5 posts tagged “school”

Wow, it's 2 am on a Saturday night and I just spent the last 14 hours working on the final project for my marketing class.  What a drag.  I'll have you know, too, that I have been working on this over the last couple of weeks, so it wasn't like i did it all at the last minute.  Just takes time to get it all together at the end.  I didn't even bother with the summary PPT we were supposed to post for peer review.  Just gotta let some things go.

One reason things were late today was because I decided to go out last night to see Carrie Rodriguez, who played at the Warner Grand Annex.  Awesome.  Glad I went even if it means getting a lower grade in this class.  Man's gotta have priorities.  Carrie is so full of talent and has such a wonderful voice.  If you haven't heard her yet, you should check out her first solo album "Seven Angels on a Bicycle".  Includes great fretwork by Bill Frissell to boot.  Unfortunately, he's not part of her touring band.  Still, it was a great show.

Not sure why I do it, but every once in awhile I end up pickin' a fight I know I shouldn't bother with.  The latest one is with an instructor for one of my current classes.  We were given a group assignment that really should have been an individual assignment, as it in no way lent itself to meaningful division of labor.  Be that as it may, my group produced the required paper and PPT presentation on the ever-so exciting topic of a comparison of the collection development policies of two college libraries. (These policies serve as guidelines for what the library purchases, who does it, and what eventually gets weeded out).

We received very quick turnaround time for the grading.  Normally this would be welcome, however the feedback was limited to saying that our analysis was "good" and all other comments referred to mechanical issues such as proper APA format and some grammatical errors.  But what stuck out for me was a comment on one of the parts I had written in which the instructor said it was not a complete paragraph.  (You can find the exact paragraph in question at the end of this post).

While it is a short paragraph to be sure, this struck me as odd since it seems to satisfy my understanding of a paragraph.  Normally, i'd let it slide, but the lack of substantive feedback on the assignment and the overall empahsis on some nitpicking mechanics chafed me.  I read over the paragraph again.  I checked APA to see if there was some rule about the length of paragraphs (there isn't; they simply note that a paragraph should be characterized by unity and cohesiveness).  I looked up in Strunk and White, who had this to say: "As long as it holds together, a paragraph may be of any length." None of this should come to any surprise to anyone who has decent training in writing (I like to think my education in this area has been above average).

So, I emailed the instructor to express my disagreement.  And I know it's stupid b/c she's got better things to do, and I've got better things to do, but, you know, it bugged me.  I tell her I concede it was brief, but not incomplete, and I cite the above mentioned texts.  She writes back saying she disagrees.  Her rationale: "A paragraph should have at least 3 sentences."  Really?  Is this second grade composition?  I'm thinking to myself, c'mon now, you can do better than that. 

I write back saying it looks we'll just have to agree to disagree, but for the record where is it written that a paragraph has to have at least three sentences?  Her answer: "It goes back to years of education and old Voyages in English grammar books and being taught that all paragraphs require an opening, middle, and ending sentences at least.  It's most likely before your time."  Turns out I was right about the emphasis on elementary grammar school texts, as that turns out to be exactly what "Voyages in English" is.  Puhleez. 

It's all kind of ludicrous.  No doubt she's not happy to have me question her evaluation, and I understand that.  At the same time, I feel if she's going to correct my writing, she ought to be prepared to defend it.  I've let the conversation stop at this point, as I don't see any point in continuing it and the only response I could have going forward would be too snarky.  But, I'll keep writing two-sentence paragraphs where I see fit.

Here's the paragraph in question, along with her comment.

Evans and Saporano(2005) suggest the purpose(s) of evaluation should be made explicit in collection development policy documents, as different purposes will call for different techniques (p. 63). Neither[JMK1]  Chapman nor Saint Mary's heeds this advice.

Another late night in front of computer.  I'm searching for examples of bias in different types of sources -- academic articles, books, websites.  Want to use them in the online tutorial we're creating that is supposed to teach users to evaluate their sources for bias.  Kinda tricky. Actually, websites are pretty easy, though I don't want the examples to be too obvious.

so, I hit a wall, and just couldn't think of specific examples or how to find them, and I finally log on to the SJSU "ask a librarian" button.  The librarian who takes my online reference question is "Frank" from Pasadena City College.  And he suggested a good search strategy -- check letters to the editors and book reviews.

A few minutes later, the transcript of my chat comes through the email.  Only it's not Frank, it's from the guy who is team teaching my class who has not been responding to my emails.  So, I email him back to say thanks and to remind him I'm still hoping to get some feedback on the programming exercises.  Only now I'm wondering if the transcript wasn't just filtered through his email address and it was not him I was chatting with after all.  Hmmm....

Anyway, if any of you have some good examples of bias ranging from the subtle to the extreme, send them my way.

Wow, it's 20 minutes to 1 a.m. and I finally finished and turned in my assignment.  Wish I could say I feel like I got something out of it.  The idea of the assignment was not bad, but the execution left something to be desired.  Mostly that's my shortcoming for not being better organized.

At the outset of the course, we created reading plans for four different areas related to instructional design (educational theories, teacher/librarian collaboration, curriculum and assessment, and information literacy).  Basically, the idea was to identify what you already know about these topics, figure out what you would like to know, and then read accordingly.  So, in the end product we were to recap what we knew at the outset, discuss how we went about our reading (i.e. how did you search, what did you find), and provide a synthesis of our current knowledge of the topic. I made most progress in the educational theories section.

The problem was, of course, that I did not really get all that much reading done, so I didn't make great strides in my knowledge on these issues.  Why did I not read?  Well, time was one issue, of course.  Another issue was the lack of a regular schedule for posting summaries of what we read (we were all expected to contribute to a course wiki, creating one long annotated bibliography).  When this lack of due dates was brought up in class, the instructor just brushed it off with a "This is grad school.  I should not have to impose structure at this level."

Well, I might agree if it was an academic graduate degree, but that is simply not the case here.  An MLS is a professional masters and the people pursuing them are by-and-large doing it on the side of their otherwise very busy lives, not as the main thing they are focused on in their lives.  Moreover, the guy is not practicing what he preaches in needing to recognize different learning styles.  Some people need more structure than others.  But, yeah, ultimately I should have imposed my own structure.

Radio Junkie took Little One to a model train exhibit this afternoon.  Nice that they could have some time to bond.  A very rare occurrence that I'm hoping will become more frequent.  Meanwhile, Better Half and I walked around the neighborhood looking at houses for sale.  Just getting a feel.  Prices are still too high.  Maybe another 6 months and we'll be ready.  But it sure would be nice to get out of these cramped quarters.

I am so tired of having to spend all my free time studying.  There's no more balance in my life.  I'm either at work or I'm studying.  If I'm not studying, I'm stressing about it because I'm not doing it.  I just want this to be over.  Just now I was at home and Little One wanted my attention.  I was trying to write to get some assignments done that are due on Monday.  Not only could I not give her my attention, but I got curt with her and determined that is best if I simply left to work elsewhere. So now I'm at the library and feeling pretty miserable about how I treated her and how I treat myself.  Never really learned the art of balance.  Hope she can learn it despite my shortcomings.