Cushing Academy adopts a new library model.
The Internets is FULL of LIES. The problem is not so much that kids bibliographies are full of bullshit webpages, but that kids can’t actually afford to get to the sites that actually have reviewed and vetted information. Perhaps a library TLD for journals and stuff on the tubes! (maybe it already exists, I hope) Somebody call ICANN.
It is true.
The Concept Librarian is right.
The thing that amazes me is that it is actually happening and they are getting a freaking Coffee Machine!? What kind of school is this? When I was in High School I subsided for HOURS, nay WEEKS on a strict diet of 2% Milk in half pint containers, one day out of date Hostess Apple Pies, Wild Cherry Pepsi, and cigarettes.
Oh, and the occassional Ice House beer from a cooler in Jamie Hallet’s faded, blue Chevrolet Caprice Classic while listening to Diamond Dogs.
What a crock.
I spent many years working in a highly acclaimed private high school setting. The thing I noticed over the years is that the more pervasive the internet became, the more Googleriffic, the quality of student work got worse and worse. It became slapdash, erratic, and generally poor. 9 times out of 10 what a high school needs to search for is easily attained on the interwebs. But the more specific a topic gets, or the more specific a teacher is, the harder it is for the student to extract good information from the internet.
I caught a lot of shit from students and fellow teachers alike for having extremely high expectations of my students. I taught a pair of electives, Technical Theater and Advanced Technical theater, and I take my work pretty seriously. It is what I do for money. I get paid to do it. I pay my mortgage with it. I want it to be good and I fully expected my students to take it seriously.
In my class if your work sucked, you failed. I didn’t give a shit about their expectations of the class. I expected REAL research and real WORK. I made it very clear, if you turned in junk you printed off of the internet that morning while at home eating a bowl of fruit loops, you’re fucked.
I saw the same thing happening in other classes, half assed bibliographies of all internet sources. That doesn’t count. You actually need to USE a book. You actually need to read. You need to go to the section in the library you are interested in a grab 50 lbs of books. Then hunt and peck and read and let ideas actually happen. Google takes that action away. The number of times in my studies that my theories and plans and theses actually radically changed during the course of my research and took a weak, lazy, ill formed, half assed, “idea” and transformed it into something was staggering. Without that time spent with actual books it would pretty much mean that before my work even hit their desk, I could already sense that they were going to call “bullshit”.
Truly smart students will ALWAYS be smart. You could give them some colored beads to sort and those fuckers will still be able to do calculus at the end of four years. Truly smart kids, the top tier, highest percentile kids will always be that way. They will always score high.
This inherent laziness built into the internet is the excuse that everyone else needs to churn out mediocre work. ALL of the other kids, the almost super smart ones, the not top percentile students, all of the ones that are in that weird zone between super smart and normal, the under achievers and even just plain fucking stupid ones don’t need any more excuses to pass of regurgatation as research. Geniuses don’t NEED to get out and hunt for information, they don’t NEED to work for it. Many of them do it anyway.
Technology doesn’t make kids smarter. It doesn’t make them better at learning. It makes them better at learning while using technology. It makes them adapt to the possibility of easier work, a shorter path. Calculus is still calculus. Physics is still physics. English, Literature, theology, it is all still learnable with books. One doesn’t need a computer to do research. It can assist you, it can help start you on the way, but even with some of the smartest kids in St. Louis, you still get limited results. You still find they hand in bibliographies based on the to the top results that Google spat out.
Don’t get me wrong. I am totally addicted to the internet. Now, even the Strangelet (aka the Googler) and I are suckaz for this dumb internet.
I wrote all this without any doing any actual research. Fuck the internet! I don’t know anything about what I just wrote so don’t get angry at me.
No books. No books at all. Not any books. They have no books in the library, at all. They have a book-free library.
In place of the stacks, they are spending $42,000 on three large flat-screen TVs that will project data from the Internet and $20,000 on special laptop-friendly study carrels. Where the reference desk was, they are building a $50,000 coffee shop that will include a $12,000 cappuccino machine.
For Pete’s sake: you can have all this stuff, and the books. Seriously.
