Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr
Ok, there is a program visiting our campus called Project Grad and it’s main purpose is to expose high school kids (mainly african american) to the college experience.
From the website:
The mission of Project GRAD Atlanta is to ensure a quality public education for all students in economically disadvantaged communities. GRAD strives to increase high school graduation rates and produce graduates who are prepared to enter and be successful in college.
So I’m sitting here at the desk and at least 20 kids swarm the desk. So we start helping them do their searches and I’m thinking “why isn’t reference handeling this?” since I work in periodicals and we don’t really do indepth searches. After helping the kids the best I could, I ask my coworker if reference knew about this. And what my coworker would say next would make me sad then mad.
*sigh*When the first batch of kids came through, my coworker was going to log the kids onto the computers and show them how to use Galileo to do their searches but the lady supervising the kids said no. She wanted them to do it the old fashioned way…by asking us because that’s what we get paid for.
Now the “get paid for” comment didn’t upset me as much as the fact that this lady *used loosely* is handicapping those children. She’s defeating the whole purpose to the program! She was busy doing her own personal research while we were trying to help these kids get the information they needed. Which would have been better gotten through Galileo than through our online catalog. If she would have gotten off her butt and let us log the kids on and supervised them, it wouldn’t have taken long and the kids would have gotten much better information than some funky ole books.
How are the kids supposed to learn research skills if we hand feed them? How are they supposed to find out about things they don’t know if they aren’t able to research them? They say knowledge is power, but if you don’t have access to that knowledge you remain powerless.
I guess I’m more outraged because unknowingly or hell knowingly she is doing this to her own. The next generation. My momma told me “never underestimate your prescence in somebody else’s life”….in this instance, what she is doing or not doing has an impact on someone else but hey everybody doesn’t think that way.
I don’t know if this was enough…you know “blogging it out”…I may have to find a way to say this nicely…God help me.
Serenity “God save our youth”
