Once More Into the Breach

  The last time I posted to this blog was sometime in 2012. I'm reviving it now as a bolt-hole from FaceBook, which is becoming increasingly inhospitable for decent human beings. I need to figure out how to make this accessible to people who might still want to keep in touch, and I need to figure out how to make this, and my Dreamwidth blog, and, to a lesser extent, my blue-sky account, serve the purposes that FB once did. 

I absolutely hate what I see happening to this country, and I hold in particular contempt those who have caved in to the perceived power of Felonious Punk and his freight train of deplorables. The fact that there are 73 million people in this country who are either so stupid they can't see the evil inherent in the incoming administration, or so evil they approve of it is  - well, I don't know how to describe the feelings it generates. And I am afraid that I do know what it is going to take to set us on the right path again. It won't be pretty. 

Oh, the Humanities!

                Reaction to President Obama's proposal to create a corps of Master Teachers for the STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) fields, and to pay those teachers a stipend of as much as $20,000 per year, has been generally enthusiastic (except, of course, among those who question where the funding will come from, and those whose attitude toward the current administration is uniformly of the "Can any good come out of Nazareth?" form.) As a teacher myself, I'm generally in favor of efforts to put more money into education. But, as a teacher of English Language Arts and History, and a newly-certificated Teacher-Librarian, I have to say, I'm feeling more than a little disrespected by the narrow focus of the proposed program. And as a student of both the general history and the educational history of this country, I wonder how badly that narrow focus may rebound against the very people it is supposed to benefit - the current and future students of our educational system.
                Let me tell you a story about the impact of an earlier educational shift on one person. In October of 1957, the then-Soviet Union launched Sputnik-1, the first artificial Earth satellite. Reaction in the United States was swift - we were losing the space race and something must be done!  One of the first things to be done on many university and college campuses was to mandate higher standards in the schools of engineering. While this certainly seems like a reasonable reaction, the net effect was a skewing of the grading scale at some schools to the point that, what would have earned a B or better in any other field garnered no better than a C for an engineering student. Many such students later found themselves foreclosed from the graduate school programs of their choice because students from other schools could demonstrate higher GPAs, even though they had been held to a far lower standard. For the person I speak of, despite excellent scores on the LSAT, he had to settle for admission to a lower-tier law school - and this, in turn, meant he was not considered for the kind of clerkships and internships that might have led to the offer of a partnership track position with one of the more high-powered law firms in his area of specialization. It is no exaggeration to say that the shift in engineering school standards had life-long consequences for this person, and, I am sure, for most of a generation.
                 I personally was a victim of New Math - elementary education's equivalent to the engineering school debacle caused by Sputnik, and brought on by the same over-reaction to the Red Menace. I was in fourth grade when New Math was introduced, and all of my difficulties in the subject were attributed to either ineffective teaching or a failure on my part to make the adjustment from the "old math" habits I had acquired during my first few years of school. As a result, my learning disability - dyscalcula - went undiagnosed until I was very nearly 50, and I suffered through years of feeling inadequate because I couldn't get Algebra.
                 But there are bigger issues here than simply the potential damage of too intense a focus on some subjects. For one, there's the damage that arises out of undervaluing the more abstract, less quantifiable subject areas. And there's the very real threat that this concentration on STEM will widen the educational gap between the classes and the races.
                  STEM subjects are not going to be accessible to students who are reading below grade-level - it doesn't matter how qualified a teacher is or how much that teacher is being paid, if the students can't comprehend the material in the textbook. Each of the various remedial reading programs I have seen have been successful for some portion of the students exposed to them, but no one size fits all  program has yet emerged. The only uniformly effective approach is increased exposure through elective reading. Where is the funding for school libraries and - more important - the qualified school librarians who can help students find material they want to read? And even for those students who can readily profit from STEM, do we really want a generation of technocrats whose social skills are modeled on Sheldon Cooper (The Big Bang Theory) or Temperance Brennan? (Bones)  If we fund and support STEM at the expense of language and the rest of the humanities, this may be what we are faced with.
                We classify subjects as part of the Humanities because they touch on what it is that makes us human. By all means, provide more funding for the teaching profession - but apply it across the fields. Don't create another case of educational tunnel vision. Learn from the mistakes of the past. Remember the words of Santayana (and if you can remember those words, thank a history teacher and/or a librarian.)
             

