They stuck right with me through elucidation of a few simple tables leading to a fairly complicated SQL query involving two nested subqueries. A couple-three bright lights were all “But that’s easy! And sensible! Why didn’t it happen until the 1960s?”

I love my students. I truly do.

Obviously there’s a lot more to SQL and databases than I could show them in a couple of hours. There’s a lot more to SQL and databases than I myself know anything about! Database optimization, query optimization, denormalization for performance—I am only an egg. I can’t do that stuff. Heck, joins still confuse me sometimes.

But my goal wasn’t to turn them into database and markup ninjas. My goal was to get across that neither databases nor markup is geek voodoo; they’re things that ordinary mortals can usefully work with. And in that sense, last night was a smashing success.

I wasn’t, because I had a full slate for last night (that I actually didn’t get all the way through, but it’s okay; I expected not to), but I sure will next week… and if I’m teaching them nothing else, clearly I’m teaching them to pay attention to the world around them.

I also found out that one of my final-project tasks was totally unreasonable. I still think it was feasible (I know how I’d do it!), but I’m an unreconstructed markup geek with lots of data-conversion experience; it was unfair of me to project that onto my poor students. The group that took on that job really went above and beyond to try to figure out how the pros do it. Unfortunately, however, the pros aren’t unreconstructed markup geeks. The task is being revised accordingly, and I hope the students aren’t too traumatized by the experience!

The biggest hassle with moving from eleven students to nearly forty is turning out to be calming their anxiety. I thought I wrote pretty clear instructions on my assignments, but apparently not! Ah, well, lessons for next time.

As the classroom gradually filled yesterday evening, I heard highly gratifying tidbits about XML validators and server space and project blogs. I’ve been asked to talk about digital signatures and VPNs, and I’m looking hard at overhauling my lecture on security later in the semester.

Somebody in that classroom is doing something right. It’s not necessarily me! But somebody is.

That said, I met the whole horde for the first time tonight, and it went okay, though forty is a very different experience from eleven. The room we’re in is crowded, which I expected, and also much too hot, which I didn’t and which was seriously wearisome (I don’t do air conditioning at home, so I managed okay, but some of them were wilting rather), but you deal with the space you got, and I mostly made it work.

They’re a forthcoming crew, which makes me really happy and will help class along no little. Several of them came up to talk to me, which is always a good sign; it means they’re not intimidated and I’m not a total ogre. We had a lot of fun with good old Abbot Trithemius and his librarian descendants (mad props to Sarah Shreeves of UIUC for finding me a paper from 1972 whose mere abstract had the room howling with laughter and an entirely salutary amount of “OMG whut?”), and we learned about job talks and twopointopians and bits and bytes and xkcd and Unicode and audio sampling and I swear it all made some kind of sense at the time, at least to me.

There was the minor detail that I was running purely on caffeine and adrenaline because I, um, forgot to go eat dinner. This was unwise of me and I will try not to do it again. There was also the not-so-minor detail of getting syllabi duplicated, which turned into a complete fiasco that was 90% my fault… I’m going to do my best to fix it in the morning, and I’ve stuck a copy on the class website for folks who can’t wait, so I hope they’ll forgive me for being a dunderhead.

Which, on balance, I think they will. They’re a good group, and I’m looking forward to the rest of the semester.

Notes to self (so that I don’t forget): Unicode guide (del.icio.us?), info on game emulators and digital preservation, show the data-death poem in class next week, remember to put digital signatures in the lecture on desktop security. (I had a student ask for that! ASK! How cool is that?)

I liked teaching back in the day, even in the Department from Hell. I still like teaching. My hammy nature comes out to play, as does the highly opinionated part of me that holds Strong Views on what folks ought to know about and be prepared for. I walked home from classes feeling good, and that was a sustaining influence given the up-and-downness evident in my day job lately.

(Still hate grading, but no jam comes sans pill.)

In general, I think my syllabus covered useful stuff. Next time, though, I want to do some hands-on work, and I’m already looking for notions (Andrea Mercado’s kioskification of Firefox looks like a good one!). I can teach a basic SQL query from scratch in an hour or two. I should. Ditto regular expressions and the basics of HTML and CSS. It’s all about expanding one’s daily technology toolkit.

Of the three major assignments, two were solid hits and the third… needs work. The job talk and the position-description assignment went over really well (how often do students thank you for assigning them work? well, mine thanked me!) and I was chuffed at how useful the job talks actually were, for the rest of the class and even for me. The third I may separate out into two or three smaller assignments—it really isn’t safe to assign big, relatively unstructured projects, because students get more stressed than they should. It’s a shame, because big and unstructured projects are what the real world is all about, but there seems to be a limit to how far a class can go in acting like the real world.

So I think “write an implementation plan or project documentation” and “install, theme, and mod a new server-based technology” can and should be done separately from each other, likely as the dreaded group projects. Live and learn.

