I'm not totally sure how I got to sixteen weeks and still have two days left next week when I only needed 25 days each place, but I guess it matters little. I've had a couple days off for various things here and there, so I still have monday and tuesday of next week until I'm completely done. Do I need to post again then?
I taught all the kindergarten and first grade classes this week, which was pretty fun, because I love reading to the little ones! It's very much play time to me as well as teaching skills, and I love the way the kids will lean in and get really drawn into the story. I especially love it when they forget to be quiet because they get SO excited about some connection they made, whether or not it looks on the surface like it's got anything to do with the story. :) Mary Ann has been working with both grades on a lot of Caldecott winners lately, so for kindergarten I paired Kitten's First Full Moon with Millions of Cats (one of my favorites, and not a Caldecott book but a Newbery honor). With a longer class period, or maybe in my own library where the kids already knew me and were less focused on figuring out who the heck was reading to them, I'd like to do a lot of rhythm and participation stuff with Millions of Cats, but at the present we just had a good time reading/listening to it. For first grade I did Silvester and the Magic Pebble for an award winner, and paired with Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good Very Bad Day mostly because I just love the latter for that age, and the pairing worked okay because Silvester had a bad day too! I experimented some with the first graders, depending on the class's group dynamics and whether they got there on time, on whether they got both books or whether they just got Alexander, and which order they went in. I did a short biography thing along with Alexander, so a couple classes had more emphasis on that, plus a personal story of a bad day I had had. My best success, with least chaos at the end of the period, was to skip the personal story, read both books, with Silvester (much longer) first, but I still went back to the Alexander-only way with one class, which was ten minutes late, had a sub, and was pretty off-the-wall.
I also did some more of the flute program this week. I've been really impressed with how well those kids will sit and listen to Debussy, with just a little explanation! It just emphasizes to me the fact that classical music isn't irrelevant; classical musicians have just made themselves irrelevant and failed their audiences, when they expect people to adore their art just because it's art music and they said so. That is a soapbox of mine. :) Anyway, so that went well, and we've been trying to get AR stuff ready for the end of the year, and that's pretty much what we've done this week. Oh, and I've been going through Mary Ann's files in the afternoons and copying all her ideas, hehe, especially orientation things so that I have some ideas to start from if I get an elementary school. It's really helpful to me just to have an example of how a multi-lesson unit plan is put together, even if I never use that particular lesson.
Friday, May 1, 2009
student teaching week fifteen
This was another shortened week for me. Monday I took half the day and went to Whitesburg to talk to a principal there, and today (friday) I've been at the pre-conference for the Celebration of Latino Children's Literature in Columbia, SC. A first-year student and I are presenting at the full conference tomorrow. My favorite session here so far has been a *fabulous* storyteller who told bilingual stories; one idea I plan to steal from her, in case any of y'all want to steal it too, is that instead of using a basket or bag or apron to hide her props till she wanted to pull them out, she used a ginormous steel bucket, which meant that she could also use that bucket to make sound effects.
I got to do my flute and stories program this week with three classes of fourth graders, which was pretty fun. They were very good listeners and asked some good questions. The first piece I did was a story from Greek mythology, and it was kinda cute that when I asked what characters they already knew, you could immediately tell who'd been reading Rick Riordan's books. :) Next week I'm going to teach all the kindergarten and first grade classes. Mary Ann's been doing Caldecotts with the kindergartens, so I'm going to pair Millions of Cats and Kitten's First Full Moon for them, and then I'm doing Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good Very Bad Day for first, just because I love it for that age.
And we enjoyed seeing Marion on thursday!
I got to do my flute and stories program this week with three classes of fourth graders, which was pretty fun. They were very good listeners and asked some good questions. The first piece I did was a story from Greek mythology, and it was kinda cute that when I asked what characters they already knew, you could immediately tell who'd been reading Rick Riordan's books. :) Next week I'm going to teach all the kindergarten and first grade classes. Mary Ann's been doing Caldecotts with the kindergartens, so I'm going to pair Millions of Cats and Kitten's First Full Moon for them, and then I'm doing Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good Very Bad Day for first, just because I love it for that age.
And we enjoyed seeing Marion on thursday!
student teaching week fourteen
Arbuthnot tomorrow!
This week we had inservice on monday, mostly normal day on tuesday, and started TCAPs wednesday, with testing through next monday. Mornings have been pretty quiet with no open access during testing, so we've been working on the A/V inventory. We did have the normal k-1 classes wednesday and thursday morning, since they weren't testing, but today Mary Ann had to test and Kellie (the assistant) had to proctor, so we shut down. Somehow or other I didn't make it onto the list to proctor (I did not complain), so I just hung out in the library workroom and did a bunch of processing on some new books.
In the afternoons we've had a pretty busy schedule of classes signing up to come in for lessons, which seemed kinda odd. I had planned out a little program to do some storytelling along with playing flute and we were going to offer it to people to sign up to give their kids a nice break after testing, and they are still welcome to sign up for it sometime if they want, but there was a sudden swarm of people wanting actual skill review lessons (story structure, genres, sequencing, that kind of thing) that filled up the week for the most part, even though those kids were in tests all morning. It seems like too little too late to me, to be suddenly wanting to review test topics the week of the test, but we're glad to have them in any time of course. I've been watching those and stealing all Mary Ann's ideas in between taking over the desk stuff. That's worked out really well to get some practice at, because I already knew how to run circulation and I already knew how to shelve, but doing it all at the same time as well as helping kids and teachers find things in a library that busy is an entirely different task. Other than that, not too much new to report this week.
This week we had inservice on monday, mostly normal day on tuesday, and started TCAPs wednesday, with testing through next monday. Mornings have been pretty quiet with no open access during testing, so we've been working on the A/V inventory. We did have the normal k-1 classes wednesday and thursday morning, since they weren't testing, but today Mary Ann had to test and Kellie (the assistant) had to proctor, so we shut down. Somehow or other I didn't make it onto the list to proctor (I did not complain), so I just hung out in the library workroom and did a bunch of processing on some new books.
In the afternoons we've had a pretty busy schedule of classes signing up to come in for lessons, which seemed kinda odd. I had planned out a little program to do some storytelling along with playing flute and we were going to offer it to people to sign up to give their kids a nice break after testing, and they are still welcome to sign up for it sometime if they want, but there was a sudden swarm of people wanting actual skill review lessons (story structure, genres, sequencing, that kind of thing) that filled up the week for the most part, even though those kids were in tests all morning. It seems like too little too late to me, to be suddenly wanting to review test topics the week of the test, but we're glad to have them in any time of course. I've been watching those and stealing all Mary Ann's ideas in between taking over the desk stuff. That's worked out really well to get some practice at, because I already knew how to run circulation and I already knew how to shelve, but doing it all at the same time as well as helping kids and teachers find things in a library that busy is an entirely different task. Other than that, not too much new to report this week.
student teaching week thirteen
Fairly short week for me this week; I left right at the end of school on wednesday for TLA and spent thursday and friday at the conference. Managed to not get sucked into a tornado, but things were a little spooky there for a while in that part of the state. :) If you've got thoughts on the extremely low participation in TLA from school librarians, I'd sure like to hear them, because that's something I'd like to help work on, provided I can continue living and working in Tennessee. The conference programming for school libraries was pretty low, I'm sure because the general participation for that crowd is so low, but I also wonder if that's exactly *why* the participation is so low. As the program was, if I was looking at having to pay conference fees out of pocket and could only afford one, I'd pick TASL over TLA every time because of the sessions offered. However, I think TLA is extremely important for school librarians because those non-k-12 sessions are where you can learn things that help move you forward, whereas most of what was offered at TASL were things that would help you get better at what you're already doing, not getting innovative. So I'd like to work on the problem of how to get more school people involved in TLA, but I don't know what the answer is currently, or even exactly what causes the problem. I don't think it's that school people just can't get away from their jobs to attend a conference, because participation in TASL is huge.
