The Thrill Is Gone Or Is It?

It is the end of April and another semester is about gone. This one started pretty much the same as all the others. I have one professor that contacts me for classes the week before the semester begins. The second week of the semester, he has his students in the library for instruction. I saw him this afternoon and the last thing he said was "I’ll be calling you in August about classes." There is then a flurry of activity as the rest call, asking to bring classes to the library for instruction. Then the race begins. The Classes. They are there every day; you end up doing them in your sleep after awhile. Nevertheless, we all survive the classes and the eager minds that come to use the library. In the end does it seem to become a case of "one size fits all" like socks and panty hose? We develop our resources, plan a strategy and, in a sense, get our act together. But does it turn into the same act for every class? After awhile, you find yourself repeating the same facts over and over again. Contending with a mountain of work and a full schedule of classes, we often times tend to go with that which we are familiar with and know will work. By the time the end of the semester has gotten here, the thrill maybe gone from our presentation. Classes become boring and uninteresting and, believe it or not, word gets around about library classes. Let’s all take the opportunity to come to ALA in June and get rejuvenated. This is an excellent chance to meet colleagues and learn new strategies to use in the classroom. If we could all come to San Francisco with one new teaching tip we could share with someone else, we could go home with a new arsenal of ideas to use in our classes. The same approach works with our newsletter. If you have ideas or teaching tips that have worked for you or if you have tried something new and had great success with it, please share with us. We are each other’s best resource for new ideas and a great way to put the thrill back into our teaching.

LIRT News, June 2001. Volume 23, number 4.
To report problems, please contact the LIRT News Production editor at jronan@ufl.edu

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