Blue: Old School Research
In interest of iteration, last week the Blue Band started a would-be experiment. On Thursday, we spent the day at the San Francisco Public Library's Main Branch. The kids came up with a list of research questions and also a list of books that they wanted to check out. We made a master list of resources, and I organized it all by library floor. Admittedly, I over-prepped for this adventure and over-structured it out of the nervousness that comes with being in a five floor public facility with eight curious minds who want to explore and experience everything.So, before departing the school, I wrote my cell phone number on eight pieces of paper and handed them out to Blue Band. The number came with a set of instructions: this is for emergencies. Please don't group text me. Do not call me if I can make eye contact with you in that moment. No emojis. I will only respond to hard copy emojis, and not digital ones.And then the next thing that erupted, as we walked from the school to the bus stop, was a flood of hard copy emojis.
And the flood Has. Not. Stopped.I tell this story not because it's particularly important or pivotal to the intellectual development of Blue Band's seed arc projects, but rather, because it has allowed a few interesting (and should-be obvious) patterns to emerge:
- I'm teaching a generation has never not known the internet.
- Such familiarity with connectiveness invites a gap in other skills.
- Capitalizing on that gap has started to open up a new and exciting world for them.
This week, we went back to the SFPL -- and this time, we spent the whole day. This is important because at the SFPL, the internet connection is virtually (pun intended) nonexistent. We had to bring notebooks and writing utensils, and had to expect that we were going to be faced the limitations of having to do research in a way that we're not used to doing research.But here's the good news: when we are there, we are surrounded by books on every subject imaginable. And LPs. And microfische. And government documents. And librarians who can help us find anything.Wait... what's microfische?
For me, the best part of this week was explaining microfische.
Let's just pause and think about this for a moment.How crazy is it that all basically all the newspapers that have ever been printed are not stored on the internet? How inconceivable is it that you have to ask for or locate small boxes of rolled information packets that you manually load into a machine? Think, for just a moment, about the process of skimming through a rolling film reel of tiny words to find a thing that may or may not exist. Think about all the possible tangents and informational rabbit holes you could accidentally stumble upon while sifting through all that eye candy.For Owen, what began as a quest to read a book stored on microfische ended up as a deep dive into the April 1st, 1984 edition of the San Francisco Chronicle's comics section.
This fruitful tangent allow us to talk about the process of researching newspaper articles using the film projecting machines. It allowed us to casually chat about the labor and site-specificity of such research, especially if you're researching something that happened in a particular area of the country and if the only copy of that newspaper's film was housed in some small town library in the middle of nowhere. We talked about the politics of and problems with digitizing all that information to make it more accessible. We talked about comics. We talked about the sociopolitical undertones of the comics and about what was happening historically when they were created. We looked at old Macy's ads. We talked about how Craigslist morphed out of the Classified section.While we did this, Felix and Julian researched classified government documents regarding UFO activity. Clem waded through a really, really, linguistically challenging book on the biology of seed dispersal, taking notes sentence by sentence. Fran and Kaia did the same with their respective research topics. Audrey read about the possibility of terraforming Mars from book that had to be specially requested from another library.On Thursday, I could have been easily sitting and researching with a grad class -- but they were middle school students taking their research just as seriously. Just as inquisitively.(Although, let's also be real here -- we also had an awesome lunch break outside playing and laughing pretty hard).
But, by making this simple change -- from digital to Old School research -- Blue's perspective of the world opened up, and I got to watch it happen again. (I never tire of this!)Thursdays at SFPL are a thing now -- see you next week!