We worked on making materials for a lesson on sequencing to use as a TCAP review with third graders this week, which was fun. I helped Mary Ann make a classroom set of several copies for her library, and then I made a set of one copy for myself, which worked out great because I could learn how she does things and then try out slightly different ways of doing it on my own copy. We started the project because the teachers were coming to Mary Ann saying their students were having trouble with things that told a story (assume for example that this is a story about Tom) then gave questions that looked like this:
1. Tom walked home.
2. Tom ran to the barn.
3. Tom fell asleep.
4. Tom ate breakfast.
What is the correct order of events in the story?
a) 1324
b) 2431
c) 4213
d) 3241
The kids were having a lot of trouble using the numbers to label the events and then putting them in something other than numerical order. So we took file folders and put cover art using real books (so that it was also a literature lesson) on the front, then opened the inside and put a typed copy of the text of the story on the left side side and a sheet on the right with numbered events and questions about them, phrased as closely to the TCAP questions as we could get them. Then on the back we put envelopes. We made little strips of paper with the numbered events on them that the kids could physically move into the right order, and that way they had a tactile and visual way of putting them into sequence to help them answer the questions, and the strips were kept in the envelopes on the back. We also put answer keys on them, and that was the main change I made when my set; Mary Ann pasted them on backs of the folders, but I wanted to try a way to cover them and make cheating harder, so I made little tri-fold construction paper things with the answers inside and put them in the envelopes along with the event strips. We made three copies each of ten stories that way.
Then for the actual lessons we started with a whole group reading "Where the Wild Things Are" aloud, then did a practice set using giant-sized event strips that kids stood up and held and moved around into order, so that everybody did one together. Then we put them at tables with five folders at each table and let them practice with partners. They could work at their own pace, check themselves with the answer keys, and then just move on to another folder for as much time as we had. If they were to run out of folders on the table (nobody did in the 45 minute class period), they could move to a table with a different set of five (we split the ten stories into A and B sets to make it easier to make sure we were getting them to different sets of stories). The kids worked together really well and seemed to benefit from the practice, so we're waiting to hear back from teachers about whether they're seeing any improvement.
That's a really long discourse on those folders, but they are going to be a super useful way to make lesson materials that can be used every year (we laminated everything to last longer), and anybody's welcome to holler at me if they want to come see my set. Just wanted to share.
Other than that, I've been working on a program to use my flute to help tell some stories. We were originally hoping to market this as an afternoon thing teachers could sign up for to give their kids a mental break after TCAP testing in the mornings, but the teachers are actually signing up for real lessons during those afternoons (which seems like too little too late, because they haven't been signing up much at all in the last two weeks), so we'll see if and when anybody wants to come in for just some music and stories. Maybe it can make a post-TCAP treat for somebody.
We worked on making materials for a lesson on sequencing to use as a TCAP review with third graders this week, which was fun. I helped Mary Ann make a classroom set of several copies for her library, and then I made a set of one copy for myself, which worked out great because I could learn how she does things and then try out slightly different ways of doing it on my own copy. We started the project because the teachers were coming to Mary Ann saying their students were having trouble with things that told a story (assume for example that this is a story about Tom) then gave questions that looked like this:
1. Tom walked home.
2. Tom ran to the barn.
3. Tom fell asleep.
4. Tom ate breakfast.
What is the correct order of events in the story?
a) 1324
b) 2431
c) 4213
d) 3241
The kids were having a lot of trouble using the numbers to label the events and then putting them in something other than numerical order. So we took file folders and put cover art using real books (so that it was also a literature lesson) on the front, then opened the inside and put a typed copy of the text of the story on the left side side and a sheet on the right with numbered events and questions about them, phrased as closely to the TCAP questions as we could get them. Then on the back we put envelopes. We made little strips of paper with the numbered events on them that the kids could physically move into the right order, and that way they had a tactile and visual way of putting them into sequence to help them answer the questions, and the strips were kept in the envelopes on the back. We also put answer keys on them, and that was the main change I made when my set; Mary Ann pasted them on backs of the folders, but I wanted to try a way to cover them and make cheating harder, so I made little tri-fold construction paper things with the answers inside and put them in the envelopes along with the event strips. We made three copies each of ten stories that way.
Then for the actual lessons we started with a whole group reading "Where the Wild Things Are" aloud, then did a practice set using giant-sized event strips that kids stood up and held and moved around into order, so that everybody did one together. Then we put them at tables with five folders at each table and let them practice with partners. They could work at their own pace, check themselves with the answer keys, and then just move on to another folder for as much time as we had. If they were to run out of folders on the table (nobody did in the 45 minute class period), they could move to a table with a different set of five (we split the ten stories into A and B sets to make it easier to make sure we were getting them to different sets of stories). The kids worked together really well and seemed to benefit from the practice, so we're waiting to hear back from teachers about whether they're seeing any improvement.
That's a really long discourse on those folders, but they are going to be a super useful way to make lesson materials that can be used every year (we laminated everything to last longer), and anybody's welcome to holler at me if they want to come see my set. Just wanted to share.
Other than that, I've been working on a program to use my flute to help tell some stories. We were originally hoping to market this as an afternoon thing teachers could sign up for to give their kids a mental break after TCAP testing in the mornings, but the teachers are actually signing up for real lessons during those afternoons (which seems like too little too late, because they haven't been signing up much at all in the last two weeks), so we'll see if and when anybody wants to come in for just some music and stories. Maybe it can make a post-TCAP treat for somebody.
student teaching week twelve
I started at Brickey-McCloud Elementary this week with Mary Ann Taylor, and I'm really enjoying it so far! Brickey has nearly 1100 students, and it's pretty affluent, almost none on free/reduced lunch. The affluence means pretty much zero discipline problems, lots of involved parents, astronomical PTO donations to the AR fund, full-color photos on all handouts at the staff meeting, parent notes coming back with library books instructing the library staff on whether books are appropriate for certain age groups, girls with Vera Bradley backpacks in the latest colors of every season, collective astonishment at the existence of a few students who aren't meeting their benchmark goals, a morning parent drop-off line that takes nearly as much time to sit through as it takes me to drive the 10 miles to get there, and other things that are completely foreign to my prior experience. It's a very nice place, just different from my much-loved little West View! I am learning how it works and how to fit in. I reckon I'm glad to have started in inner-city schools before I got here, because I feel like that might be a little easier adjustment than the other way around.
The size of the school, which allows for a full-time assistant (Kellie), makes the daily schedule a bit of a zoo. K-2 have a set weekly rotation, where Mary Ann gets them in and out in shifts. After she reads and does her lesson with a class for about half an hour, she lets them loose to go find books and check out with Kellie; in the meantime, she's already got the next class in place. That means she doesn't get to spend as much time helping directly with book selection, but with nine kindergartens, eight 1st grades, and nine 2nd grades, that's how she's got to do it to make sure they can all have time every week. While all that happens, there's also open access going on, which another librarian at a big school told me is sort of mandatory to justify funding the library assistant. They circulate about 300 books by 11:00 on a daily basis, and with a few teachers' checkouts, they actually had done 573 by 11:00 on monday. Then after 11:00 they have flex scheduling, where normally they'll have classes signing up for various lessons. Mary Ann says they don't have too many problems with people not signing up, that they generally have nine classes a day in there, but right now the afternoons are very quiet because grades 3-5 are staying in the classrooms beating up on TCAP review. A couple of third grades have been coming in for some lessons on story elements, which is one of those TCAP concepts, and Mary Ann and I are working on a lesson right now on story sequencing for next week, which is also a third grade TCAP topic that the teachers are all excited about letting someone else do. :) I'm planning a short-ish program using stories and flute for the week of TCAPS, that teachers can sign up for in the afternoons after testing to give their kids a mental break (as well as get a little mythology and folk tales in, which is my sneaky curriculum).
This week on tuesday afternoon was an AR reward activity. Mary Ann has found that with an affluent community like this, being able to spend points on little things is really not a motivator. So instead, she plans fun activities that will get them out of class once per nine weeks, and she uses STAR to set individual goals for each student, and every student that meets their goal for the nine weeks gets to take part in the activity. Tuesday was the last day of this one (the other days were last week), and we had the first graders in in shifts. They'd taken photos of all the kids who got to come, and they gave them these little wooden boxes with a wire twisted to be one of those wiry picture holders, so the kids got to decorate the boxes with markers and then put their pictures in them to take home. For the last nine weeks the reward is going to be an ice cream party with the principals (school nutrition-approved ice cream products, ordered from the cafeteria), and then there's a final reward for kids who've met their goal every nine weeks to have lunch with the principals.
