Is it really THAT hard to research a musical? — Page 2

I remember with delight learning how to conduct research for a paper. It was fifth grade, before computers, before photocopy machines were everywhere.

You went to the library, to the card catalog, found your sources, hand-wrote all your notes, and compiled your paper.

This was public school, in a semi-rural Midwest town.

I find it difficult to imagine research is harder to do now...

You can call me dumb. It happens.

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This brings back memories of when I was teaching high school theatre arts. I gave a similar project to my advanced theatre class one semester. They had to pick a current musical on Broadway and do an extensive report on it. In addition to a plot synopsis, song list, etc.; I also had them summarize the reviews from selected critics, track the weekly grosses, design their own marketing materials (posters, etc.)for said musical - and do a class presentation of their findings (along with playing a selected track from the cast album).

I ran into a lot of the same issues with students complaining that they couldn't find info on their musicals. Of course these were the usual habitual slackers; the ones who had chosen such obscure shows as Oklahoma! and The Music Man... I even gave them a list of websites to use as resources.

The fun part was convincing the librarian that "Playbill.com" should be added to the list of accessible sites...

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Research skills have to be taught.

I am a teacher and many of my colleagues assume that because kids today have easy access to the Internet, they know how to access information. Wrong. Kids are bombarded with information today, far more than I was (and I've only got about ten years on most of my students). They need to be taught how to be creative about finding it (because they usually don't have to be creative about research - they can find tons and tons of information about their favourite singer, TV show or movie in literally seconds), they need to be taught how to be critical and selective about the information they find (because they're exposed to a lot of bull**** that is specifically designed to manipulate them) and they need to be taught how to integrate information from multiple sources. Just setting a research assignment and letting kids go off on their own is not good enough teaching. Research skills have to be taught and practised.

IMHO.