Take-away: "The World Is Too Much With Us" Is Not About Natural Disasters

Okay, I'm going to vary my format a little bit this week, since there's just so much going on. I'll just give you some of my reactions to the writings as I read them, instead of trying to do an in-depth summary and analysis on one or two. This is probably the way I should have been doing things from the start, but I've always had a hard time following directions.

Let’s start with Robert Darnton's "The Library: Three Jeremiads". Not really a fan of Mr. Darnton's. First of all, I had to go look up the word jeremiad, and while I'm all for word-of-the-day calendars, putting something so obscure and classical in your title just makes me think you've been trapped in the ivory tower too long. Secondly, Monsieur Darnton apparently didn't know what a business plan was until 1999. How on Earth could he be president of the American Historical Society and not know this?! Libraries and museums are not exempted from having to deal with money and planning for the future just because they give out information for free. Lastly, he just didn't have anything original to say. Anyone in library school can tell you that the terrible price-gouging perpetrated upon libraries by serials publishers is a grave injustice. Yes, creating a national digital library is a good idea. The only people who are going to argue with you about that are the ones you've already pissed off by calling (justifiably) terrible price-gougers. No, Google doesn't necessarily have the best interest of libraries at heart; they're a multi-national, multi-billion-dollar company (admittedly, one whose unofficial motto is "don't be evil"). These are not particularly new problems and don't, in my opinion, require 4000 histrionic and self-congratulatory words in the New York Review of Books. Instead of dusting off the old lamentations, we as librarians need to swallow our outrage and figure out how to survive, even thrive, in this brave new unfair world.

I'd like to preface my discussion of the next reading by acknowledging that I have knee-jerk reaction to disagree with opinionated authors. While I found Metzger's "Teaching Reading" to be condescending and gimmicky, I can acknowledge that her repurposing of the Socratic seminar for use in High School classrooms has had an impact on the teaching of the humanities. If I hadn’t participated in sessions such as these myself as a High Schooler, I might have been more skeptical because of my dislike for the author’s tone. I especially disliked the way she referred to her students as "outrageously confused", once laughed aloud at their interpretations, and offered many "amusing" anecdotes about their mistakes. Additionally, her set-in-stone declaration at the beginning of the piece (“Five years ago I solved the problem”) reminded me uncomfortably of the blithe testimonials offered by infomercials and weight-loss plans.

In contrast, Tredway’s take on Socratic seminars came from a much more optimistic place. Even though Metzger asserted that literature cannot be treated like a math problem, consisting of only one right answer, she had no problem saying, “although the boy’s enthusiasm was cute, his notion was wrong” when a student exclaimed about the universality of literary meaning. Tredway, on the other hand, has a much more lenient view on what is right and what is wrong in literary analysis. I cannot imagine her laughing at her student’s interpretation of Ozymandias. Something that she just briefly touched on, but which has come up in previous readings, also intrigued me: “contrary to popular notion, self-esteem ‘training’ will not bolster academic achievement”. YES. I’ve thought this for years, so it’s great to finally get some backup. Students (whether in a school or a one-shot workshop) achieve confidence through succeeding and speaking up, not just being told that they’re valuable human beings no matter what they do. We’re all born with value—what matters is how we stretch and challenge ourselves.

In response to “The Book Club Explosion”, I’ll simply remark upon the fact that I had not previously thought of the complexities of getting 20 free copies of the same book in the same location at the same time. Kudos to the creative librarians who thought up book club kits and having members of a group read several different books for the same discussion.

Re class last week: loved the pervasive reminders by dead-faced children that we were spending Valentine's Day evening in the basement of North Quad.  Also, the example about the High School teacher using the Egyptian protests to compare and contrast with the French Revolution really clarified the issue of transference for me.

Story Problems, or How I Learned to Stop Imagining and Love the Math

Just so you know, I hate math. I love Dr. Strangelove, but I hate math. The only thing I hate more than math, however, is story problems. You know what I'm talking about. Story problems are those questions you get at the end of the exam, when you're discouraged and your hand is cramped and you're thinking exclusively in numbers, that suddenly ask you who will get to Baltimore first if Mrs. Bennett leaves on the 6:35 train from Hartford traveling at 60 miles an hour and Mr. Darcy leaves on the 7:10 train from New York traveling at 75 miles per hour. You don't have to answer that. In fact, please don't; my intention was never to spread the misery of the story problem.

Anyway, imagine my surprise when I did the readings for this week's class and discovered that the poor story problem is actually considered superior to many other methods of teaching. In fact, the story problem is something of an innovation in getting kids to transfer "school learnin'" into everyday experiences. Looking back, I guess the problem I always had with story problems is that, despite the desperate attempts of their writers, they seldom had anything to do with real life. I can assure you that never in my life will I need to know the area of grass a goat tied to the side of a barn can eat (this was an actual question from a high school geometry exam). The worst, however, were the names. The writers seemed to assume that I would be more motivated to solve the inane questions of fictional children if they were called Lakshmi or Tomeeka or Nell. Being as I was a rather fanciful child, I spent much more time constructing back-stories and personalities for my carefully multicultural new friends than discovering the most cost-effective blend of lemon juice, sugar, and water for their lemonade stand.