So this week I've watched Mary Ann a lot (partly to see her lessons and partly to see how classroom management works with a very different group than what I'm used to), worked circulation a whole lot, helped with the AR activity, and we've started the AV inventory, which we're working on kind of in dribbles as we have little chunks of time. She's trying to take advantage of the currently quiet afternoons to get ahead on that.
The size of the school, which allows for a full-time assistant (Kellie), makes the daily schedule a bit of a zoo. K-2 have a set weekly rotation, where Mary Ann gets them in and out in shifts. After she reads and does her lesson with a class for about half an hour, she lets them loose to go find books and check out with Kellie; in the meantime, she's already got the next class in place. That means she doesn't get to spend as much time helping directly with book selection, but with nine kindergartens, eight 1st grades, and nine 2nd grades, that's how she's got to do it to make sure they can all have time every week. While all that happens, there's also open access going on, which another librarian at a big school told me is sort of mandatory to justify funding the library assistant. They circulate about 300 books by 11:00 on a daily basis, and with a few teachers' checkouts, they actually had done 573 by 11:00 on monday. Then after 11:00 they have flex scheduling, where normally they'll have classes signing up for various lessons. Mary Ann says they don't have too many problems with people not signing up, that they generally have nine classes a day in there, but right now the afternoons are very quiet because grades 3-5 are staying in the classrooms beating up on TCAP review. A couple of third grades have been coming in for some lessons on story elements, which is one of those TCAP concepts, and Mary Ann and I are working on a lesson right now on story sequencing for next week, which is also a third grade TCAP topic that the teachers are all excited about letting someone else do. :) I'm planning a short-ish program using stories and flute for the week of TCAPS, that teachers can sign up for in the afternoons after testing to give their kids a mental break (as well as get a little mythology and folk tales in, which is my sneaky curriculum).
This week on tuesday afternoon was an AR reward activity. Mary Ann has found that with an affluent community like this, being able to spend points on little things is really not a motivator. So instead, she plans fun activities that will get them out of class once per nine weeks, and she uses STAR to set individual goals for each student, and every student that meets their goal for the nine weeks gets to take part in the activity. Tuesday was the last day of this one (the other days were last week), and we had the first graders in in shifts. They'd taken photos of all the kids who got to come, and they gave them these little wooden boxes with a wire twisted to be one of those wiry picture holders, so the kids got to decorate the boxes with markers and then put their pictures in them to take home. For the last nine weeks the reward is going to be an ice cream party with the principals (school nutrition-approved ice cream products, ordered from the cafeteria), and then there's a final reward for kids who've met their goal every nine weeks to have lunch with the principals.
So this week I've watched Mary Ann a lot (partly to see her lessons and partly to see how classroom management works with a very different group than what I'm used to), worked circulation a whole lot, helped with the AR activity, and we've started the AV inventory, which we're working on kind of in dribbles as we have little chunks of time. She's trying to take advantage of the currently quiet afternoons to get ahead on that.
student teaching week eleven
This was my last week at the middle school. They were doing practice TCAP testing all week, so it was pretty light on children where we were. I mostly spent it cataloging the new books Carole had pulled from the book fair and weeding. Carole is stressing just a little bit over having less time for inventory than usual, especially since she'll be out of school the week before inventory to go to the coolest workshop EVER in Memphis with me (it's from NASA and is fully funded and I'm excited), so we went on a big campaign to clear out as much stuff as possible. That stuff needed gone anyway, and this way she has more than ten boxes fewer books to scan and account for. :) Carole has been at GMS for four years now, but is still having to work pretty hard to clean up after her predecessor, who left her a seriously crummy nonfiction section. Too many things over there are ancient to go around pulling things just because they're way old (there aren't enough newer sources to replace them), so I've pretty much been thumbing through almost every book to see if it still had value or not despite its age, and only pulling the ones that were out-of-date to the point of uselessness. Some of the ancient stuff was fantastic, like a series on what the world was like when a bunch of famous people were alive (John Smith, George Washington, etc.), but I also found some real jewels to pull, particularly in the American Indians section. Other than that it was pretty quiet, no big news to report. Next week is elementary school, so I'm pretty excited about that!
student teaching week ten
Yikes, y'all: week ten is getting on through the semester! I am not sure how two thirds of the semester manage to come prior to spring break, but whatever. :) So, after the break I have one week left at Gresham, and then it's on to lovely elementary school. I really like Gresham in general and have learned an awful lot from Carole, but I won't be too sorry to make the move. I like the kids (who are an absolute hoot in general) a lot better than I thought I would, but I'm growing weary of having them old enough to push your buttons in an adult way and not old enough to start figuring out when it's time to back off. This week I've had to kick kids out of the library for skipping class under the guise of helping us with circulation (we have a couple of those), confiscate a pile of Nazi symbols printed from the lab without permission, and deal with kids who are uncomfortable with the lesson material almost to the point of tears but who choose to cover it by lashing out at me and telling their teammates they suck. That's only a few of the kids, of course, and many of them are splendid, but I'm a little down about it, especially after getting a little flack for not suiting a teacher who asked me for help evaluating student work without telling me anything about what was expected of them. Note to self: never do that to anybody.
This week we had our relay race, which I won't repeat from an earlier post. Most of the kids had a lot of fun, most were able to find their books on their own or with just a little help, and only a few had trouble with good sportsmanship. There were a couple of cases where kids couldn't find books because they'd been misshelved by somebody, which prompted me to be very assiduous about shelving everything myself after each class. This was not a good exercise in letting go of control for me, which is a problem I'd need to struggle and come to terms with before I tried to repeat the lesson in my own library, because I couldn't be an effective teacher and librarian if I was busy being the head shelver all the time. Meh.
Other than that, I've been weeding the 300s, cataloging some new books from the bookfair and an amazon order, taking a ton of fine money (must've been payday for parents somewhere, or something), and working with some AR scores.
This week we had our relay race, which I won't repeat from an earlier post. Most of the kids had a lot of fun, most were able to find their books on their own or with just a little help, and only a few had trouble with good sportsmanship. There were a couple of cases where kids couldn't find books because they'd been misshelved by somebody, which prompted me to be very assiduous about shelving everything myself after each class. This was not a good exercise in letting go of control for me, which is a problem I'd need to struggle and come to terms with before I tried to repeat the lesson in my own library, because I couldn't be an effective teacher and librarian if I was busy being the head shelver all the time. Meh.
Other than that, I've been weeding the 300s, cataloging some new books from the bookfair and an amazon order, taking a ton of fine money (must've been payday for parents somewhere, or something), and working with some AR scores.
student teaching week nine b
Well, the answer is that the camera people are in fact at fault for the cable breach, but it wasn't just a little snip. They hit the entire wad of fiber optic cables with a concrete drill. It's finally fixed now, and we're all caught up with our zillions of backlogged circulation tasks. We don't know who is going to foot the $5000 bill for all the fixing, but since we're pretty sure it's not us, we are not sticking our noses in it anymore. It was quite the little disaster and I'm sorry it happened, but I reckon I'm glad I got to watch it since it did happen.
Other than that, this week we had book fair, which was pretty much as you'd expect it to be. I learned lots of things about money, how to make deposits with the book keeper, etc. We had some wonderful parent volunteers in all week, which was a HUGE help. Scholastic does not hold you responsible for theft, but it's still bad, so one thing Carole does to combat it is she just forbids anybody to wear a coat or sweatshirt in the book fair; if they are not comfortable taking their jacket off for whatever reason, or if doing so would cause them a problem with the dress code, then they can sit on the other side of the library and read. The other noteworthy point about book fair was that Carole does a pizza dinner during her family night when she keeps the fair open late, where they can buy tickets ahead of time for $6.00 each that get them a drink, two pizza slices, a salad, and a dessert. It was a nice but not huge turnout, and it raised only a little money, but the point of it was just to have fun and socialize at the book fair, which I thought it accomplished well.
