Week six (Feb. 23 – Feb. 27)

Even though this is the sixth week of my intern, it is the second week of teaching indeed. And so far, I only had two sessions to teach. I would be very easy to be stressful if I couldn’t get the topic before the class. Unfortunately, I got the problem for two of classes this week.

Normally we got the topic at least a week ahead so we would have time to prepare. However, one professor did no respond my email, and another professor said she sent the topic but no one got it. I also heard that both of them have some special requirements, but we couldn’t tell what those are without their topics. I was frustrated, but I kept trying to call and email them a couple of time since last week. Finally, I got what I need a day before the class and I was so happy because one of them ask to teach the class in lecture style, which means, I need to show the entire class how to search in OPAC and databases step by step. Without knowing the topic, I would not able to choose appropriate databases for the class. It is always highly important to contact professors in advance. They are very busy and they may forget sending topics, we have to try and try because without a topic, we can not know which databases we want students to try on.

The day before teaching the lecture style class, we had the meeting with Toby to go over the lecture class tips, and the professor asks any topic that related to the Great Gatsby by Scott Fitzgerald, such as men and women of 1920’s, Jazz Age, Scott Fitzgerald is also fine. Because I have to show the class how to search, I need to choose a topic to use on the class, and relate to the Great Gatsby. Thus I decided to use Women’s rights in 1920’s as the topic and use OPAC, Academic Search Premier, Omnifile, and ProQuest Historical Newspaper – San Francisco Chronicle (1865-1922). From four of them, students would able to find books, scholarly journal articles, and historical information. However, lecture style class takes longer time to explain each database, so I run out of time to show all of databases. Instead, I show them how to use OPAC, Academic Search Premier, and ProQuest Historical Newspaper – San Francisco Chronicle (1865-1992).

Another session I taught was that the professor wanted me to show the class different databases in different subjects because she would assign several papers to the class in different subjects. The topic we would use for the first paper is Healthcare system. Based on her needs, I chose OPAC, Academic Search Premier, Business Source Complete, ProQuest Newsstand, and Opposing Viewpoints Resource Center. As again, OPAC and Academic Search Premier were chosen because OPAC is the basic one for catalog searching and Academic Search Premier is an extremely helpful one for starting a research with fresh. ProQuest Newsstand provides newspaper and magazine articles; Opposing Viewpoints Resource Center provides articles for more debatable resources that students could refer to.

There were several problems that I haven’t deal before, but I learned from dealing with these problems and gained knowledge of the importance of communicating with faculty and manage time effectively during the session.