Help! I'm surrounded!

So, my students return to school Monday. That means I am now trying to restore some sort of order to my classroom - putting posters on walls, moving furniture (including figuring out how I am going to put an additional 10 student desks into the same space that was crowded with 32), off-loading books from rolling carts onto bookshelves. And today/tonight I get to do it while parents and students are dropping by...

To top it all off - yesterday we picked up the base cabinets for the island that is going into my kitchen, and Tuesday I bought another filing cabinet for my home office. Only, there are modifications that need to be done to the kitchen cabinets and the furniture in the office needs to be rearranged before I can put the file cabinet in place. So both at work and at home, I'm surrounded by looming pieces of furniture.

Right about now, I'm seriously considering becoming a sheepherder and going to live in a tent.

Peer -ing Into the Future

So, here I am, in my penultimate semester at SLIS, getting ready to be a Peer Mentor in one class and looking forward - with more than a little dread - toward having to learn yet-another-style of formatting and citations, since the section of LIBR 285 I signed up for is focused on history and apparently historians use the Chicago Manual of Style, rather than APA - as all my other classes at SLIS have used - or MLA, which I used during my entire undergraduate career and which I have been teaching for the last eight years.

And in my in-box today was a reply to an inquiry on a possible fieldwork placement for Spring '12, along with a form to fill out. It looks like I'm really going to do this - get a Teacher-Librarian credential. Whether I'll ever actually be able to use it, given the state of California's budget and the way people seem to think librarians, as a whole, but especially school librarians are expendable - well, let's just say that sometimes I wonder if this isn't as futile an exercise as the year I spent in law school.

But then I remind myself that I always feel like this at the beginning of a semester. I am suffering from what my daughter so brilliantly describes as an excess of whelm. Considering that I've had some sort of major life-changing event every semester since I started the program in Fall '08 - at least until last semester, which was relatively calm - maybe what I'm feeling isn't so surprising. At least it ought to provide me with some empathy for my mentees - if that's the correct word for those one mentors.

I am reminded by the URL of this blog that I am woefully behind in my professional reading, as well - guess that's next up.

Plus ca change, as the French say...

There's a quote that has been thrown around for years describing the youth of the day as unwashed, ill-mannered and lazy (I'm paraphrasing here), The punchline is that, when you finally get to see who said it, it's attributed to Socrates. I was reminded of that today as I was reading an article that described the emergence of the term "tween" to describe kids in the 8 - 12 year-old range as having come from the steady slippage of adolescent behaviors into the pre-adolescent age range. The article, by Kay S. Hymowitz, describes the "morphing" of her daughter from a sunny child into a surly adolescent, culminating in the throwing of a sheet over the child's collection of American Girl dolls, as though she (the daughter) were bringing down the curtain on her childhood - all at the age of ten and in fourth grade. Hymowitz then goes on to talk about the increasing sexualization of pre-adolescents - boys as well as girls - and the inherent risky behaviors that accompany them, with the risks enhanced by tweens having even less sense of themselves than do 15-to-18-year-olds. She quotes one psychologist as saying that there is a trend to "kids getting older younger." (I have to admit, that convoluted phrase reminded me of the time my mother said to me, "When I was your age, I was older.") As a middle school teacher who sees evidence of this every day, I was nodding my head in agreement when I happened to glance at the date of the article. Autumn - 1998. My own daughter was in fourth grade that year, but somehow escaped the sort of transition Hymowitz describes. Maybe it was because she was involved in sports. Maybe we were just lucky. Or maybe I just have a very bad memory.

Whatever the case, the article serves to point out something we need to be aware of as youth librarians. Much as we'd like to turn back the clock or un-ring the bell, we have to remember who our clients are and meet them where they stand. That's not to say we need to give in to the over-sexualization and exploitation of tweens. But we need to strike a balance between, "Give 'em what they want" and giving them what we believe they should be exposed to.

Looks like this is going to be harder than we thought.