In other news, I was pretty bummed to hear from Kristin and Lisa today about the loss of librarian positions at Central and Karns. The one at Central of course means they're not replacing Nancy, which is very sad but with their wonderful wonderful secretary they should make it okay. I think I've mentioned before that I don't really know how they could afford to have two librarians and a full-time secretary anyway, with only 1300-ish students, and given that, I guess if I was the principal I'd probably have made that cut too if it saved a teacher. I'm afraid the loss at Karns will mean Jackie Porter, unless her co-librarian is retiring and I don't know it. Sad news. Those are the only local librarian cuts I've heard about so far.
Other than that, this week we had book fair, which was pretty much as you'd expect it to be. I learned lots of things about money, how to make deposits with the book keeper, etc. We had some wonderful parent volunteers in all week, which was a HUGE help. Scholastic does not hold you responsible for theft, but it's still bad, so one thing Carole does to combat it is she just forbids anybody to wear a coat or sweatshirt in the book fair; if they are not comfortable taking their jacket off for whatever reason, or if doing so would cause them a problem with the dress code, then they can sit on the other side of the library and read. The other noteworthy point about book fair was that Carole does a pizza dinner during her family night when she keeps the fair open late, where they can buy tickets ahead of time for $6.00 each that get them a drink, two pizza slices, a salad, and a dessert. It was a nice but not huge turnout, and it raised only a little money, but the point of it was just to have fun and socialize at the book fair, which I thought it accomplished well.
In other news, I was pretty bummed to hear from Kristin and Lisa today about the loss of librarian positions at Central and Karns. The one at Central of course means they're not replacing Nancy, which is very sad but with their wonderful wonderful secretary they should make it okay. I think I've mentioned before that I don't really know how they could afford to have two librarians and a full-time secretary anyway, with only 1300-ish students, and given that, I guess if I was the principal I'd probably have made that cut too if it saved a teacher. I'm afraid the loss at Karns will mean Jackie Porter, unless her co-librarian is retiring and I don't know it. Sad news. Those are the only local librarian cuts I've heard about so far.
student teaching week nine a
Clearly, the week is not over yet, but I am going to go ahead and start my posting for this week because I have a good story. Here is the sequence of events:
1) About a week ago, maintenance people came into the library, told us they had finally gotten around to putting in the security cameras they'd started planning after the shooting at Central, and asked if they could put one right above the circulation desk. We said that would be fine.
2) They worked on the cameras all week, stringing cables all up and down the sprawling school campus behind the ceiling tiles and other hard-to-reach places, getting things finished up Friday afternoon.
3) Just before time to leave on Friday, the catalog got cranky and decided it couldn't find the server. No worries, it'll rest over the weekend and feel better; technology does that sometimes.
4) First thing monday morning, not only does the catalog not work, but neither does anything else on the network. No catalog searches, no checking books in or out, no AR tests, no internet access.
5) After not being able to figure out where there's a loose connection or something that needs rebooted, Carole calls the school's techie guy. He hems and haws all over it for a while, then calls for backup. They hem and haw over it for a while, then call for more backup. More hemming and hawing occur, stretched over several hours and several rounds of backup.
6) Turns out they're able to determine that the camera installation guys cut a fiber optic cable somewhere in the ceiling while stringing their own cables. But they are NOT able to determine where the cut is. They go home, perhaps to think about it some more, perhaps just to take care of other requests. We keep having no network.
7) All day tuesday, various piles of maintenance men with various blunt instruments stream in and out of the library while our book fair is going on. They finally find the cut and get rid of the old stuff, then work for a long time getting new cables strung. The last step is to "terminate" the cables, which we believe means to plug the ends into all the places they should go, but apparently another pile of maintenance men does that. We keep having no network.
To be continued?! We're hoping they can finish it tomorrow, but in the meantime, GMS circulates like 150 books a day. We can check out by having them write down names and barcodes on paper, which is no big deal to them because Carole has them do that with every checkout anyway to avoid the "I never checked that out" argument (though it'll be a big deal when we have to go back and enter every one of those by hand), but our book drop is about to burst because we can check nothing in, nor shelve it for others to use. It's just fortunate that book fair is this week, because without catalog, circulation, AR, or internet, the library is relatively crippled for normal use.
Good times.
1) About a week ago, maintenance people came into the library, told us they had finally gotten around to putting in the security cameras they'd started planning after the shooting at Central, and asked if they could put one right above the circulation desk. We said that would be fine.
2) They worked on the cameras all week, stringing cables all up and down the sprawling school campus behind the ceiling tiles and other hard-to-reach places, getting things finished up Friday afternoon.
3) Just before time to leave on Friday, the catalog got cranky and decided it couldn't find the server. No worries, it'll rest over the weekend and feel better; technology does that sometimes.
4) First thing monday morning, not only does the catalog not work, but neither does anything else on the network. No catalog searches, no checking books in or out, no AR tests, no internet access.
5) After not being able to figure out where there's a loose connection or something that needs rebooted, Carole calls the school's techie guy. He hems and haws all over it for a while, then calls for backup. They hem and haw over it for a while, then call for more backup. More hemming and hawing occur, stretched over several hours and several rounds of backup.
6) Turns out they're able to determine that the camera installation guys cut a fiber optic cable somewhere in the ceiling while stringing their own cables. But they are NOT able to determine where the cut is. They go home, perhaps to think about it some more, perhaps just to take care of other requests. We keep having no network.
7) All day tuesday, various piles of maintenance men with various blunt instruments stream in and out of the library while our book fair is going on. They finally find the cut and get rid of the old stuff, then work for a long time getting new cables strung. The last step is to "terminate" the cables, which we believe means to plug the ends into all the places they should go, but apparently another pile of maintenance men does that. We keep having no network.
To be continued?! We're hoping they can finish it tomorrow, but in the meantime, GMS circulates like 150 books a day. We can check out by having them write down names and barcodes on paper, which is no big deal to them because Carole has them do that with every checkout anyway to avoid the "I never checked that out" argument (though it'll be a big deal when we have to go back and enter every one of those by hand), but our book drop is about to burst because we can check nothing in, nor shelve it for others to use. It's just fortunate that book fair is this week, because without catalog, circulation, AR, or internet, the library is relatively crippled for normal use.
Good times.
student teaching week eight
Pretty busy week at my place, getting ready to have another busy one, because next week is book fair all day! We've had a lot of lessons to teach this week (Carole has them on a rotation with language arts and reading classes to make sure every kid gets in there at least once every two weeks), and how we've been doing it is basically that Carole will do it a few times while I watch, and then I'll start taking over it. I haven't done any original lessons here, but I'm okay with that; I had a lot of opportunities at Central to plan my own thing and just run with it, but because they were so good about pushing opportunities my way, I actually ended up with not as much chance to observe the experts at work there. So I like watching Carole and learning from all the things she does. Plus, since these kids are all coming in on a steady rotation, it's important to me to watch what she does and then try to do the same thing, rather than just making up something and doing that, because I want to make sure all the kids are on an even footing.
Our sixth graders have been learning about Dewey and how a classification system works, and their lessons this week were to give them practice in the concept of books fitting together in a certain order. Carole had index cards prepared with three NF call numbers written on each of them. Each kid got a card, and they were to go to the shelves and pull one book from each call number. At their tables, they then had to put their three books in numerical order, and then they had to work together to put all the books at their tables together in order. Then, one table at a time, they had to interfile their books with everybody else's on a book truck, so that they ended up with one big "number line" for the whole class. That gave them some good practice, and it also made it a lot easier when it came time for us to re-shelve the books after each class. :)
The next lesson for these kids, which follows up on this one, is a relay race. She thinks I'm going to get to see it before I leave, but I haven't checked the date yet. She told me about it, so I'll go ahead and share it so we can all steal these things. Anyway. So for the relay race, she has more index cards, but these just have one title on each instead of three call numbers. Each kid gets a card, and the class is divided into three lines. For the race, they have to go to the catalog, do a title search, write down the call number, and go to the shelves and pull the book before they can go back to their team for the next person to go. Everybody gets a prize, but the team that finishes first gets the best prizes because they get to pick first.