Our local course management system sucks rocks and I refuse to use it ever again for anything. Next time I’m putting in a Drupal install, and we’ll interact online that way. The blogs worked reasonably well, but they’d be better in a Drupal install (like Five Weeks’s) because of increased opportunity for interaction among students.

Using del.icio.us as a tickler file for current events was a winner. For one thing, it helped me tie what I was teaching to the real world. For another, it modeled the professional behavior of keeping one’s ears perked for relevant news. For a third—hey, readings for next time! (Though I’m happy with the readings I found for this semester, and will reuse a lot of them.) Drupal’s RSS module should let me put a few good blogs and technology-news sources (Ars Technica for the win!) within student reach.

I’m scheduling quizzes next time, instead of doing them ad-hoc. Should be a stress reducer for everyone, me not least—several weeks I ought to have written up a quiz, but life just kept on intervening in that annoying way it has. No major exams, though; in a class like mine that’s just goofy.

I can’t say enough about how great the students were. They took a chance on a brand-new class from a brand-new instructor. They put up with my genial weirdness (did I mention the day I played two Monty Python clips in class?) and my insane outside schedule. They let me know how I could make the class better instead of grumbling out of earshot. They expressed gratitude early and often, and sometimes in embarrassingly fulsome terms. They took chances with their final projects, several of them, trusting me enough not to let fear of a poor grade hold them back.

I will be proud to have them as colleagues, and the library world will benefit from their presence in it.

See how pretty the site is? Yes, well, we didn’t do that. The planning committee, that is. I was all ready to dive in and make yet another of my square boring blocky two-d non-lickable 1.0 site layouts, but…

But a library-school student named Heather Yager sent us an email asking if she could give us a hand. We took one look at her elegant portfolio site and said “Yes, please!”

Since Heather hasn’t bragged on her own work (I looked!), I’m going to brag on it for her. It’s darn good-looking stuff. Within the limits of the Drupal template she worked from, it’s well-coded stuff, too (despite my well-known unfondness for table layouts). And Heather did this in less than a month, on top of a full course load plus whatever else she’s doing.

She has been a joy to work with; I can say this with authority, as I’ve had the most contact with her of the planning committee. She is smart, highly technically proficient, articulate in writing, self-reliant, and invariably pleasant.

And what’s more, Heather took the initiative to contact us and volunteer her services. I admire that. A lot. And as soon as Heather goes on the job market, I will happily write as many recommendation letters and field as many phone calls as she needs me to. (I’m guessing that won’t be many. She’ll get snapped up fast.)

Library-school students could do far, far worse than try to emulate Heather Yager. I confidently predict she will be an excellent librarian.

Do I need to manage my buffer size to avoid the input file overflowing memory, asked somebody. Yeah, like the professor has time to sit there cackling at the carnage while twenty-odd student programs bring the JVM crashing down one after another. Puh-leeze. (And what is a guy who worries about buffer overflows doing in remedial Java, anyway?)

Then later they jawboned her into letting punctuation as well as whitespace be word delimiters. By that time I’d already turned my assignment in. Did I redo it? Did I hell. Sure, I could have. I have better things to do with my time, thanks.

Yesterday’s pop quiz was an exercise in how often we could be tripped up by sneaky little “features” of Java. I got all but one; not too shabby. We discussed Big-O algorithm analysis, which is conceptually rather nifty, but whose details (ugh, sigma notation, shoot me now) lead me to believe that a lot of “rigorous” software analysis boils down to not much more than the traditional Scientific Wild-Ass Guess.

There’s a guy in the class who will not stop staring at me. It’s not that I’m the only one with girl-cooties, either; there’s six other women in the room, not including the professor. Nor is it my stunning animal magnetism. I don’t have any. I’m the oldest and fattest woman in the room, and the homeliest to boot.

He just stares. I don’t get it. Maybe it’s that I don’t keep my mouth shut? Now that I think about it, mine is the only female voice I’ve heard in class (aside, again, from the professor’s). Eh, well, whatever. I just wish he’d cut it out.

Nobody panic, it’s just nondegree info-systems stuff (and likely pass-fail to save the lecturer some grading), because I’m tired of not having all the clues I ought to. Besides, this clue-gathering is free-as-in-beer because it’s a job perq, so I’d be silly not to let MPOW buy me a clue.

Applying for admission, even for nondegree student status, is as much of a stupid bureaucratic farce as ever, I must say. Why hasn’t anyone come up with a secure electronic transcript request/fulfillment system yet? I’m tired of filling out stupid forms and paying ridiculous amounts of money for something that should be as simple as I web-form a request to OldSkool, OldSkool crypto-signs and sends the transcript to my school, my school decrypts with OldSkool’s public key, end of story. Bah, silly systems. Relying on paper in this day and age.

The process illustrates the give-and-take between student and teacher. The two professors I’ve been asked to recommend (and both have been mentioned by name on CavLec, though that’s all the hint I’m giving) are the two I was most impressed with at SLIS. No surprise that they trust me, even despite my well-known ire at academia, not to stab them in the back.

