This Could Be the Best Educated Generation in History
Before the start of my freshman year at university, I was required to sit down with my advisor, a professor in my chosen field of study who was there to help me navigate my academic life. I rarely spoke with him over the course of the next four years. I don't even remember his name, but among the tips he gave me during that first meeting was to consider enrolling in a course called Use of the Library. It sounded like an easy A.
As it turns out, it was by far the most useful class I ever took. The internet was a decade away, so if we needed answers beyond the encyclopedia sets on our parent's bookshelves, libraries were our only option. Of course, I'd been to my local library to pick out books, but now I had access to a major university library. The class was taught by a librarian who taught us how to ask and then answer our own questions, something I didn't know I didn't know. We spent most of our time amongst the reference shelves, a place I'd never been, digging through indexes, tracking down academic articles, tracing trains of thought through esoteric books and journals that were either kept bound, organized by volume numbers, or, in the case of older material, compressed onto what was called microfiche, a flat piece of film that we read using a special light box type machine.
Few things in my previous educational experience had prepared me for this. Yes, I'd occasionally used my high school library to write papers, but that had typically involved CONTINUE READING: Teacher Tom: This Could Be the Best Educated Generation in History