8-30 Environment

8-30 Environment

Empowering Learners Chapter 1
Having read chapter one and worked with the standards over the summer, I have to say that they still confuse me. I understand the basic gist of them, and I totally agree with the lifelong reader that they try to create, but they do not seem to be organized in an overly user-friendly way. Somewhere between the standards, strands and common beliefs I get lost. Which are we actually teaching and which do we simply believe in? Perhaps this confusion stems from the fact that I am an English teacher now and the only things we work with are the standards we teach. It appears that librarians have set up a policy of why they teach and that seems somehow redundant and unnecessary, which no doubt leads to my confusion. Of course, I do believe in the principles of the common beliefs, but they really confuse me as to how they fit into what we teach. I suppose I will have to somehow get this way of thinking to click in my head soon though.

Woolls Chapters 4 and 5
Chapter 4 was a good deal of review of the school situation for me. Fortunately, as I already teach in a high school and will probably take over our librarian’s job when she retires in a few years, much of this did not worry me. I found the start of chapter 4 giving good ideas that aren’t really practical anymore. The chapter is written on the assumption that the applicant will get an actual choice in jobs, which certainly isn’t really the case anymore. She mentions several times that it is best to look for a school that has a coordinator or director of library media programs because it shows that school values the library program. However, I have never heard of a school that had such a position. Honestly, even if there were an option I’m not sure I would accept it. In general, I’m a type A kind of girl and it’s very hard for me to share my roles. I like to do things efficiently and find that often the best way to do so is to work alone. I must say that pages 63-64 may have given me the single worst advice I have ever read in an education book. When offering advice to find out about the administration the author suggests that the librarian hang out and listen to the teacher’s lounge gossip. Being in a school where massive layoffs occurred last year and more will occur this year and our school is sooooooo confusing now since we suddenly have a two building campus (even the teacher’s don’t know when to let kids out of class), I have discovered that the teacher’s lounge is generally the first place to go if you are in a bad mood and want to share it. I made the mistake of going in Friday, something I rarely do, and spent the rest of the day in a bad mood since in 20 minutes all I heard was complaining. The people who have positive things to say generally don’t hang out in the lounge gossiping about them and rumor starters stay there to spread discord.
Chapter 4 also addresses the other jobs a librarian should expect to take on. At my school, the librarian is the technology coordinator, which is a frightening prospect for me, but one I expect I will be able to handle since we do have a solid technology department. Outside of that, I do feel somewhat daunted by all the jobs a librarian does have to take on. Between being the technology coordinator, textbook coordinator, collaborating with teachers, and working with students, I’m not sure where one would find the time in the day.

I do heartily agree with her point about library fines and the idea that just because something has been done a certain way for a long time does not mean that it has to stay that way. I have never been swayed by what other people do, so I don’t expect changing things will be a problem, and I think that when I become a librarian the first thing to go will be the 2 week check out policy. Kids are busy now and I think that limiting them to two weeks isn’t enough time to promote reading. I think a semester unless someone else wants the books is just fine. I also agree that putting fines on late books is punitive and the last thing we should want to do is punish kids for having a book and reading it longer than they should. Of course, I’m not totally sure how to get the books back when I need them, but I expect I’ll come up with something in the next two or three years.

Chapter 5 had some interesting points about how the library is really a business, something I haven’t considered in terms of a high school library. The library advisory committee is a great way to promote the library in the school and to show the administration that it is a valued part of the school, something that needs to be a constant reminder in these economic times I do find hope in the fact that I will still get to teach and look forward to those kids who come in just wandering around looking for something to do on a study hall.

The section calendars and plan books was both enlightening and concerning. I am unsure of how to keep a plan book when so much changes from minute to minute in terms of what I’m doing. The same hold true for a calendar. I do think, though, that keeping a calendar and maybe sending it out in the morning to the teachers would be a great way to let them know if there’s free time and they can bring in a class. I also think it’s a great way to show exactly how much goes on in the library. I feel that librarians often get the image that they have an easy job since they don’t really have grading and they appear to just be hanging out at a desk most of the day. Posting a calendar that shows what I plan on doing that day and the many areas my activities cover will highlight the importance of the librarian rather than create jealousy.

The list that ended chapter 5 was very heartening for me. These suggestions that the author gives for how to increase effectiveness every day made me feel good as I already do at least half the items on the list. I am a huge planner and am big on getting tasks done, prioritizing, and getting to school early so I have a minute to look over my plan for the day. I feel confident that the craziness of my current job (I have 138 dual credit kids who write a 4-6 page essay every month plus I teach part time at the community college) will well prepare me for the craziness of being a librarian.