Which I didn’t last time, and won’t this time. I still haven’t heard about the results of the last go-round; how the heck long does the tenure-review process take, anyway? If I were the prof undergoing it, I’d feel more than half-dead by now.

So we got to comparing our programs (seeing as how I’m a recent grad and all), and it turns out that several of her courses have been abysmally taught. This is no great surprise to me; so were a number of mine. And another no-brainer: the worst-taught courses are the so-called “core” courses.

I really hate to say it, but this appears to be a library-school universal. I’ve never heard anyone express unequivocal satisfaction with the core courses in their librarian education. And before anyone asks, yes, we understand that pedagogical quality is going to vary, and that we’re going to like some subjects more than others. I’m not talking about ordinary vagaries of teaching here; I’m talking about library schools falling down on the job. Classes that suck, rather than merely not rocking.

Which class gets the most complaints? Well, in my school it was “Organization of Information,” and my interlocutor at rehearsal agreed about her school’s variant. The person who taught me this course was pleasant—and completely clueless. Why, after all, should she have a solid understanding of the subject matter? She does statistical research into software usability and design. Frankly, except for the MARC bits, I could almost have taught that course better at the time I was taking it.

Some schools (such as my interlocutor’s, apparently) have revamped this course to toss a bunch of IT concepts in, and that is helping not at all, given the average tech-savvy of your average LIS faculty member… so much is it not helping, in fact, that my interlocutor said of her course, “It makes me really scared of taking a course in databases or web design.”

Insert horrified shriek here. I hope I changed her mind, but I’m not sanguine.

No bloody wonder librarians can’t, don’t, and won’t code. The precise course that ought to give them confidence in handling digitized information (be it in MARC, XML, an RDBMS, some combination of the above, or something else entirely) is driving them away from it in droves because of heinously poor teaching.

Oh, and before M-ch–l G-rm-n or his pet bullyboys get all up in my face, let me just point out that this same course is typically the prerequisite for cataloguing, so if it’s taught poorly, the librarian world ends up with fewer cataloguers. (And judging from the job postings I have been monitoring for New Librarian, that doesn’t seem to be so far off from the truth.)

In library schools’ defense, these Info Org courses are viciously hard to teach. It’s a lot of material, some of which is banal memorization (yes, I can recite the main Dewey and LCC divisions from memory, how about you?), and much of which exercises modes of thinking that are new for most non-geeks. Scary bad combination.

Moreover, if the teacher doesn’t understand the technologies to be taught (hush; MARC is a technology too, folks) well enough to get across why they exist, what problems they solve, how they think about their problem domain, and how we need to think about and use them in order to get our work done—well, how can we expect proto-librarians to?

And library schools are also fighting against the research-faculty grain to get coverage for these courses at all. Or they’re turning to guest lecturers who are practitioners, which sounds like a fine idea but has the bad habit of crashing headlong into a busy practitioner’s Real Job. I heard a hair-raising story about this at rehearsal: a course with no assignments, no papers, no projects, no tests, no evaluation whatsoever because the guest lecturer was too busy with the Real Job to grade anything.

There’s no easy answer. Honestly, though, my reaction now is the same as it was when I was taking the courses: get the core stuff taught and taught well or stop pretending to be a library OR info-sci school. All of this poseur nonsense helps nobody.

This is not to say that I disagree with Andrew Dillon and April Norris’s conclusion that the G-rm-nesque “library education crisis” is a trumped-up pile of baleful bile, because Dillon and Norris are quite right about that. By and large, library schools are at least interested in teaching the right stuff.

They’re just not interested enough to get it taught right, that’s all; and buried at the end of their article, Dillon and Norris say in a pianissimo whisper that they agree with that assessment.

Speaking of Andrew Dillon (who has a new blog, by-the-bye), I’ve been reading and enjoying the second edition of Designing Usable Electronic Text and wondering why I’d never seen the book before.

The conclusion I came to is that the book makes a lot of people uncomfortable. (So it’s only natural that I’m loving it, eh?) It makes researchers uncomfortable because it isn’t afraid to point out that the emperor of digital text usability research is naked as a jaybird. It makes practicing text artisans uncomfortable because hell’s bells, we aren’t even paying attention to the little research that there is. It makes librarians uncomfortable because… well, librarians are always uncomfortable.

And it makes M-ch–l G-rm-n uncomfortable because of its spirited, drily funny defense of human-computer interaction as a worthy—indeed, necessary—topic of inquiry. G-rm-n, you see, would prefer not to admit that humans interact with computers at all… never mind actually programming the beasts.

Which brings me neatly back to my post title. Librarians can’t code because too many librarians and library schools have their noses so far up in the air about computers that they are neither recruiting coders (which is purest, sheerest madness—why are we not using the exodus of women from comp sci to our advantage?) nor creating them.