My nostalgic annoyances aside, there's no reason why learning designed to create understanding and transfer can't be fun or effective. I think the biggest objection I had to story problems as a child was the lack of effort and creativity they exhibited. The technique of relating abstract ideas to instances from everyday life looses all flavor when made trivial or general enough to be understood by the entirety of a textbook audience. Luckily, for us future librarians, we'll be doing most of our teaching where no textbook has gone before. Whether in face-to-face instructional workshops or even through chat messaging or webinars, we'll be able to assess our audience beforehand, ask questions of them to determine their current knowledge of the subject, and apply it in ways that could very well have a meaningful impact on their lives. After all, our students don't have to be there--they're responding to internal motivations and actually want to learn.

If I were, for example, teaching a group of senior citizens to use EBay (thanks Prof. Fontichiaro, this will now always be my go-to example), I would start by comparing it to an auction house or estate sale--something that they already understand and can use as a base for further learning. Then, after a quick description of the basics (how to get to the web page, how to create an account and navigate the site), we could jump right into learning by doing. This is also where the personal contact and feedback come into play--the teacher has to be available to provide (this should be familiar) formative assessment and individual help.

Oh, and P.S.: On a completely different note, since I'm apparently supposed to have been referencing the lectures all along (sorry!), here's a few thoughts/ things that stood out from last week:
I used the names Mrs. Bennett and Mr. Darcy in my problem specifically because of the JaneAustenAtTheSuperBowl tweet--video games can change the world--always use an even number of options when giving surveys to nice people--I really want to be in the position someday where I can make people do the human thermometer--and, on a serious note, my Big Hairy Audacious Belief is that libraries are where story problems go when, having led a good life, they die and are reincarnated as literature.

I Never Knew Grading Was So Complicated

In summation, our readings for this week dealt largely with the idea of "formative assessment"--essentially, teaching students to evaluate their learning and take steps to square it with the goals of the course over a period of study. In contrast to summative learning--the traditional letter or percentage grade that students get at the end of the year-- formative assessment seeks to get learners interested in their own progress. By helping them to identify the metacognitive processes at play in their learning experiences, Sadler, in his 1989 essay "Formative Assessment and the Design of Instructional Systems" thinks students can better "bridge the gap", as he says, between merely mediocre or formulaic work and well-crafted, creative products. For the most part, he addresses these issues in terms of student compositions and essays, where the line between what makes a good and a bad piece of writing becomes somewhat "fuzzy".  Teachers should, he advises, start out with a solid framework: a set of expectations described through examples and standards. The criteria that teachers then use when grading these assignments are a significant secondary topic for Sadler, and he goes into great detail describing the thought processes and strategies behind making these "multicriterion judgments". The most important topic, however, is what happens after--how instructors communicate areas for improvement to their students and help them bring their work up to snuff. Since the article is almost entirely theory and philosophy, Sadler doesn't offer many practical tactics to achieve this, instead saying, "providing guided but direct and authentic evaluative experience for students enables them to develop their evaluative knowledge". He concludes by implying that in order to close the gap, students simply need to gain experience--to fail often enough, and in different enough ways, that they can identify all these different detractors in their work during future endeavors.

The How People Learn chapter offers much more concrete advise. In "The Design of Learning Environments", the authors discuss the importance of integrating learner-, knowledge- and assessment-driven learning. In addition to taking into account the developmental and personal abilities of individual students, they present several examples of cultural misunderstandings and effective teachers using the cultural and community backgrounds of their students in order to make learning connections. They also address formative assessment more loosely, as feedback, and stress the importance of integration in all aspects of learning.

I can see where formative assessment would be of great use in a library instructional setting. In one-shot workshops and information literacy tutorials, most of the librarian's students won't be sticking around for more than a few sessions. Giving them letter grades at the end of these classes would be completely ineffective, whereas allowing them to build on and learn from their mistakes could result in a higher rate of comprehension. Additionally, most of the library patrons likely to show up to such a session would be doing so voluntarily--the often-necessary motivator of grades would have no bearing.

In this scenario, the How People Learn reading is, at least on the face of it, much more useful to library instructors than Sadler's. After all, the first refers almost exclusively to assessment of written works (which, while perhaps found in some library environments, would not be the main focus of instructional programming) while the second offers concrete, practical advise on how to relate to students of different culture and integrate the things they learn into their community life. However, Sadler's theories better describe the inner life of the evaluator, and how her implicit judgments seem to migrate, as if by osmosis, to her students. Taking into account his exhortations to provide examples, criteria, and specific task definitions, as well as the ongoing teaching tactics provided by How People Learn, I feel I have a much better idea now of how to teach my hypothetical future library patrons with their learning aforethought.