Fishing for the Right Education

“What Should Colleges Teach?” is by Stanley Fish. In Fish’s article he states “I cannot see, however, why a failure of secondary education relieves college teachers of a responsibility to make up the deficit. Quite the reverse. It is because our students come to us unable to write clean English sentences that we are obligated to supply what they did not receive from their previous teachers.” I agree with this statement that college teachers are having to pick up the missing pieces from high school but I feel that more important things could be focused on for preparing us. Something that I feel should be focused on is showing students how to do good research.

After spending 8 weeks in the Writer’s Studio observing a student and a tutor for my English class I have noticed that one of the more important parts of writing was the research that you had to do to find your information and the details to support your topic and also the sources that you use to make your paper more reliable. These items can help to better develop a more knowledgeable paper and find information that is reliable. But, in order to do the research you need there’s a few things that you need to know and that is how to do the research. That is what I believe that students need to be taught in the classroom.

To any student who procrastinates, this is relatable

Students often sit down 12 hours before their paper is due and expect all of their ideas to just come to them without doing any research at all. Well these students seem to have trouble writing about the topic that they are assigned. This could be many things but typically it’s because they don’t know much about the topic they are writing about. Students need to be taught the directions of how to do research.

Let's face it, we don't all have money to blow

The reasons that I believe that students don’t do as much research is because they simply don’t know where to look for the information they need. During one of my tutoring sessions that I observed the student told the tutor that he needed two more sources for his paper. The tutor then showed the student how to order books from the OSUN library for this student to use as a source. By knowing this information you can find these articles easily and best of all for free which is fabulous for every college student trying to save money cause let’s face it college isn’t cheap.

Sometimes after you are sitting down and researching is that there are always so many search results to look through about your topic. What we might ask ourselves though is “How do I look through all of these results?” The best way to narrow down your search results is to use an advanced search because advanced searching will narrow down your search results so you can find articles that are only about what you want to read and learn about.

After you narrow your results down and you find a few that look like they might be worth looking at, what are you going to do? Read all of the articles? No, most college students don’t even have enough time to sit and do the paper until last minute so why would they read articles that could be up to 25 pages long? They don’t. But what do they do to figure out what the article is about? They read the abstract, which will make it quicker to know what the article is about without reading the whole thing because it is a spot on summary of the article.

By observing in these eight week sessions in the writer’s studio I got to experience college writing being done first hand and see the different elements that are needed to develop a well written and reliable college paper. Although we will never know every single thing that is needed for a perfect college paper we can at least know how to at least start to do research to start typing the paper.