It’s the last week of the semester and these are questions I’ve been asked by college students doing final assignments:
Student: Do you have books on fish?
Me: Yes, many… is there a particular type of fish you’re looking for?
Student: Dolphins.
Student: I need a newspaper article about the murder of George Wallace.
Me: George Wallace… the governor?
Student: (shrugs) I guess.
Me: He was shot but not killed. Would you like a newspaper article on the shooting?
Student:… … I guess… okay
[one PROQUEST HISTORICAL NEWSPAPERS article on the shooting of George Wallace later…]
Student: Oh cool! He was from here in Alabama?!
And my absolute favorite-
Student: I need primary sources on the Ike Turner Rebellion.
(“You’re just a slave, you know you’re in love…”- few people know that when Tina left him Ike went mad and killed dozens of Virginia planters.)
I’ve told my favorite undergraduate-boneheadedness eye-roller before, but it’s so exquisite I must tell it again.
I was proctoring an exam in a class on the Old Testament for a fellow religion professor. I passed out the exams, and one young woman came up and asked me for a translation of the first essay question. “What does ‘OT’ stand for?” asked she.
“Well,” I said, "It might stand for ‘overtime,’ and it might stand for ‘occupational therapy,’ and it might stand for ‘Old Testament.’ "
Yeah. She did. She asked “Yeah, but which one is it?”
Another “Who’s George C. Wallace” tale: Years ago when I was a grad assistant in this library, I had a student who had to write about a personality of the Civil Rights era and didn’t have a clue who any of them were (late in the semester, hadn’t read the first sentence from the book I don’t believe, etc.). I don’t usually recommend topics but she was desperate, and she knew Rosa Parks and MLK already had too many takers and the professor wanted them to pick somebody else, so I suggested George Wallace. She too, a native Alabamian, had never heard of him. I tried to spur a memory: wheelchair? Nope. “Segergation now, segergation fo’evah!”? Nope. Stand in the Schoolhouse Door? Nope.
What finally struck home: the movie Forrest Gump. “That scene took place here?”
It’s amazing to me how lost any collective memory seems to be of what was practically the day before yesterday on the historical calendar (though in fairness, Wallace was long out of politics before these kids were in elementary school).
Another shocker was when a student had to do a report on the Fall of Saigon. He had no idea when (even “which decade”) Saigon fell, when or why the war in Vietnam was fought, whether or not we’d won, etc., and while this might not be terribly shocking for many teenagers I couldn’t believe the degree of his ignorance because…
he was the son of a Vietnam vet and a Vietnamese war bride- I wanted to ask him “Did you ever notice that your mom looks and speaks a little differently than most women from central Alabama? Well there’s a reason for that…”
(to be fair, there was a lot of moving done over last summer and a student who hadn’t been in since to use the items that were moved from the lower level (basement) to the sixth floor could, in theory, be confused. And I suppose we should be happy that the student was actually reading the catalog records enough to identify the location).
Thank Og finals week is almost upon us.
“But… my paper’s due like… tomorrow… and all the books about the McCarthy Hearings are already checked out?” Gee, it’s almost as if the other TWENTY PEOPLE IN YOUR CLASS HAVE THE SAME ASSIGNMENT AND GOT HERE FIRST, ISN’T IT!
Whenever I teach BI sessions I literally make the class say with me in unison at least twice “I will do my research as soon as possible because if I wait til the last minute books will be checked out and I will not be able to use interlibrary loan”. I actually managed to work a “bouncing ball” effect in PowerPoint so they can follow along. (I never actually started writing a paper, be it 2 or 20 pages, til the night before it was due, but I learned really quick to go ahead and get the books and articles and all as quickly as I could.)
Oooh! I want one - although I don’t use PowerPoint so much in my BIs, I could make a switch for a bouncing ball.
The university I work at has somewhere around 12,000 students. If I assume that 1/4 of those are freshmen taking the english class that requires a very specific paper…I’d say that most of them came in this week needing the two books they have to include in their bibliography but that they haven’t done even looked for.
I’m starting to hate the look - the one that shows their despairation as they come up to the desk.
By finals week, we’re pretty dead as far as questions go, because most papers are due before exam week.
Over the phone “Will someone be there to help me this afternoon? Should I come over now or after lunch?”