As you may have noticed, the success of both these lessons depends on the specified books being exactly where they should be, which brought up an interesting point: expressly for these lessons, she keeps a number of books on her shelves that will never ever circulate again, instead of weeding them. She let me go pick some more titles that looked like they'd never circulate again to add to the stack of options (I checked in Spectrum to make sure they hadn't been checked out). I thought that was an interesting counter to the need for weeding, to make sure that you could count on at least a few books being in place when you needed them, and I'm probably going to borrow that when I get my own place. I don't think I'll do it exactly the way she does it, though, keeping them in the collection on the shelves all the time for that one lesson; if it needs to be weeded, I don't really want it cluttering up my stacks the rest of the year, so what I'll probably try to do is go on and discard them and then keep a box in the back somewhere that I can put on the shelves just for the lesson, then take them back up.
I don't think I've shared Carole's take on AR here yet. I think it gets abused in most places, and I think when it is abused like that it really ends up hurting more readers than it helps, but Carole uses it heavily and seems to have a positive program with it. She thinks it's one of the best tools they have to make sure students are practicing reading--not building critical thinking skills, mind you, but practicing reading. As she says, you don't have to read a whole book to write an alternate ending to it, or film a book trailer for it, or make a brochure for it, or any of the other projects we like to have kids do for book studies, but you DO have to read the whole book to do well on the AR quiz. So they use it to encourage kids to practice reading, and they do all the usual kinds of incentives, but they don't do anything like turn it into the kids' reading class grades. They have the STAR reading management system, which is an additional component of the AR system, and the STAR allows them to give the kids a diagnostic test at the beginning of every nine weeks to see what their reading level/zone of proximal development is. That allows them to a) make sure they're helping kids find books at an appropriate level so that they can actually enjoy them (every student has to carry an agenda everywhere they go that has the ZPD written in it, so you can ask to see it when you do reader advisory), b) set individualized point goals for each student based on a goal of 30 min reading practice every day at their reading level, c) check in on how each student's progress is going by comparing the numbers, and d) have something concrete to show students when they have to have conferences about some students' failure to practice reading regularly. Y'all know I have found AR very distasteful, but that all made good sense to me, and so I may consider converting. However, I think the success of Carole's program really hinges on using the reading diagnostics responsibly, individualizing the point goals and book recommendations, and having the principal's support that all this is for reading practice and not for the reading grade. It also helps that GMS owns a quiz for almost every single fiction book in the library, and many non-fiction titles, so they're not really limiting reading choice.
Our sixth graders have been learning about Dewey and how a classification system works, and their lessons this week were to give them practice in the concept of books fitting together in a certain order. Carole had index cards prepared with three NF call numbers written on each of them. Each kid got a card, and they were to go to the shelves and pull one book from each call number. At their tables, they then had to put their three books in numerical order, and then they had to work together to put all the books at their tables together in order. Then, one table at a time, they had to interfile their books with everybody else's on a book truck, so that they ended up with one big "number line" for the whole class. That gave them some good practice, and it also made it a lot easier when it came time for us to re-shelve the books after each class. :)
The next lesson for these kids, which follows up on this one, is a relay race. She thinks I'm going to get to see it before I leave, but I haven't checked the date yet. She told me about it, so I'll go ahead and share it so we can all steal these things. Anyway. So for the relay race, she has more index cards, but these just have one title on each instead of three call numbers. Each kid gets a card, and the class is divided into three lines. For the race, they have to go to the catalog, do a title search, write down the call number, and go to the shelves and pull the book before they can go back to their team for the next person to go. Everybody gets a prize, but the team that finishes first gets the best prizes because they get to pick first.
As you may have noticed, the success of both these lessons depends on the specified books being exactly where they should be, which brought up an interesting point: expressly for these lessons, she keeps a number of books on her shelves that will never ever circulate again, instead of weeding them. She let me go pick some more titles that looked like they'd never circulate again to add to the stack of options (I checked in Spectrum to make sure they hadn't been checked out). I thought that was an interesting counter to the need for weeding, to make sure that you could count on at least a few books being in place when you needed them, and I'm probably going to borrow that when I get my own place. I don't think I'll do it exactly the way she does it, though, keeping them in the collection on the shelves all the time for that one lesson; if it needs to be weeded, I don't really want it cluttering up my stacks the rest of the year, so what I'll probably try to do is go on and discard them and then keep a box in the back somewhere that I can put on the shelves just for the lesson, then take them back up.
I don't think I've shared Carole's take on AR here yet. I think it gets abused in most places, and I think when it is abused like that it really ends up hurting more readers than it helps, but Carole uses it heavily and seems to have a positive program with it. She thinks it's one of the best tools they have to make sure students are practicing reading--not building critical thinking skills, mind you, but practicing reading. As she says, you don't have to read a whole book to write an alternate ending to it, or film a book trailer for it, or make a brochure for it, or any of the other projects we like to have kids do for book studies, but you DO have to read the whole book to do well on the AR quiz. So they use it to encourage kids to practice reading, and they do all the usual kinds of incentives, but they don't do anything like turn it into the kids' reading class grades. They have the STAR reading management system, which is an additional component of the AR system, and the STAR allows them to give the kids a diagnostic test at the beginning of every nine weeks to see what their reading level/zone of proximal development is. That allows them to a) make sure they're helping kids find books at an appropriate level so that they can actually enjoy them (every student has to carry an agenda everywhere they go that has the ZPD written in it, so you can ask to see it when you do reader advisory), b) set individualized point goals for each student based on a goal of 30 min reading practice every day at their reading level, c) check in on how each student's progress is going by comparing the numbers, and d) have something concrete to show students when they have to have conferences about some students' failure to practice reading regularly. Y'all know I have found AR very distasteful, but that all made good sense to me, and so I may consider converting. However, I think the success of Carole's program really hinges on using the reading diagnostics responsibly, individualizing the point goals and book recommendations, and having the principal's support that all this is for reading practice and not for the reading grade. It also helps that GMS owns a quiz for almost every single fiction book in the library, and many non-fiction titles, so they're not really limiting reading choice.
student teaching week seven
This week I started at Gresham Middle School with Carole Romeiser, and I like it well. I was concerned about how much I would like the "unbridled puberty" of middle school, but so far it's a hoot. That said, I'm probably seeing them at their best in the library, with more adults in the room than probably any other single place in the building. The library is one kinda mid-sized square-ish space, with fiction hardbacks around one side, non-fiction around the other, biography on a small set of freestanding shelves in the center, and fiction paperbacks divided by genre on bookstore-style racks in a couple of places. There's a computer lab on the side with the fiction, as well as some table space between the computers and the office/circ desk area, where the kids sit while Carole gives announcements and instruction. There's also table space on the other side, but less of it, since there are more shelves in that space to hold all the nonfiction. Carole's office is in the back, behind the circ desk and directly opposite the entrance. There's another office space next to that which holds their school store, and then there are two office spaces on either side of the entrance, one of which has a workroom with the laminators, and the other of which is a small ESL classroom. Carole has a part-time secretary and a steady schedule of parent volunteers, so at any given time when kids are there, there might be Carole, me, the secretary, the kids' classroom teacher, the ESL teacher, a volunteer, the technology guy who's been working on the lab, and any other teacher working in there. This is why I think maybe the kids are seeing more adults than usual when they're in the library. :)
So far I've been doing mostly a lot of shadowing Carole, seeing everything I can see. I managed to front-load all of my required activities into my high school segment (but no worries, Marion, I'm not going to stop doing things!), which frees me up to have a lot of flexibility on what I do from here out.
Monday's inservice was pretty interesting to go through. We spent the morning in meetings with the principal and two leadership teams of the teachers, so I got an earful and eyeful of faculty politics at work. A lot of people were at a lot of other people's throats, and the principal worked REALLY hard at making things look positive and effective anyway (to her credit), and the people who've later been identified to me as the "good guys" think a lot of the complaints were wholly unfounded. Basically, they are trying to implement vertical (between grade levels) and horizontal (between teachers on the same grade level) planning so that they can hopefully guarantee that all the kids are mastering the same essential skills without wasteful redundancy, but many of the teachers are really resisting anything that makes them work together--including letting the librarian and technology teacher work with them, even when that means Carole teaches the class for them and they don't actually have to do anything. Carole worked at another school for some years and did some truly incredible-sounding interdisciplinary research projects there, and she's really frustrated that she's been at Gresham for four years now and has been able to eke out only very minimal buy-in from teachers to do the same thing here, even with the principal's support.
