A Note to College and Graduate Students
February 16th, 2009
College and graduate students, it is wonderful you
are working on a degree. But part of
graduate work is learning how to do research. It is not easy. It is hard work. There are no short-cuts. Do not send me
an e-mail asking me to document, for you, every book published on X, Y,
Z. God created Google for a reason, along with your brain, and digital
card catalogs and, gasp, you might have actually to crack a real book
open, now and then, and check out what they call a “bibliography.”
Seriously, don’t expect me to do your work for you. That is all, and
thank you.
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Excellent entry. Do you have any idea for resources I could use on this topic? Any page numbers? Thanks!
Unfortunately, modern education (from kindergarden to graduate school) does not teach critical reasoning and research. That creates independent thinkers that ask tough questions and operate outside of “normal” patterns as understood by the education establishment. In place of these classic skills, the modern school teaches memorization and then fact regurgitation.
When I was an engineering technician (with a High School Diploma) I was appauled at how many “college educated” people were incapable of basic reasoning and research. It is part ignorance, part conditioning, and part laziness.
…it really is sad.
Yes it involves thinking, and thinking is hard work, that is why so few people do it. I can hear the classroom standard responses ‘what’s a card file?’ and ‘Where do you find a Bibliography.’
I must admit I do miss the Concordia Seminary library. Though we have a wonderful public library where I live I’ve never been able to adjust back to the Dewey decimal system.
A handy url for those cases:
http://lmgtfy.com/?q=cyberbrethren
McCain: Excellent!!
It’s really not that hard to develop a list of sources for a paper. If you’ve been at seminary for more than a semester or two, you ought to have a fair start on your own personal library. Between that and the course syllabus, that ought to give you a starting point for papers. Those books will certainly cite other authorities on your subject material and include bibliographies. When you look up those books and the ones they cite in the library, right there on the shelf next to them are likely to be other books touching the same matters. If that, Google and ATLA don’t give you enough references on point, you’re either trying to write the most exhaustive paper ever written on your subject or you really don’t know how to do research.
Amen, Pastor McCain!
When I was in grad school (in music), I was amazed at how many of my fellow grad students had absolutely no idea of the basics of research. Here we were at a state school with a large library, and some of them had not the slightest concept of how to plumb the depths of that amazing resource. That is definitely the downside to the advent of the Internet. Students have become so lazy.
I could go on forever about this topic, but I won’t.
Schools teach kids to get the right answers at any cost, not to think. “Bibliography” is such a big word, after all.
Google won’t help a fair number of students; to use Google effectively, you’ve got to be able to puzzle out which words to put into the search box to yield useful results.
Well said.