My main concern at this point (and this has to do specifically with my experience with the MARC tutorial) is that I am wasting significant time on details that I really don't need to know. How specific does my knowledge of the MARC system need to be to run a high school library? How many numbers, codes, fields, subfields, indicators, delimiters etc. do I personally need to know, and how many does the computer just do anyway?
Last semester an ESL student (taking a course from a local college) asked me for help with an assignment. She was being asked to memorize ridiculously specific rules of grammar-rules that I didn't even know (as a senior English teacher) and that she would have absolutely no need for in the real world. I felt so sorry for her, that she was struggling so valiantly with what she had been told was important, when in reality it was meaningless outside of the course that she was taking.
I am hoping that the assignments in this course will truly reflect the knowledge I need to have to run a high school library. It may be that I do need a very specified knowledge of the MARC system and the AACR2, and that eventually the codes will be child's play if I use them on a daily basis. Some brilliant person somewhere once said: "All things are difficult before they are easy". I'm about to start working on our 2nd major assignment, so we'll see how that goes.
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