In fairness, I’m guessing this was a professor, not a college student. (I never saw the person.) And I suppose it isn’t really a stupid reference question so much as it is a borderline stupid question asked of a reference librarian. Asking the hours of the reference desk would come under the umbrella of informational questions that shouldn’t require a librarian, but would be answered without fussing. And the thing that the person wanted help with was really an accessing electronic information question rather than reference.
The thing is, though, as a reference librarian, even if only imaginary and temporary, I percieve myself as a person working in a service profession. That means I should answer the question with “Whenever is most convenient for you, sir” and not “Wait until after lunch. Then you’ll be somebody else’s problem” (Exceptions to this statement may be made for people whose questions are clearly in a specific subject area and thus should be directed to the subject specialist in that area).
And also asked of me that same day “Are you the person I spoke with on the phone?” (yes. probably) “How do you know?” (Um, because I’m the only person who’s been at the reference desk for the past three hours? Look, sir, it really doesn’t matter if I’m the person or not. I’m the one you get unless you can give me a clear reason why I should try to pawn you off on someone else.) “I wrote down the call number you gave me, but I lost the paper I put it on” (No problem, I remember the title of the book. (Really, I did. I hadn’t had that many people calling for assistance. Probably him and the other guy described above. And if I hadn’t, well, I could have asked for the info he had and did the search for him just like I did the first time.))
What I find really spooky is Jay Leno’s “Jay Walking” segments.
Jay asks general knowledge questions and gets answers such as we fought the Nazis in the Revolutionary War.
One time he interviewed students that just graduated college. The answers were pretty scary.
Now that I’m here, May 2005 will have a Friday the 13th. Does anyone know what day of the week Friday the 13th usually falls on ?
Early this semester, we had a class dealing with the American Enlightenment and, more specifically, the role of Enlightenment ideas in the lead-up to the American Revolution.
I gave a bit of a lecture on the subject and, in order to give the students a better sense of the chronology, i drew a timeline on the board and asked the students to help me fill in some important events.
They got some of the obvious ones first: Stamp Act, Boston Tea Party, Boston Massacre, Continental Congress, etc. When they started to slow down, i marked out the years 1756-1763 and asked if anyone knew what had happened during this time period, and why it was significant. I was looking, of course, for the Seven Years War.
There was a long silence, until finally one student ventured a guess:
“The War of 1812?” :smack:
I never would have believed it if i hadn’t heard it myself. Of course, it was just a momentary brain-fart, and i did my best not to embarrass the student when i gave the answer.
Not a reference question, but a conversation I had with a 9th grader this week:
Him: (a sentence with some word that he made to include a wet cchhh sound, back of the throat)
Me: Is that the Jewish version of that word? Ccchhh…
Him: I’m Jewish? I’m not a Nazi!
Yes, he seriously had NO idea of the connection between the concepts, and he really meant what he said. He thought I was implying that if he were Jewish he might very well then be a Nazi.
I took Greek Drama in the spring semester of my sophomore year. The professor assigned three plays for us to read each week (the works of Aeschylus, Euripides, Sophocles and Aristophanes) and followed up the readings with three days of intense class discussion. We had to know those plays inside and out.
On the day of the final, before the professor showed up, one student I hadn’t seen before was wandering around the room with a bewildered look on his face. I overheard him ask a classmate “So who was this Oedipus guy?”
I had to bite my tongue to keep myself from telling him he’d already failed.
I took an Introduction To Greek Literature course in my first year: my fondest memory of that class is still of the the student who hadn’t attended a single lecture during the year, sitting in the hall 10 minutes before the final exam frantically thumbing through a tattered Classic Comics copy of The Iliad.
I took a Shakespear class with some buddies my senior year of college. One of my buddies asked me on the way out of the midterm exam “what was the name of the antagonist in Measure for Measure?”
Now, he’d read the play, participated in class discussion, and outside of class discussion as to whether the Duke was “a good boy or a transvestite lesbian” (trust me it only makes sense to weird people. Someone thought in a movie version of MfM that the Duke appeared very feminine.)
But when he took the test, he couldn’t remember Antonio’s name (I think, maybe not though, it’s been a while since it mattered). Rather than write an essay in which one character was referred to as “the antagonist” he answered the other essay question on the test.