References:

Hymowitz, K.S. (1998). Tweens: ten going on sixteen. City Journal, Retrieved from http://www.city-journal.org/html/8_4_a1.html

BIBLIOGRAPHIC CITATION: Hymowitz, K.S. (1998). Tweens: ten going on sixteen. City Journal, Retrieved from http://www.city-journal.org/html/8_4_a1.html [NOTE: Italicize "City Journal"] PARENTHETICAL CITATION: (Hymowitz, 1998)

We Built It and They Came

"Video games are now a part of the culture and the fabric of our society." So says Sandy Farmer in her article entitled "Gaming 2.0", published in the November/December 2010 issue of American Libraries. Farmer, Central Youth Services manager for the Houston Public Library, describes how the addition of two dedicated gaming spaces, one for children ages 5 -12 and the other for teens, has spurred a major increase not only in the number of patrons using the library but in the circulation of more traditional library materials. The "KIDS" area features Wii consoles and games rated either E or E-10, while the TEEN space offers Playstation 3 consoles and T-rated games, along with some E and E-10 choices. The games span the full array of available genres. An initial investment of $22K is now down to an average expense of $1 per client, and will continue to drop as usage increases. And any concerns about noise levels seems to have been assuaged - as Farmer points out, "When we are busy it would be hard to notice those individual sounds anyway." (Farmer, 2010)
Given my own aspirations of school librarianship, I began to ponder how game consoles might work in a school library. Putting aside the issue of cost for the moment, there's the space problem. Most public school libraries are small, and set up on an open space plan. But if you're lucky enough to have an adjacent room off the library (maybe you work in a former "open plan" school that has been converted), this could be doable. Even in a more traditional library, gaming could be limited to specific off-peak times. Gaming privileges might even serve as a reward - tickets entitling the student to game time could be given for improved attendance, improved grades, or improved behavior.
Okay, so now - what about those costs? Start small, and the costs could be no more than a tenth of the HPL's investment. Local businesses might be persuaded to donate materials. Students could fundraise. Some of the larger game producers might even be convinced that this was a perfect opportunity for some good publicity.
Wii Tennis, anyone?

References:
Farmer, S. (2010, November/December). Gaming 2.0. American Libraries, 41(11/12), 30 - 34.

All the World's a Stage

    Reading aloud to groups of students was one of the most enjoyable parts of my job as a Library Media Technician some ten years ago. But as much as the children seemed to enjoy my reading to them, how much more might they have enjoyed experiencing some of those stories through a Readers Theater? Even in the self-conscious tween years, there are always those students who enjoy being "on stage." And preparing a version of a well-known tale to present to younger children can often catch the imagination of even the most reluctant students. (The added benefit of this approach is that it allows even those students who read significantly below grade level to be fully involved.) Not everyone needs to be an "actor," either - although Readers Theater is sometimes referred to as "minimalist" and is intended to be presented without costumes or stage sets, there is still a need for a director, a prompter, and perhaps someone to create supplemental narration. There could also be a committee of students who select the books to be presented. Readers Theater need not be limited to fiction. Fictionalized biographies could be adapted to Readers Theater (Claire Rudolf Murphy's I am Sacagawea, I am York comes to mind here), as could some works in history.
    As Elizabeth A. Poe reminds us, Dewey observed as early as 1938 that the deepest learning takes place when students are involved in the creation of their own learning experience. (Dewey, 1938) Writing in From Children's Literature to Readers Theatre, Poe points out that teachers and reading specialists have praised the positive effects on fluency produced by the repeated readings that occur in rehearsals for Readers Theatre.
    For librarians, particularly school librarians, Readers Theater represents a chance to collaborate with classroom teachers, as well as an opportunity to get children more interested in reading. It's a win-win situation.

References:
Dewey, J. (1938). Experience and education. New York, NY: Macmillan.

Murphy, C.R. (2005). I am sacagawea, i am york: our journey west with lewis and clark.. New York, NY: Walker Books for Young Readers.

Poe, E.A. (2010). From children's literature to readers theatre. Chicago, IL: American Library Association. excerpted in the May 2010 issue of American Libraries, 41(5), 28 - 31.