Re: research topic guidelines

[HCgraves@AOL.COM]

Of course Duncan is right that the basic problem on the 10 pager on Dogs is a
teacher problem -- but we do have to do our best for that student who came in
with a poorly assigned goal. If the teacher often gives this kind of
assignment, we're dealing with a student who has had a good shrare of
frustration allready.

I we're lucky, we have a little time when we can talk with that student.
Sometimes when a student pulls an assignment paper out of the notebook we
find the assignment wasn't really that vague, and we help the student get a
handle on the project as assigned.

But if the assignment was that general, we can have fun talking with the
student. "Everything about dogs? How fast their toe nails grow? Whether their
hair is suitable for knitting sweaters? Why hounds bay?"  After a bit of
this, ten pages seem too few for everything about dogs.  And there's always
the moment for asking, "Well, what do you all ready know about dogs?" and
helping that student make quick notes about what he knows, which often leads
to finding some aspect of dogg-ism which will make a manageable paper.

I've had kids coming to write a "report on baseball" who ended up writing on
how bats are made, and a history of baseball bats, students coming to make a
report on "how people dress in South America" who wrote a report on how
different styles of hats signify home regions for people living in the Andes,
etc. It's a lot of fun, it gives the librarian a chance to take advantage of
some of the special resources in the library, and saves that student from
feeling the library is one more place for educational frustration.

It's a luxury to be able to teach that one student at the moment of need, but
that's one of the reasons we wanted to be librarians, so we make as many of
those luxury contact as we can.

Helen Seagraves    School Librarian made redundant by budget cuts Hood River,
OR   HCgraves@aol.com