Then on tuesday we had the system-wide inservice with all the high school and middle school librarians, which I thought was a very pleasant crowd to hang out with all day. I spent the day in two long sessions, smartboard training in the morning and activboard training in the afternoon. I was hoping not just to learn about how to use them, but to get a feel for what the differences were (a LOT) and for which I'd rather have if I was in position to need to purchase one, which I'm still confused on. The activboard (designed originally for schools) would do a lot more stuff and seemed more durable, but the smartboard (designed originally for businesses) seemed a lot more user-friendly. Apparently the schools in Knox Co. are about half and half as to who owns which kind.
The rest of the week was spent settling into the new routine. Carole had pretty thick schedules of seventh graders coming in as classes for checkout on wednesday and thursday, so I kept pretty busy running circ and shelving, and friday there were no classes so we just had open access and took care of a lot of little tasks here and there (entered some internet use permission forms, bought some things for the AR store, etc.)
So far I've been doing mostly a lot of shadowing Carole, seeing everything I can see. I managed to front-load all of my required activities into my high school segment (but no worries, Marion, I'm not going to stop doing things!), which frees me up to have a lot of flexibility on what I do from here out.
Monday's inservice was pretty interesting to go through. We spent the morning in meetings with the principal and two leadership teams of the teachers, so I got an earful and eyeful of faculty politics at work. A lot of people were at a lot of other people's throats, and the principal worked REALLY hard at making things look positive and effective anyway (to her credit), and the people who've later been identified to me as the "good guys" think a lot of the complaints were wholly unfounded. Basically, they are trying to implement vertical (between grade levels) and horizontal (between teachers on the same grade level) planning so that they can hopefully guarantee that all the kids are mastering the same essential skills without wasteful redundancy, but many of the teachers are really resisting anything that makes them work together--including letting the librarian and technology teacher work with them, even when that means Carole teaches the class for them and they don't actually have to do anything. Carole worked at another school for some years and did some truly incredible-sounding interdisciplinary research projects there, and she's really frustrated that she's been at Gresham for four years now and has been able to eke out only very minimal buy-in from teachers to do the same thing here, even with the principal's support.
Then on tuesday we had the system-wide inservice with all the high school and middle school librarians, which I thought was a very pleasant crowd to hang out with all day. I spent the day in two long sessions, smartboard training in the morning and activboard training in the afternoon. I was hoping not just to learn about how to use them, but to get a feel for what the differences were (a LOT) and for which I'd rather have if I was in position to need to purchase one, which I'm still confused on. The activboard (designed originally for schools) would do a lot more stuff and seemed more durable, but the smartboard (designed originally for businesses) seemed a lot more user-friendly. Apparently the schools in Knox Co. are about half and half as to who owns which kind.
The rest of the week was spent settling into the new routine. Carole had pretty thick schedules of seventh graders coming in as classes for checkout on wednesday and thursday, so I kept pretty busy running circ and shelving, and friday there were no classes so we just had open access and took care of a lot of little tasks here and there (entered some internet use permission forms, bought some things for the AR store, etc.)
student teaching week six
So, week six was my last week at Central, and I was really sad to leave. Happy to move on to the next great thing, but sad, as I'd started to feel really at home! :) They took mighty good care of me there, and the principal was kind enough to come talk to me on my last day about the fact that Nancy's retiring and they'll have an opening, which made me feel really good about the way everything went.
I had just enough time to wrap up most of my loose ends before I moved on, so that was good. I spent the early part of the week looking for good websites for a teacher to have world history and geography students research people and countries, and then I made her some handouts to copy and give to them with the names of the sites and brief instructions on how to use them. Then, when she brought them in on wednesday, I walked them through using each site, as well as how to use the catalog to find some print sources. The usual laptop for presenting lessons decided to freak out and not connect to the catalog in her first period, so I got to ad-lib a little, but it worked out fine since we were meeting in a computer lab; I just told them what to do, and walked around while I talked to look for problems, and then I got a new computer for the other three classes.
We finished moving the books and furniture around--at least, finished until they decide to play with things some more--and it's shown a lot of reaction. Kids are going straight to the newly reachable fiction, which makes me really happy, because that was the point of it all! We used the now-empty shelves behind the teachers' desks to just put up a bunch of face-out displays, which looks nice, and the kids are going to those where they hadn't been going when the shelves were full. We reckon that means they can pick out their books by the covers from afar and then feel comfortable to dart back there just long enough to grab it off the shelf, where they weren't comfortable standing back there and browsing close-up before. A couple of teachers have made small gripes about the new arrangements, but along the lines of "I just don't like it different because I liked it fine before" rather than raising any real reasons that it doesn't work. My personal opinion is that I'm glad they liked it fine before, but it wasn't working for the students (who we're there to serve, after all) and since we haven't changed a thing about the teachers' desks, I can't much sympathize with resisting the change. Paula and Nancy think so too, and it's their library, durnit. :)
That week I also finished a sample calendar with suggestions of books to rotate through the new front display I'd made, showing bibliographies of 10-12 books on enough different themes to change it out every three weeks for next year, and I put them on a calendar to align them roughly with seasons (football in august, prom/makeovers in april, etc.). That way they can just pull titles real easily. I changed out the music books I'd put up and did a black history month display instead before I left, and then since I had those music books out, as well as two stacks I'd pulled while making the sample calendar (poetry and science, the latter containing an awesome-if-terrifying picture book called The Tarantula Scientist), I went ahead and put all of those out on display on top of the row of shelves that's now in the middle of the fiction section. We ended up gaining a ton of display space through the move in its various stages, which was great.
Then my last little project on friday was to look at the way the other high schools have their TEL worked out. Since I'd been working with TEL a lot for my lessons and inservice, I'd found that when the new TEL portal went live on the web, nothing changed with the current portal that Central was linked to. This was mystifying Nancy a bit, so she asked me to go see what other schools were doing, as well as just to look at what databases they'd moved around to emphasize, since it turns out you can do that. The answer, if you're curious, is that most schools have done pretty much nothing to their TEL portals except link to them, but they're all still on the old portal; this is important, because linking properly through the old way means you get TEL statistics counted for your school, whereas going straight to the new portal on the web just sends all stats straight to the state. I assume they'll eventually change it so schools can get stats from the new portal, but it's not so right now. Austin-East had actually done something really odd, maybe copying and pasting a URL from Farragut's site (they have a new librarian and I wouldn't be surprised if he'd gone looking for help or a quick fix that way), such that it sure looks like their site links to Farragut's portal and therefore sends all their stats to Farragut. The interesting high school TEL portals to go look at, in case you are interested in making changes of your own, are Central, Fulton, and West, who have only selected a few sites to show as particularly important (everyone else has them all on the default "select all"), and Hardin Valley, who has them all selected but has carefully changed their order in the list to group certain ones together.
I had just enough time to wrap up most of my loose ends before I moved on, so that was good. I spent the early part of the week looking for good websites for a teacher to have world history and geography students research people and countries, and then I made her some handouts to copy and give to them with the names of the sites and brief instructions on how to use them. Then, when she brought them in on wednesday, I walked them through using each site, as well as how to use the catalog to find some print sources. The usual laptop for presenting lessons decided to freak out and not connect to the catalog in her first period, so I got to ad-lib a little, but it worked out fine since we were meeting in a computer lab; I just told them what to do, and walked around while I talked to look for problems, and then I got a new computer for the other three classes.
