Week 3: Class Reflection

A concept that really struck me in class last week was the separation between teaching people who are your students versus teaching people who are you peers. The former is a pretty well-explored subject, so I'll leave that out for the moment, but the latter is a situation that comes up a lot without necessarily being discussed, or at not least anywhere I can hear.

With a few exceptions (tutoring jobs), everyone I've ever formally or academically taught anything to has been either my peer or, in some cases, my superior. In the case of the latter it is usually a matter of showing a boss or professor how to use a piece of technology they haven't encountered before. This sort of instruction tends to be fairly quick and more or less informal--they look over my shoulder while I click through whatever it is they need to understand, and then I go back to whatever I was doing and they go on to use the tool I've just explained to them.

When it comes to teaching peers, though, I feel like I have a deeper experience. Being the sole English major in a social circle packed with engineers meant that I spent a good portion of undergrad helping people patch up papers and lab reports, often from scraps that could only very loosely be defined as coherent writing. I always demanded that we go over the piece together, rather than just fixing it myself, so that they could see why I made the changes I did, and maybe learn how to do it for next time. I don't mean to make my friends sound illiterate--they were all very intelligent people, and I needed their help just as often as they needed mine. They just weren't writers. We were peers, more or less alike in age and experience and status, but I had a skill set that most of them lacked completely.

Despite the lingering awe-of-the-reference desk that some library patrons seem to exhibit, it seems to me that most of them see librarians as some hybrid of teacher and peer. Especially in public libraries, our jobs are likely bounded by similar hours and similar wages to a great number of our patrons. Some classes have encouraged me to approach library customer service in an open, direct manner that suggests a peer-type relationship to the patron, while others have suggested a more directly teacher-like strategy. My personality is more suited to the former option, and so I am thinking about my college friends and their lab reports--when I helped them edit their papers, they helped me write code for my blog, or figure out the calculus for a particularly brutal astronomy class. We traded.

So what am I trading with library patrons when I help them? The only thing I can think of is that all experience of this type is helpful--the more people I help, the more resources I am familiar with and the more able I am to interpret the kinds of questions that patrons ask. Do you think there's something else, or is it mostly a one-way exchange?