Teaching Library Stuff
One of my responsibilities - a responsibility shared by many of my fellow librarians - is to teach library stuff to science students. Library orientation, BI, information literacy instruction, whatever you call it, it means teaching students the 5 W’s of the Library:
- Who is this guy?
- What is that squirrel doing out there? It looks merry.
- When will this end? Oh god, this is never going to end.
- Where is the coffee shop again?
- Why is he still talking?
In all seriousness, the prospect of teaching a library instruction teaching fills me with the nervousness, because although I have done it many times, I remain acutely aware of two things:
- Sometimes, you can’t make databases interesting, and
- I have no real training in teaching, and I have bored students nearly to death in the past.
However, I have to say that this week has proven to be an excellent week for library instruction. I’ve done two sessions, which is actually a little ahead of the pace for the sciences (I advertise every semester, and the response rate is almost always great in the Fall, and weaker in the Spring; I generally do one session per week at most), and both have gone very well.* Read more…