As a novice academic librarian, I'm learning the work rhythm of the academic year. I started work a few weeks into the fall term, so the upcoming spring semester will be my first full semester here at MPOW. One of my liaison librarian duties is course specific instruction in my liaison departments. I'd been here a little over a month when I presented my first classes -- seven 2-hour computer lab sessions with freshman biology students. Talk about your baptism by fire! Thankfully, my predecessors had developed a great class presentation, including a dynamite tabletop exercise. I simply had to update the handouts and do some adjusting to fit my personality. And believe me, I learned a lot from these sessions by making some mistakes. And of course, there was the morning when PubMed was totally unavailable because of some power outage in Bethesda. Click on the link and nothing happens. Guess we'll finish 20 minutes early today...
To help myself get up to speed on matters instructional, I joined the Information Literacy Instruction Discussion List which is indeed a "thriving exchange on instruction and information literacy." In late fall, a librarian from the University of Texas Libraries sent along the link to a recently posted YouTube video of a bad instruction session mocumentary that they developed a number of years ago. CSI: Library Instruction is a must watch!
As noted in the comments, The Library Teacher does a lot of "cringe worthy" things. She is disengaged and her students are clearly lost. The scary thing is that I saw myself in a couple of the things she did. Quite a learning experience.
So how do YOU handle The Slacker Student? I had more than a handful of those in my biology sessions. Please comment on this post and share your wisdom!