Still more reflections on Freshmen Follies.
Today, the English teacher announced that students should print all their sources because they would soon need to take notes in class and begin writing their research papers.
One student said (in a genuinely horrified voice) “You mean we have to READ them?”
Foolishly, I did not expect to hear that. But I got to thinking…..
For the net generation, putting information together from the net is a little like baking a cake. Stir up a little bit of this from a web page together with a little of that from a database, along with a dash of information from an online book. Pop it in the oven for awhile, and see what comes out.
Guess I’ve known that for awhile. Not sure how to deal with it. And I wonder how many teachers realize what’s happening? I used to blame it on Powerpoint – but it is obviously more rampant than that.
We can no longer assume that our students will read their sources – not simply “word process” them.
This year we asked teachers to consider requiring an annotated bibliography as a required step in their research process. Suddenly these kids are worried about selecting db articles that are very long (who wants to read ALL that?) WHile I won’t assume it is the cure all for the “easy-bake” research paper, it has curbed their enthusiastic printing of every article they think they might use to write their papers.