We finished moving the books and furniture around--at least, finished until they decide to play with things some more--and it's shown a lot of reaction. Kids are going straight to the newly reachable fiction, which makes me really happy, because that was the point of it all! We used the now-empty shelves behind the teachers' desks to just put up a bunch of face-out displays, which looks nice, and the kids are going to those where they hadn't been going when the shelves were full. We reckon that means they can pick out their books by the covers from afar and then feel comfortable to dart back there just long enough to grab it off the shelf, where they weren't comfortable standing back there and browsing close-up before. A couple of teachers have made small gripes about the new arrangements, but along the lines of "I just don't like it different because I liked it fine before" rather than raising any real reasons that it doesn't work. My personal opinion is that I'm glad they liked it fine before, but it wasn't working for the students (who we're there to serve, after all) and since we haven't changed a thing about the teachers' desks, I can't much sympathize with resisting the change. Paula and Nancy think so too, and it's their library, durnit. :)
That week I also finished a sample calendar with suggestions of books to rotate through the new front display I'd made, showing bibliographies of 10-12 books on enough different themes to change it out every three weeks for next year, and I put them on a calendar to align them roughly with seasons (football in august, prom/makeovers in april, etc.). That way they can just pull titles real easily. I changed out the music books I'd put up and did a black history month display instead before I left, and then since I had those music books out, as well as two stacks I'd pulled while making the sample calendar (poetry and science, the latter containing an awesome-if-terrifying picture book called The Tarantula Scientist), I went ahead and put all of those out on display on top of the row of shelves that's now in the middle of the fiction section. We ended up gaining a ton of display space through the move in its various stages, which was great.
Then my last little project on friday was to look at the way the other high schools have their TEL worked out. Since I'd been working with TEL a lot for my lessons and inservice, I'd found that when the new TEL portal went live on the web, nothing changed with the current portal that Central was linked to. This was mystifying Nancy a bit, so she asked me to go see what other schools were doing, as well as just to look at what databases they'd moved around to emphasize, since it turns out you can do that. The answer, if you're curious, is that most schools have done pretty much nothing to their TEL portals except link to them, but they're all still on the old portal; this is important, because linking properly through the old way means you get TEL statistics counted for your school, whereas going straight to the new portal on the web just sends all stats straight to the state. I assume they'll eventually change it so schools can get stats from the new portal, but it's not so right now. Austin-East had actually done something really odd, maybe copying and pasting a URL from Farragut's site (they have a new librarian and I wouldn't be surprised if he'd gone looking for help or a quick fix that way), such that it sure looks like their site links to Farragut's portal and therefore sends all their stats to Farragut. The interesting high school TEL portals to go look at, in case you are interested in making changes of your own, are Central, Fulton, and West, who have only selected a few sites to show as particularly important (everyone else has them all on the default "select all"), and Hardin Valley, who has them all selected but has carefully changed their order in the list to group certain ones together.
student teaching week five
So, I enjoyed having the snow days (I got my laundry caught up), but one of them got in the way of one of my inservices, so I'm having to reschedule that. We're trying to put it on the 19th, which is after I move to Gresham Middle, but that's real nearby so I should have any problem getting over there after school. We're also tweaking my schedule as a result of missing 3.5 days for snow, so I'll still be at Central all of this week instead of switching on thursday; I had two extra days built in since I didn't include the 16-17th inservices in my original count, so I can do that without missing any time at the middle school.
The inservice I did have on thursday went well. We talked about how and why to use book studies in the classroom--I had about 12 teachers, and only a couple were English teachers, so not everybody already uses books--and I walked them through how to use teachingbooks.net and What Do I Read Next, which is available through TEL. Both are favorite new toys of mine, and y'all need to go check them out right now if you aren't already familiar with them. We also did a brief look at the author/criticism databases in TEL. Nancy and I talked about it afterwards, and I'm gonna need to cut some material out of my rescheduled inservice to keep kosher on the time (we all know how I over-talk things) so I can really slow down in spots where teachers need some help following along (we're in a computer lab where everybody can try it I present). It's a funny balance that Nancy thinks takes a while to master, trying to talk a subject way down for the people who don't use much technology without treating them like children. Seems like you get a similar problem with students, but it's maybe easier in a classroom than with teachers, because you can have some natural authority with the kids but are in a crowd of equals with the teachers.
The big fun at the end of the week is that the movers came and moved the bookshelves for my fiction reorganization project this week! We started moving the books on friday, and we're definitely going to have room to get those books out from behind the teachers where kids will be able to get to them. We're also going to be able to fix some crowded shelves in the fiction that was already accessible, we gained a ton of display space, and the new position of the shelves makes a great divider in the front sitting area that helps with the general flow of the library. Paula and I had a field day moving all the tables and chairs in the whole library while we were at it. They're really happy with how it's shaping up, and I'm really excited that we were able to do it while I'm still there.
The inservice I did have on thursday went well. We talked about how and why to use book studies in the classroom--I had about 12 teachers, and only a couple were English teachers, so not everybody already uses books--and I walked them through how to use teachingbooks.net and What Do I Read Next, which is available through TEL. Both are favorite new toys of mine, and y'all need to go check them out right now if you aren't already familiar with them. We also did a brief look at the author/criticism databases in TEL. Nancy and I talked about it afterwards, and I'm gonna need to cut some material out of my rescheduled inservice to keep kosher on the time (we all know how I over-talk things) so I can really slow down in spots where teachers need some help following along (we're in a computer lab where everybody can try it I present). It's a funny balance that Nancy thinks takes a while to master, trying to talk a subject way down for the people who don't use much technology without treating them like children. Seems like you get a similar problem with students, but it's maybe easier in a classroom than with teachers, because you can have some natural authority with the kids but are in a crowd of equals with the teachers.
The big fun at the end of the week is that the movers came and moved the bookshelves for my fiction reorganization project this week! We started moving the books on friday, and we're definitely going to have room to get those books out from behind the teachers where kids will be able to get to them. We're also going to be able to fix some crowded shelves in the fiction that was already accessible, we gained a ton of display space, and the new position of the shelves makes a great divider in the front sitting area that helps with the general flow of the library. Paula and I had a field day moving all the tables and chairs in the whole library while we were at it. They're really happy with how it's shaping up, and I'm really excited that we were able to do it while I'm still there.
student teaching week four
I think I left off the weeding project last week having pulled books. This week I went over my justifications for what I pulled and discussed with the librarians what could just be thrown out and what really needed replaced. I then got to go hunting for the replacements, and was pleased to discover later that the library already owns one of the books I'd picked out (it's just in reference instead of in non-fiction, was why I hadn't seen it). It made me feel clever, like I'd gotten it correct, that a real librarian had already picked it out and ordered it. :) The other thing I quickly discovered while picking out books was that Follett, which is where pretty much all of the ordering here goes through, did not have the most current editions of fully half the books I was looking into. That may be a coincidence, that Follett's just low in music books or something, but only being able to tell you about a 1997 book when there is in fact a 2007 edition creates a problem if you're only doing your ordering in one place. So I guess I learned to shop around not just for price. :)
Then I had a fun project this week that grew out of the weeding/ordering discussions, because Paula was remarking that she hesitated to sink a lot of budget into replacing books when she wasn't seeing a lot of music books circulate. I pointed out that they seemed like they really ought to be a high-interest section, but that they were buried way in the back of a ginormous library and maybe kids just didn't know about them. I'd been looking at the library space for my reorganization project (which we're doing! the movers come next week) and had noticed a column right at the entrance that I thought wasn't being used real well currently, so I suggested making that into a display space for bringing little-used sections up front, rotating its contents every so often. They thought that was a good idea, so I've moved shelves around and made signs for the space and put a bunch of those music books out to just see if they circulate better, and three have gone home with students from that shelf already--victory! I'm working on a sample calendar of a year's worth of suggested exhibits to leave for them to put there, and I'll probably change it out for Black History Month books before I leave and go to my next school.
Let's see, what else this week...been doing a lot of work on my inservices coming up next week, and I taught three more classes about catalog and databases. That teacher did change her topics on me the day before the lessons, so I had to go rewrite them, but she was real nice about it, so I'm counting it as a learning experience about the quickly changing needs and wants of teachers rather than something obnoxious. :)
I guess something else worth noting is the value of hanging out with the classroom teachers and just getting to know them personally. I am NOT a good socializer, but I've been eating lunch with a group of teachers who eat in the kitchen behind the library every day, and that's been a really good experience for just sort of working my way into the group. It's a good opportunity to figure out their concerns with how the curriculum is going, because they're basically sitting back there gossiping and it's often about work, and it's a good time to sneak in my ideas (as in "Oh, you're upset about the new ACT testing requirements? Yeah, that's real bad. Did you know about the database with practice tests we have through the school? I could show it to you sometime...") instead of waiting for them to come ask the librarian for official help.
