"History Help" Session

The History Help session - I had to give it a title in order to reserve the room and this is the best I could come up with - was a success from my point of view. A dozen students from all three of my spring classes attended. They came with questions and we covered the two topics that earned the most votes on the questionnaire I had circulated in the classes last week. We talked about how to write a proper Chicago style full citation in a footnote. We even talked about other uses of footnotes. Finally we spent a little time in the library databases looking for articles. This last part surprised me a little because I thought it was going to be more productive than the footnoting part, but I couldn't tell if students were actually finding articles for their papers or if they were learning anything new about databases.

In order to find out if the session was a success from the students' points of view, I sent out a link to a very quick survey (from surveymonkey.com) to all those who attended. If they respond, it'll help me determine if holding such a session again - as in, next semester - would be worthwhile.