Barriers to success

I was reading an email sent out by our archery club secretary today, and was rattling through it casually, when I was brought up short by a single sentence:

[He] was 1st male novice, with an excellent score of 510 - first CUB novice to break the 500 barrier this year!

See anything jarring there? Maybe I'm being too pernickety, maybe I'm used to positive reinforcement techniques, but I balk at the word barrier for a couple of reasons.

Do not pass go, do not collect $200

 Let's talk semantics. The word barrier is synonymous with such words and phrases as "obstacle", "limit" and "bar to passage". Now, the competition the archers were shooting at was a Portsmouth round (5 dozen arrows at 20 yards on a 60cm target face). With metric scoring, the maximum possible score is 600. That is the "limit" - an archer cannot score more than that. (And if they have done, then something has gone wrong somewhere.) 500 - that's not a barrier. Many archers can score higher than that. And do.

So, it's not literally a barrier, is it? No, but look at it. It's a lovely round number. And what do we do with round numbers? Fixate on them to the detriment of our actual skill. After a term of shooting, a number of novices are getting 460, 480, having enjoyed a pretty steep learning curve up until then. But recently, most of their scores will be 400-odd, and it creates a greater sense of accomplishment to change that first digit, which has been around for too long without changing (and for some really good novices, it hasn't changed at all).

But there is 500, tantalising in its attainability. And then what happens is archers focus on that, getting that score, "breaking that barrier", and forgetting about little things like "shooting properly," "aiming at the middle", "keeping consistent". I'll own up, it's happened to me too - I can't begin to count the number of times I shot over 990 on a FITA and never managed 1000.

One thing I've learnt about archery: it isn't hard. What makes it a challenge (once you've learned how to shoot), is the fact that your brain will often get in the way of your shooting. Some archers find that if they start scoring generally well, they panic and shoot badly in "compensation", to end up with almost the same score they would have done had they been shooting at a mediocre standard throughout. And vice versa; an unusually low score might spur them on to "fix" their mistake, again with the result that they shoot much the same score as always.

There are various mental tricks archers can use to try and get the brain to think about something other than that holy grail of a score. Sometimes you can avoid knowing your score (just writing down arrow values and not adding them up). That's alright, but you can sometimes "feel" that you're doing better, and sometimes you're at a competition where they demand running scores, and you can't help but be aware of exactly how you're doing. Another idea is to aim for a different round number - slightly hard, because 600 is quite a way off, and 510 or 520 or 550 just isn't as round. Or aim for something else entirely; handicap tables - or the CUB Tabs based on them - are set at scores which are very decidedly not-round. If I remember correctly, a score of 480-something will earn you your black Tab, then 520-something will get you Blue. If you aim for those, somewhere in between you will have got 500, just like that.

So, back to the idea of this "barrier" then. It's a perception, caused by the fact that we have a decimal numbering system. There is nothing stopping anyone from getting over 500. Except that we refer to it as a "barrier". So let's change that - 500 is now a "benchmark" of success. We can see that we are better archers if we score higher than 500 more often than we did before. Let's use it as a way to show improvement, not as a limit to our talent.

Students - Lazy or Ignorant?

This was shared by LibGoddess on Twitter today, and given I'm determined to keep this blogging lark going for as long as possible I thought I'd offer my take on it.

I had a lot of books growing up (aged 12 I counted over a thousand), and my family were a pretty knowledgeable bunch, so it wasn't until high school that I was introduced to the library as a source of information rather than as somewhere to borrow fiction books. In Year 8, somewhere within the first few weeks of starting high school, my class were invited to the library where we were given a tour of the resources and told about the books. We were each given a topic (mine was Thomas Gainsborough) and given two weeks to use the library resources to research this topic and present the information to the librarian, who would mark it based on the resources used.

Gainsborough, from mira66 on Flickr

 Fantastic idea in principle, but the librarian was a bit of a harridan, and I didn't feel welcome in the library at all, so when I found a small paragraph on Gainsborough in a general encyclopaedia, I copied it out and handed it in, then didn't return to the library for four years. (I got a low mark for the work too, for not using the more art-specific resources available.) Curiously enough, when I returned, it was not as a reader, but as a volunteer. I must have been some kind of glutton for punishment...

Fast forward to university, and once again, I and my peers were subjected to the ubiquitous library tour. I can't remember much but it was definitely one of the less scary moments of being at university¹. However, we were given reading lists specifying exactly which books we needed, so once I could wrangle my way through the catalogue search and find the books, that was it. In fact, it wasn't until I actually got a job there, and then began my librarianship degree, that I began to learn what a library was really for and how it actually worked.

So what's my point? I think that yes, there is definitely a need for institutions to recognise that students' expectations have changed significantly since the development of search engines and online information. I still find Newton cumbersome and difficult to use, and as a cataloguer I'm always aware that while trying to catalogue to minimum bibliographic standards, I'm also trying to predict how our library users are going to search for something, and tweaking records to fit that too. And students today are all about speed. If something isn't immediately useful, they move on. I do too. I'm not going to run through eleven different resources either; if I can find one that works well enough and blag the rest then I will (though I'm trying hard to train myself out of that now!).

The Pendlebury: not very scary.

However, I think some effort has to be made on the part of the user too. Libraries run all sorts of training, but students don't take it up sufficiently. For my part, I just wasn't aware that there was all this information out there (one of those "unknown unknowns") that could help me. I could see there were periodicals on the shelf, but I didn't know what an abstract was, let alone that there were indexes for these abstracts that I could search! Perhaps if we'd been set a project like I had in Year 8 I would have learnt about this at university? Certainly the Pendlebury librarian was a heck of a lot less scary than the one at high school. But my lecturers and supervisors had done the work for me, so I perceived no need to find out beyond the framework of that hallowed reading list. And this is where I think maybe academics and libraries (and teachers and school librarians) really need to work together. Research skills should be taught in much the same way as geography, or science, or Notre Dame polyphony. And they need promoting, not just by the libraries but also by the departments and their academics. If I knew that there was a genuine reason to grapple with a resource, I'd have had a go, rather than resorting to Google.

Remember that Oxfam advert? Give a man a fish, he'll eat that day; give him a net, he'll eat for the rest of his life? Students don't need spoonfeeding. Trust me, it's nice, but ultimately it doesn't help anyone. What you produce is a generation of "students" who expect everything to be done for them. Instead of a reading list, give them the link to the library's electronic resource page. Tell them what each resource is, and how it will help them, what you thought of it, its advantages and disadvantages, and then let them go forth and discover. They'll thank you in the long run.

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¹The scariest moment was definitely at my first supervision, on keyboard technique, when I had to harmonise a melody at the piano, had my efforts subsequently pulled to pieces and I was asked whether I thought I should actually be there. Bit of a sore point still, as you can see.