Dumber

This is something that happened to me a few weeks before I left Info Services downtown, but I forgot to write about it until now.

As a general, stereotypical group, I despair of teachers who never did the after-degree. If they went straight into Education, and then started teaching, I never consider them knowing enough about the Universe to teach other people. And stories like this only cement my worldview on this point.

A high school teacher came up to the Desk, and said that she was preparing a unit on teaching high school students about budgeting; she wanted books on budgeting for teens. Fair enough.

I started to search for the elusive subject heading that I knew would be there, but with a certain type of patron, a full minute of searching - let alone 3 minutes of searching - is just too much, and obviously I don't know what I'm doing. She started to give me suggestions, and show her impatience fairly quickly - I'm sure we've all experienced this phenomenon.

Because she was so impatient, I suggested that she use some of the general budgeting books I was finding. She replied that those wouldn't work, because - wait for it - "With teens, sometimes you have to dumb-i-fy it."

Now, usually, I slip into my poker face and try not to comment on the patron's statement. But this time - with this shaper of young minds - I just couldn't resist.

"Um...," I said, "Did you... just.. say... 'dumb-i-fy'...??"

"Yeah," she nodded pertly, "Sometimes they just don't get it."

At this point in our conversation, two things happened together. We suddenly got very busy on the Desk, and I snagged the perfect subject heading as I knew I would. Since she's a teacher (heh), I wrote it down for her and sent her to the catalogue computers to find materials, and told her I'd check back with her in a few minutes. It should be pretty easy - right? - to find books with the perfect subject heading put in your hand for you?

But when I got back to her five minutes later, the only thing she had found of value was a 1986 children's book at a different branch. Puzzling? Oh. The despair. Indeed, she was using my perfect subject heading in a TITLE search. Yup, a high school teacher who doesn't know the difference between a subject search and a title search. And I couldn't talk her into doing it again correctly. She was all used up. She insisted that she'd drive all the way to Branch X to get her outdated budget book for kinders, and make the best of it.

It bugs me that she's dumb and doesn't know it. It bugs me that she probably thinks I wasn't very helpful because I didn't put the best books in her hand in the 30 seconds that she afforded me. It bugs me that her students have to put up with her for a whole year. And mostly, it bugs me that she has such little respect for the potential of her bet-they're-wildly-smarter-than-her kids.

Sayonara, Ms. FancyPants. May your teens dance circles around you.