Podcasts and LM_Net
I listened to several podcasts this week. To satisfy my bookish nature, I listened to two book review podcasts (one from NPR and one from New York Times) and a short podcast called cool tools for Library 2.0. Library 2.0 was exceptionally interesting and I was very sad it was so short. I wanted to know more about shelfari. IT does seem to be a really cool tool that incorporates everything that a reader would want. It can be used to organize your own books, make lists of books you want to read, and doubles as a social networking site to meet people who have similar interests in reading. It also offers links to MySpace and Facebook pages so that you can get to know more about the people in a different, more personal manner. It sounded like a really cool tool that I will look into when I have a bit more free time. I did already go out to find it and add it to my favorites. I think that things like this will be great for kids when I am a librarian. I could do brief little seminars for 15 minutes or so after school and I think the kids may actually show up. Since it’s about technology it would lure in those techie kids and since it’s about books it would lure in all the regular kids. I bet there’s a ton of stuff like this out there that I don’t know anything about (my husband says I’m just catching up to 1999 technology), so I look forward to learning more about it. Until recently, I have ardently opposed adding more technology to my life (I’ve never in my life actually paid for a cell phone and I’m only 28!), but I have recently had a change of heart. It seems that I can’t make the kids untechnological and they certainly prefer technology in school and I have no doubt that it increases learning. Another teacher tried blogging with the kids at school last year, but a kid hacked the system and was really inappropriate so no one has tried it since, but I might give it a go. The other two were book reviews. I can see the value of this to a librarian who has to constantly order books, but, again, I have to see written word to really make things stick so they would start the review with the title of the book and then give a summary. By the time the summary was done and I was interested in reading the book I had forgotten the title. Perhaps that will be something I get better with over time (my husband just bought me an iPod for my birthday last week, so I’ve never had to listen before now). Of course, vampire literature is always big right now so the new True Blood book was covered and I heard three times (yes, three in only two podcasts) about john Grisham’s new legal thriller for kids, Theodore Boone: Kid Lawyer. There was a comparison between this novel and To Kill a Mockingbird which will, I am sure, make the book a huge success. I also enjoyed the commentary on the importance of children’s literature in this podcast. It really is the foundation of our society since children’s books are the first teacher of what is and is not socially acceptable.

One of my LM_NET postings was about the new fad in teen fiction: vampires and werewolves. It never occurred to me that with all the vampire and werewolf craze now that there would be a demand for Native American and African sorties of that nature. It would make sense, however, that these cultures may have the best stories. One librarian was searching for them for her library and I always support stories from different cultures. I think that in terms of effective librarianship this is a great example of diversifying the library holdings and broadening the world view of our students. In recent years (maybe the last 20-50), it seems that Native American and African American culture has been slowly disappearing from our education. History textbooks that used to have a whole chapter dedicated the Trail of Tears now only has two paragraphs. The same is true for African American culture in modern American society. I do see it as a part of our jobs as librarians to keep the history of peoples and pass it down. Finding ways to connect our students to something both amazingly popular and historically important has great value. It would hook kids because it’s yet another vampire book, but it could also serve as a transition into a cultural study.

The other post was about a new novel similar to Number the Stars about a Czech girl who was taken by Nazi’s and then adopted out as a perfect Aryan to a Nazi family. That sort of literature always has a good place in the library as the kids seem really, really drawn to it for some reason. Unlike the slowly diminishing African and Native American cultures in America, the plight of the Jews in WWII seems to always remain at the forefront of education. It slides in and out of the light, but with The Book Thief I think that WWII literature (for the lack of a better phrase) has come back in a big way. Kids need to see the un-sugar coated version of history. As librarians it should be our goal to show things as they are. I really do believe that we can’t forget or gloss over the unpleasant parts of our past or they will occur again. I am glad that more and more WWII literature is published every year and is now modern instead of the old Anne Frank, which is good but for so long was the only type of WWII fiction for kids. I can see that parents may disagree with this (we actually have a national, annual meeting of skinheads in the town I teach in where they descend from all over the country for a week and then leave again), but I don’t think we should be in the business to please, but to teach and remember.

On 8/16/2010 Michelle Bell posted to LM_Net a thread title “First day activities- help please?”. She started at a new school and wanted good first week activities to get her kids excited. A response posted by Michael Bell urged her to begin with the site infotopia. Though this site seems less than helpful for the k-3 librarian’s student body, it does seem super helpful for middle and upper level librarians. The site is a search engine that librarians, administrators, and other teachers can go to and add websites to. Ideally, this would mean that the kids could go to the library, pull up the site, and only see sites that are teacher approved. As a further benefit, this could maybe be a way around the sites that are blocked for kids in high security schools (like mine). Not that I really want to bypass the system, but since only faculty can add sites, they would all be previewed for appropriateness and often my senior students cannot research at school because their essay topics are sensitive. As a librarian, I would play around with this site to see how well it would work for my students and if no other benefit came from it, at least it would be a good starting place for their research for their essays.

