Over the weekend, I read that romantic comedies are ruining relationships. People expect their relationships to be exactly like these movies, and they leave when it isn’t. For years, people have been either accusing cartoons and video games of increasing violent tendencies in children or studying the potential relationship between violence in children’s media and violent acts committed by children. I have to wonder how many of the love-scorned adults out there were children who learned their violent ways from cartoons and video games.

We teach young children about reality and fantasy. Somehow, if these studies are all to be believed, they lose that understanding somewhere in elementary school, and it only gets worse as they get older. I’d be willing to bet those (heavily-edited) reality shows don’t help much, either. I’ve known people who couldn’t miss an episode of their favorite reality show, and then couldn’t function if their own life wasn’t full of drama. While it was interesting to see what lengths they would go to just to add more drama to their life, I don’t really miss any of them.

The question here becomes: How do we keep reinforcing the difference between reality and fantasy? How do we make it strong enough that people can understand the difference between being inspired by media and expecting these stories to be how the real world functions? And how do we tuck the intentional moments of instruction in and have them sink in over everything else?

Information literacy really refers to a set of skills including recognizing valid sources, separating unbiased reporting from opinions, recognizing plagiarism, and being aware of copyright. Actually, there is no set list of information literacy skills. If you look it up, you’ll find dozens of different skills grouped together in different ways.

Information literacy supports a student’s research activities in any class. When the student develops these skills, they become more skilled at distinguishing between primary and secondary source materials, or how to use non-primary sources to locate the primary source. The student also learns to look at a source and decide if there is a bias, where it is, and how that will affect their research.

Information literacy is also where a student learns about copyright and plagiarism. The student learns (or should learn) what copyright is and how it applies to their research materials. The student should also learn about plagiarism, including what it is and why it’s a bad idea. A copyright/plagiarism lesson is the ideal place to teach the student the art of citation, regardless of the format you’ll use for the project. It makes them aware of how to minimize plagiarism in their own work.

In a culture where we are bombarded with information from all directions, it’s useful to arm students with the ability to sift through and find what they really need to know. That’s why we need to teach them information literacy skills

Traditionally, writing is part of most language arts classes. We teach students grammar and composition, expecting them to carry that knowledge into other classes and into life. Most teachers include in their grading rubrics sections on organization, coherence, and technical (grammar) skills. Some teachers, especially in middle school and junior high, also seem to reteach their students how to write while developing the paper.

That’s how important writing is. It’s a means of communication that you have to be proficient at, no matter what field you go into. Many teachers realize this and try to prepare their students the best they can. An unfortunate number of students regard it as torture (because anything requiring actual work is torture when you’re a teeanager), develop a hatred for it, and refuse to write their school papers.

Instead, they whip out their phones and type up a poorly worded, poorly structured complaint, which then masquerades as a Facebook status.

I haven’t found a way around this cycle myself, except to explain to my students that every single text they send is writing, and grammar is what’s allowing them to both speak their mind and understand what their friends are trying to say. It doesn’t work, but they slowly start getting that they’ll never get away from writing.

It seems like a pretty straightforward statement, but research is research. Regardless of the subject, research employs the same strategies, even if the best sources are different. I point this out because I can think of five different years in my schooling where I was subjected to a “How to Conduct Research” lecture in at least three of my classes.

Can you imagine sitting through three different variations of the exact same lecture roughly fifteen to twenty times? Most people don’t have the patience for it. They’ll sit for a refresher, but not for a repeat of the same full lecture.

I think it was the research lectures for a late project in American History in eighth grade and a freshman Astronomy class in college that handled it the best. We were introduced to a library none of us had likely been in before. We were shown the preferred citation method (which beat grad school when my Collections Management professor simply said, “Of course, we will be using the professional standard”, and left it to us to figure out what that was).

Really, students need to learn a set of basic skills for research: note-taking, citation, copyright and plagiarism, tools and resources for research, assessing the value of a source, interviewing, and observation, and then how to effectively use research to augment and strengthen their work. These can be covered in a single setting since there are many opportunities for practice throughout all the subjects.