It's hard for me because I mainly tutor first-years. And they need, beyond most other priorities, to learn how to find shit. A proportion of them don't care. Others care a little but not enough. A bunch are scared to ask for help. Others ask for too much help, to the point where they basically expect me to do everything for them. And what I get from that last group of students is just a regurgitation of the sources I've given them - because they figure that I've expressly endorsed that material and I want nothing more than to have a paraphrased/plagiarised gunge-ball of it lobbed at me.
The course schedule includes library training sessions, but only the real nerds give a shadow of a fuck.
There's usually a text to dig into, and I try to tell them that an intelligent close-reading (an investigation and insightful description of techniques, literary effects and so on) is WHAT I REALLY WANT, and that I honestly wouldn't give a fuck, irrespective of the course profile, if they didn't incorporate a specified number of critical perspectives into their writing, SO LONG AS THEY FOCUSED AS A HUMANE READER ON THE WORDZ, but 80% tell me, blandly, utterly un-analytically, what happens in the narrative. As if I haven't spent time I don't have going spare, fuelled by Pepsi Max and Xhamster, reading the fucking novel myself.
Unthinkable.
