Class Reflection, Day 1

Well, today was the first day of SI 643. I think it will be a fun and interesting class, and I expect I'll do a lot of learning along the way.

At the very end of class we discussed the results of our little "Mindset quiz" that we took during the class break. Pretty predictably, I got a strong "growth" mindset. One of my classmates spoke up pretty quickly and said that she expected all of us to have the "growth" mindset, meaning that you believe that a person's intelligence/talent can grow and develop. And I thought that made sense, because I'm heavily "growth" oriented, and I do believe that librarians subscribe to the idea that people can grow and develop. Well, it ended up being a struggle over definitions (go figure, with a bunch of library students) and how you define "intelligence" or "talent" versus "knowledge" or "ability," which I get. Two thoughts on this area: The first was of my best childhood friend. We grew up together, we were neighbors, we went to school together, we took dance classes together. All through school, she was always talented and smart, and sometime in high school she took a real interest in contact juggling (that thing David Bowie does with the crystal ball in Labyrinth. See this clip). She spent weeks, months, even, with a tennis ball filled with sand and wrapped with duct tape and armed with online tutorials and simply the drive to "do that cool hand thingy." And guess what. She learned how to do it. In fact, by our senior year of high school, she won the city-wide talent show. She bought the clear acrylic balls, and started learning more and more complicated tricks, and by the time she went off to college, she was incredible. But she didn't stop there, no, that was just the beginning. She started going to the Renaissance Festival in her new city, and they had gypsy performers there, and she quickly started performing with their "tribe." Six months after she had left our hometown, she was spinning fire and bellydancing and still contact juggling, all while going to art school, too, so she was learning to make her own very intricate costumes, too. Now, she and her husband have their own fire-spinning act, Tricks of the Light, and they travel the midwest as a pair and she runs the business and makes the costumes and takes care of practical things like insurance. It's really been incredible to watch her journey from a shy bookworm to a bellydancing, fire-spinning performer. And so that's what I think of when I think of developing talents. I'm not sure that my friend has a specific "base level" of talent for contact juggling or fire-spinning, although she has always had better hand-eye coordination than me. I'm pretty sure that my friend's unusual success has been because of her dedication and perseverance and excitement in this specific area. So. Roundabout reasoning, but there you go.

The second, hopefully much briefer, reaction, was when our professor, Kristin, suggested that the people in our program who have the growth mindset tend to think along the lines of "I wonder what I will learn today!" instead of those of the fixed mindset, who believe that if they don't immediately get something (because we are all smarty-pants in our program), they think it's a dumb assignment or task, are happier in the program. And I'm not sure that I have the "I wonder what I will learn today!" outlook, but I find that while some of my cohort gripe about assignments, I just take them as they come, usually. I assume that there is a reason I am being assigned a task, and that the professor of this prestigious program knows better than I do about things I need to know for my future career.

Now for something entirely different:

We talked very briefly in class (as in, Kristin mentioned very briefly) about a university that is assigning freshman students each a "personal librarian," much in the same way that at some universities students are assigned an adviser. I had never considered such an idea, but man do I think that is cool! By being assigned a librarian, and maybe by having a couple of the gen. ed. courses require that students actually visit these librarians for at least one or two assignments, I think so many more students would be able to realize the value of their librarian! Once students develop relationships (hopefully positive...), they would be more likely to come back for assistance on further assignments as they progress through their college career. It would benefit the student in two ways that I can think of, first that students would be able to write better quality papers due to better sources/development of their ideas, and second that by continued interaction with the librarian, their own research skills would be vastly improved so that by the time they are seniors they can write really great papers! (I always thought that it was such a shame that I spent so much time learning to write a great paper in college, but it would not be a skill I would use once I graduated. Now I'm in grad school so it's useful after all! Hah)

I could probably continue talking on any number of subjects for days but no one wants that so I will stop here.