Whatever You Do, Just Give Me My Damn Paper Back

I’ve been living at the Hennepin County Public Library lately. (Those are the Minneapolis libraries, by the way.) At Milkweed, I was recently assigned a fact checking job, and, naturally, accredited and peer-reviewed sources such as books are preferred over Wikipedia. In fact, the other intern and I who are tackling this manuscript were told to pretty much avoid the internet as much as possible. As I work, I find the library more and more limited, and find myself wishing more and more that I could use any sketchy website I wanted as a resource. (I never knew fact checking could be so hard!)

Like many nerdy English majors, I love libraries. I love the quiet corners, the old books that were last checked out in the 1930s, the seemingly endless amount of intriguing titles. However, like many a young person living in 2011, I barely ever step foot in them—fact checking assignments aside.

Last semester, I took three literature courses and a creative writing course. Being basic, required lit courses, our papers concentrated heavily on the text at hand, and we didn’t look to outside sources for theory or others’ critical analyses. I only used a library book once that whole semester.

The semester before that, with only one lit course on my schedule, I still only used a library book when I needed a copy of an Edgar Allan Poe short story for a final paper. All the other sources I needed for any of my assignments were either found in a purchased, required class text—or online.

Today, most college students’ research is done from the comfort of their own dorm room on their trusty laptop. If I can’t find it on the MLA International Bibliography database (my preferred database of choice), I usually assume it just doesn’t exist. I may love libraries but, more often than not, it seems like most of the nonfiction titles lining their shelves are outdated. I was trying to get some basic information on penguins today, and it was literally either something from the 1970s or the book based off of March of the Penguins. And don’t even let me get going on the poor selection of titles on goats.

The internet is arguably the best thing to happen to studying and research in a long time, once you get off Facebook and Twitter and everything else that basically cancels out these benefits. When I haven’t found time to finish one of the four novels I’m reading simultaneously for class, I can SparkNotes it now and finish it later. When I want to hear someone read “The Canterbury Tales” in proper Middle English, I can just search for it on YouTube. I can Wikipedia authors I’m reading to get some fundamental background information in literally two minutes, and if I have any question—no matter how obscure—I can Google it and see what comes up. I can email my professors copies of my paper, questions, and rough drafts. If I forget what iambic pentameter is (something that is FINALLY happening less and less), I can just type it into a search engine. There are online dictionaries and online instructions for writing MLA bibliographies and online programs that let you type in the citation information and they format it for you. Often, if you’re looking for a specific quote or word in a book but don’t have the page number, you can search for it on Google Books and it’ll list all the pages on which that word appears.

Take into the equation the fact I like doing my homework and studying in my room (or at the pool…), and it’s easy to see why I struggle to remember the last time I stepped foot into my campus library.

Starting sometime when I was in high school, teachers have likewise been  trying to get on the whole internet-and-academics bandwagon. But… it just doesn’t fly in most student opinions. You know, (or maybe you don’t since you guys were all born in the 1980s and are no longer in college), those intricate forums with places for the teacher to post announcements, the syllabus, and readings, plus inboxes for you to turn in your assignments, and student discussion boards—all with a login ID based off of your student ID number. My college uses one called Sakai.

Now, the more I think about it, the more I realize I really have nothing against Sakai. It’s easy to use once you get used to it, and it’s a great environmentally-friendly way to access readings—students who don’t mind reading on their computer can do so, while those other students can print the documents themselves. Teachers are able to easily email the entire class. It also allows you to creep on other students in the class, in case you need their email address or, more likely, their last name to Facebook-stalk them.

But, for some reason, I feel a certain hostility to these online programs. I like having readings posted online (nothing like a giant stack of paper you’re using once to make you feel sick to your stomach), but I hate when the teacher goes crazy and all-embraces it. Just give us a hard copy of the syllabus, please; you and I both know we’ll have plenty of changes to scribble in later. And don’t require online discussions—isn’t that what the classroom is for?

And please, whatever you do, please give me back a hard copy of that paper that I spent a ridiculous amount of time and energy on. Microsoft Word track changes has its uses… but it also feels impersonal, is more difficult to read (except for maybe the comments—but then again, deciphering the teacher’s handwriting is all part of the fun), and any comments are way less likely to ever be glanced at again. Plus, I can’t tape it on my fridge.

I had a professor who required us to write about our reading on the Sakai forum before each class. The idea made sense; he was able to make sure people did the reading and find out what we were interested in, and us students were able to engage with each others’ ideas. But it just ended up feeling like busy work. Somehow, using the internet this way—or in high school, when, similarly, I had math and physics problems online—takes any magic there was out of homework. It’s no longer an intimate act of watching your ideas flow out of the physical work of putting pen to paper. Plus, it’s required; there’s no personal curiosity involved, which takes the magic out of the internet.

The internet is completely changing the way students study and learn, not to mention the way the world reads, and I’m interested in seeing what happens when it becomes an inherent part of college academics—not just something external that is applied to courses taught by professors who have been set in their ways for decades.

So, as beneficial as the internet can be for my studies, right now, like most things in life, it can just annoy me the heck out of me at times as well. When that happens, nothing sounds better than crawling into my bed—or a lawn chair next to the pool—with a real book, the original source of my love for literature. I can put post-it notes on the pages, write in the margins, and flip through them back and forth in seconds. You can’t find that online. And as much as you put on internet, this is where the real substance of my English papers will always lie.

And I still find myself some nights, after spending hours scouring the library databases, running to the real thing in the middle of the night with a list of call numbers in my hand.