Hello, Everyone. I have recently completed a 6 week Summer Session teaching "Classification and Cataloging of Information Resources". This is an introductory catalgoing course we teach here in the College of Education for students interested in becoming certified school library media specialists (school librarians) in the state of Georgia. As someone who received his professional education in a graduate School of Library and Information Science (University of Pittsburgh SLIS/SIS '92, '00), and pratical training in a number of academic libraries, I am keenly aware of the value of learning both the theory and practice associated with librarianship in general and cataloging in particular. Unfortunately, in my student evaluations from the most recent iteration of this course, I was asked by a number of these students to severely curtail my effort in the teaching of both bibliographic description and classification theory in future courses. Among the sentiments that are expressed by the students to support their contentations were the following: " I do not understand why I have to take this course...what is the point of learning AACR2 and Dewey classification? All of the technical services for the media centers (school libraries) in our school district is (will be) done at a central facility...as a media specialist I will not do original cataloging...why do I need to know this stuff?..." Although I have yet to receive the set of student evaluations from this Summer's class, I will teach another section of this course in the Fall Semester. I have sent this message to this list to garner some ideas and advice from the members of EDUCAT regarding some proven ways to teach this subject effectively to aspiring school library media specialists given the scenario and sentiments that were outlined above. I would appreciate any tips, suggestions, approaches you may be willing to share to both deliver course content more effectively and provide a better learning experience for my students in what is perceived (by them) as a "hard" class. In closing, I would also like to publicly acknowledge Drs. Lois Mai Chan and Arlene G. Taylor for their assistance in my teaching of this material. Your textbooks have helped a number of my students "see the light" and , for some, to seriously consider careers as catalogers and "real" librarians. -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Edward C. Lomax, Ph.D. Department of Middle/Secondary Education and Instructional Technology Room 636 College of Education Georgia State University Atlanta, GA 30303 (404) 651-0188 (voice) (404) 651-2546 (fax) email: <mailto:[log in to unmask]>