Article note: on dealing with those not so well made library assignments
Citation for the article:McHale, Nina, “Eradicating the Rogue Assignment: Intervention and Prevention.” C&RL News 69.5 (May 2008): 254-257.Read via WilsonWeb.This little article may be useful for librarians in academia who have to deal with the occasional less than well made library assignment sent by some professor who, while well intentioned, likely did not do the assignment himself or check with the library prior to sending his horde of students to the library. Now, if some reader out there wants to call me on my less than charitable view of some professors, I will say that I was a teacher and an adjunct professor at one point. Also I took a lot of time to prep for my classes, and I always did check my assignments before handing them to students. Therefore, I have little sympathy for professors who display poor class preparation and planning with scavenger hunts that the students see as busywork. Now that we got that out of the way, I will say the article is a little bit too optimistic in assuming most professors will be responsive when a bad assignment is pointed out by the librarians. The reality is that often the professors are unresponsive. In fact, I can attest to that since this week we were bombarded with a science assignment from some adjunct who did not make his guidelines clear enough. The students were in a panic, and teacher was nowhere to be found. It took a phone call to his department head before we got some action. In that case, the tips offered in this article probably would not have gotten us very far. I would like to think that situations like that one are rare, but I have been in education long enough to know better. Again, having said that too, I think the article is still worth looking over. Better yet, this is one article that students in library school planning to go into academic librarianship need to read. …
Tags: Education, School, Science