Here is a second day of "deep thoughts" from James reflecting about the experience of being a student again. As was the rule with yesterday's entry, if you're not up for my open and honest ( and perhaps self-indulgent) diatribe, please feel free to exit, ignore, or remove this blog from your favourites list.
The picture is of what's called the 1888 building, built in 1888 of course, and which serves as the post-graduate centre. There are a grand total of 13 000 students currently doing some form of post-graduate work at the university. If you look closely, you can see Linton talking to her dad on her mobile (not cell phone) . She came for a campus tour today.
Here we go! Today I am attending a couple of sessions about how to properly reference research, avoid plagiarism and write academically. This is something I have been teaching to Holy Trinity high school students for the past nine years. Now it's time for me to put my money where my mouth is and, to use yet another bad cliche - to see if I can truly practice what I preach. Remarkably, whether you are a grade ten English student in Richmond Hill, Ontario or a graduate student in Melbourne, Australia the rules and standards for writing and referencing are fundamentally the same. I guess that's somewhat reassuring and the way it should be. Although, there was secretly a part of me that wanted the process to be inexplicably difficult because after all, I've come all this way and spent all this money and therefore the way one references research in an academic essay should be incredibly and wonderfully foreign, right? Well no, and the fact that what I have been teaching is very similar to what a masters student should be practicing makes me feel very good about the English program at HTS.
The presenter is another university classic. He is fifty-something and certainly knows his stuff and yet, with the Australian accent and my pre-disposition to the very North American posit that anyone who sounds "British" has somehow more authority to push Porsches or plagiarism, I once again get a feeling of being talked down to. Oh well. It is certainly not his problem and if I would get my head out of the defensive clouds I would probably realize he has some very good reminders for sale. I do wonder where all of the younger voices are. Down at the bank saving the world, perhaps.
Anyway, Roger, as his name happens to be, is actually freaking me out a bit because although I know this stuff functionally and philosophically, I don't know if I can know this stuff at the level of which I think I want to know this stuff and need to know it, ya know? MLA is a breeze and maybe Chicago, but APA? Harvard? Vancouver?! I didn't even know there was a Vancouver style!
In point of fact, I don't need actually need to know every citation style known to man. However, on Day 2 I am plagued by this quiet, creeping need to be "perfect" - to learn everything effectively and efficiently - all the time. So that, while I want all of the other parts of this year - the travel and family time to be memorable - I also want the learning and the whole masters process to be, memorable. I don't want to waste time doing things the wrong way and wasting time. "Perfect" then, in terms of my masters, means spending time on the reading, the thinking, the writing, and not so much on learning the proper presentation of a bibliography - or at least I don't want to waste time getting it wrong! So while Roger is already increasing my stress levels about getting everything right, I must also recognize that that is the precise reason why I am sitting in this session, doing something I have done and taught for years. I am going to put my money where my mouth is; one day, one class, and one proper bibliographic reference at a time.
Two things I learned today that I liked:
1) The origin of the word plagiarism comes from the Latin word for kidnapping.
2) Roger was actually quite poetic in his presentation of a rather dry topic and at one point he said: "The use of language makes things happen and is not merely a window on the world." I liked that but perhaps he might have added, "The effective use of language makes things happen.."
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