't learn anything good about research here. Now she knows that I can do it, but I am a professional, and while I will help her with anything I can it would be better for all of us if this professor weren't so determined to make up bad lessons that teach nothing to the students.
I'd like to drop an anvil on the head of said professor and then speed away saying, "meep meep".
stupidity