Blogs
I read a very interesting post on library fingerprint canners in the UK in schools. Some of this is trickling down to America now as well though no one from the school in Minnesota would comment on it. The concerns raised were, of course, that is was one more step toward big brother and that identities could be stolen with fingerprint scans if the information was compromised. My first and perpetual thought about the big brother claims, no matter what it applies to, is that we are closer than we think anyway. We just don’t know it so we squabble about fingerprint scans to check out books instead of actually learning what’s going on in the country…but that slides into politics. I don’t think people are any more likely to be arrested or followed by the government with fingerprint scans than they are now. Honestly, with the passage of the Patriot Act, the government can already subpoena our library records if we check out enough suspicious books so I can’t imagine that fingerprints would change much. I cou8ld give credit to the idea that kids identities can be stolen though. If the system is cracked then all those fingerprints would be out there. Not that I’m into the whole criminal scene, but I assume that if we head to a more fingerprint based society (for debit cards, identification purposes, etc.) it would be convenient to steal a kids fingerprint and do that who glove thing (if it’s possible outside of action movies)when you replace your fingerprint with someone else’s. I have heard reports of children’s social security numbers being stolen and then when they were 18 they had 17 years of bad credit and it takes years and years to clear up. However, I think fingerprints would certainly be a quick, convenient way for libraries to be run. After all, the kids can’t say they forgot their finger at home so they can’t check out a book!

I also found a great idea of edible book day. Apparently a librarian at Calvin College set it up as an adaptation from something similar in Europe. I think that would be a great way to get kids involved in the library. There could be a prize, or even if not, the kids would surely be very excited about eating and the students in my school are super competitive so they would be clamoring all over each other to make the best representation. The premise is certainty simple. All they have to do is bake some sort of physical, edible representation of a book of their choice. I’m thinking that it could be adapted to be set up before school and kids could vote throughout the day (on lunch, between classes, etc.) up to the last block of the day. Then I could tally the votes and we could eat it all after school. In this manner, it wouldn’t’ even affect the school day really. Perhaps I could convince English teachers to offer some small extra credit for participation in the contest.
From the Library Advocate blog I watched a simultaneously sad and humorous video dramatization of closing a school library. Unfortunately, I don’t think that it was meant to be humorous, but one can only go so far in a dramatization before laughter has to happen. The point was, in fact, very disturbing. It showed the library before being closed and it was full of kids drawing, reading, putting together puzzles, having fun, etc. of course, it was all wholesome fun because there was a librarian. Then the process of closing the library was shown and the final result of empty shelves (which was super sad for me). However, to really drive the point home all those kids that were being wholesome at the beginning of the clip were suddenly making out in the halls, participating in vandalism, and beating up other kids. Though I do think the library is positive and does keep people out of trouble, I can’t imagine that if the library is closed those same kids that were into puzzles, reading, and art will suddenly become juvenile criminals and magically get pregnant. Did I mention that the closing of the library and kids sudden shift to degenerates was accompanied by the theme song to the 70s Psycho?
I think I may have just found my first video on a blog (have I mentioned that this is my first foray into technology?) that was so funny I was crying! It’s a clip of school librarians redoing a Lady Gaga song. They changed all the lyrics to relate to searching for research and they recreated the video with some of the dance moves. There were tons of librarians in it too. Whoever put it together must have traveled to many libraries to get so many people involved. It was hilarious. It’s on the library advocate blog, so you should check it out if you haven’t. I guess it’s on YouTube as well. Though there was absolutely no educational value to it whatsoever, at least it’s solid proof that librarians can, in fact, be very fun and are no longer like the stuffy Madame Pince out of Harry Potter.

Here’s an interesting post about copyright law. I public librarian posted her issue that a woman returned a DVD case that was empty. They called and asked her to check her DVD player. When she returned the phone call she said that she had scanned in the art and made a reproduction of it (complete with barcode) and returned the wrong case accidentally. After checking her history they found she had a huge record of checking out DVDs and the librarians assumed that she was copying both the cover art and the DVD for her private collection. The librarians at the branch were unsure what to do since she never said she copied the DVD (only the art). One suggested sending her name and record to the FBI for copyright infringement, another suggested revoking her renting privileges. I can see how sticky this situation is since one of the core beliefs of the ALA is that we should rent without discrimination to all patrons. Another is that we should never, unless under subpoena, give out a patron’s check out record. I am unsure where I fall in the issue. At the least, I think you could revoke her card since she copied the cover art for sure and that too is copyrighted. But then the patron would not be able to check out books, and surely she would not scan in a whole book page by page. If it were my decision, I would ban her from all electronic renting and only allow paper materials to be rented out.