Some days I feel like a librarian

So, earlier today someone came to the desk and said they wanted to know where their grandfather could browse for books about medicine or books in French.

Without even looking it up, I said "the 610s for medical related books, and 840s for French literature".

She looked at me as if I was made of magic.

Just then I was doing some research for an assignment, and this is the first thing I typed into the search box:

((non-native* OR "non native") w/3 speaker*) AND (english w/3 language) AND (textbook* OR "text books" OR text-book* OR (course w/3 material*))

The first thing.

As in, I didn't even try to go to the guided search options, or start with a couple of words and see what happened - I just went straight for a search string involving several layers of brackets, multiple truncation and phrase searchers and half a dozen proximity searches.

I am a librarian.  This is how I roll.

Lecturers should do their own assignments

The more I re-engage with education as a student, the more I realise lecturers really need to stop marking assignments until they've actually tried doing those assignments themselves.

I recently had an assignment (an annotated bibliography) graded and given back to me, and for pretty much everyone of my lecturer's comments I had the following response¹:

"Yes, I know, I thought of that, too - but there was this word limit, you see, and I couldn't fit that in without leaving something else out."

I played it out fairly evenly across the board - I left some things out of one entry and left different things out of another.  She noticed every single oversight.

I have a feeling that, had she had to do that assignment within those limitations, she would have missed out on important pieces of information as well.

But, as she was marking the assignment, not writing it, she was in a position to see the limitations in my answer, rather than the limitations imposed by the question.

At least the question was a reasonable assessment task to begin with.

At the reference desk of an academic library, I often see students come for help trying to answer really, really stupid assignment questions.  A surprisingly large part of my job involves helping students compensate for bad assessment design.

There should be a rule somewhere that states a lecturer cannot set an assignment for students until after he or she has satisfactorily completed it him/herself.


1. Not that I actually "responded".  Giving feedback on an assessment piece or its mark isn't done - although I'm sure there's something to be gained from it.