Then I had a fun project this week that grew out of the weeding/ordering discussions, because Paula was remarking that she hesitated to sink a lot of budget into replacing books when she wasn't seeing a lot of music books circulate. I pointed out that they seemed like they really ought to be a high-interest section, but that they were buried way in the back of a ginormous library and maybe kids just didn't know about them. I'd been looking at the library space for my reorganization project (which we're doing! the movers come next week) and had noticed a column right at the entrance that I thought wasn't being used real well currently, so I suggested making that into a display space for bringing little-used sections up front, rotating its contents every so often. They thought that was a good idea, so I've moved shelves around and made signs for the space and put a bunch of those music books out to just see if they circulate better, and three have gone home with students from that shelf already--victory! I'm working on a sample calendar of a year's worth of suggested exhibits to leave for them to put there, and I'll probably change it out for Black History Month books before I leave and go to my next school.
Let's see, what else this week...been doing a lot of work on my inservices coming up next week, and I taught three more classes about catalog and databases. That teacher did change her topics on me the day before the lessons, so I had to go rewrite them, but she was real nice about it, so I'm counting it as a learning experience about the quickly changing needs and wants of teachers rather than something obnoxious. :)
I guess something else worth noting is the value of hanging out with the classroom teachers and just getting to know them personally. I am NOT a good socializer, but I've been eating lunch with a group of teachers who eat in the kitchen behind the library every day, and that's been a really good experience for just sort of working my way into the group. It's a good opportunity to figure out their concerns with how the curriculum is going, because they're basically sitting back there gossiping and it's often about work, and it's a good time to sneak in my ideas (as in "Oh, you're upset about the new ACT testing requirements? Yeah, that's real bad. Did you know about the database with practice tests we have through the school? I could show it to you sometime...") instead of waiting for them to come ask the librarian for official help.
student teaching week three
This week was a short week because of the holiday and the snow day. And then there was the bizzaro optional day last friday in Knox County; how was attendance where y'all were, and what thoughts did you have or pick up from other teachers? Attendance was crummy here, around 30%, and the teachers were extremely unhappy with it. They couldn't teach anything to the students who did bother to come because they'd just end up having to do it all again with the rest of the class, but they also couldn't use the time to catch up on their own work because they had 30% of their students to effectively babysit. We did a steady trade in videos all day.
I've been working at my computer a lot this week, getting ready for upcoming projects. I have two inservices scheduled to deliver the first week of february, so I've been working on my presentations for those and have done a little promoting them among the faculty. Unfortunately, I have heard from one teacher who's in a night professional development program (maybe an alternative licensure program, though I'm not certain) that they're only having class two times in the month of february and it happens to be those two nights, so that may take out several among my potential audience. I've also heard from two people who've already signed up, though, and the number of required unscheduled inservice hours has apparently gone way up this year, so the librarians and the administrator I arranged it with think I'm likely to get a pretty good turnout from people scrambling to get those credits in.
I'm also starting a weeding project right now. I got to use the TitleWise analysis we've all heard about, and it was indeed pretty nifty. We decided I should do the music section, since it's a manageable size, BADLY needed attention, and is in my subject area, but astronomy was another good contender (it hasn't been weeded here since Pluto got demoted, which needs corrected quick, but it's a big enough section that there's new stuff in place to supplant the old stuff, and anyway they say the science doesn't get much use here). I did a little reading about the weeding process before I got started, and every article I read was full of how circulation goes up when you weed, which I thought was pretty interesting. It makes sense; one of my librarians, Nancy, loves to weed, and she says she made her first co-librarian (a dinosaur type) furious by daring to weed the fiction section ("We never weed fiction! It never goes out of date!"), but if you look at Central's nicely weeded fiction stacks, the conspicuous lack of ancient musty volumes really does make the whole selection look brighter, more inviting, and easier to successfully browse. Pretty much everything there is something you'd potentially want to read, instead of just being an endless collection that you have to spend a lot of time wading through before you could find something that just began to be modern and pertinent. So I've started working on taking some of the chaff out of the music section (oldest one so far is 1908, silliest one is called "I Like Jazz", a guide to jazz for swingin' cats, and the one perhaps most in need of throwing out is a guide to electronic music from 1962). It's nice to see the shelves looking a little more colorful after just removing a few volumes.
It turns out there is an art to weeding, which makes sense now that I try it, but which I never thought about before because while we're told in class that we need to weed, there is really no way to practice weeding until we have books in front of us. Nancy and Paula have been to whole classes on it, and they like to work on it by printing a shelf list and just working through it on paper before ever moving to the shelves, marking suspect items by date and title. Then they go to the shelves and compare their list to what they see in front of them, and they pull some things they hadn't picked out yet, and some things come off the list because they turn out to be really wonderful even though they're old. Nancy is not a strict advocate of the general rule that you should wait a year before you weed anything from the collection--for instance, it really did not take me a year to establish that the 1962 electronic music guide would not be of research use to anyone here--but does point out that it's helpful to know what big projects teachers do regularly so that you don't get rid of the sources they're counting on you to have. She says the English teachers here, for instance, do a medieval studies project using library books that are truly ancient, but that she doesn't replace them because they still get used and the more modern ones available really just aren't as good.
I've been working at my computer a lot this week, getting ready for upcoming projects. I have two inservices scheduled to deliver the first week of february, so I've been working on my presentations for those and have done a little promoting them among the faculty. Unfortunately, I have heard from one teacher who's in a night professional development program (maybe an alternative licensure program, though I'm not certain) that they're only having class two times in the month of february and it happens to be those two nights, so that may take out several among my potential audience. I've also heard from two people who've already signed up, though, and the number of required unscheduled inservice hours has apparently gone way up this year, so the librarians and the administrator I arranged it with think I'm likely to get a pretty good turnout from people scrambling to get those credits in.
I'm also starting a weeding project right now. I got to use the TitleWise analysis we've all heard about, and it was indeed pretty nifty. We decided I should do the music section, since it's a manageable size, BADLY needed attention, and is in my subject area, but astronomy was another good contender (it hasn't been weeded here since Pluto got demoted, which needs corrected quick, but it's a big enough section that there's new stuff in place to supplant the old stuff, and anyway they say the science doesn't get much use here). I did a little reading about the weeding process before I got started, and every article I read was full of how circulation goes up when you weed, which I thought was pretty interesting. It makes sense; one of my librarians, Nancy, loves to weed, and she says she made her first co-librarian (a dinosaur type) furious by daring to weed the fiction section ("We never weed fiction! It never goes out of date!"), but if you look at Central's nicely weeded fiction stacks, the conspicuous lack of ancient musty volumes really does make the whole selection look brighter, more inviting, and easier to successfully browse. Pretty much everything there is something you'd potentially want to read, instead of just being an endless collection that you have to spend a lot of time wading through before you could find something that just began to be modern and pertinent. So I've started working on taking some of the chaff out of the music section (oldest one so far is 1908, silliest one is called "I Like Jazz", a guide to jazz for swingin' cats, and the one perhaps most in need of throwing out is a guide to electronic music from 1962). It's nice to see the shelves looking a little more colorful after just removing a few volumes.
It turns out there is an art to weeding, which makes sense now that I try it, but which I never thought about before because while we're told in class that we need to weed, there is really no way to practice weeding until we have books in front of us. Nancy and Paula have been to whole classes on it, and they like to work on it by printing a shelf list and just working through it on paper before ever moving to the shelves, marking suspect items by date and title. Then they go to the shelves and compare their list to what they see in front of them, and they pull some things they hadn't picked out yet, and some things come off the list because they turn out to be really wonderful even though they're old. Nancy is not a strict advocate of the general rule that you should wait a year before you weed anything from the collection--for instance, it really did not take me a year to establish that the 1962 electronic music guide would not be of research use to anyone here--but does point out that it's helpful to know what big projects teachers do regularly so that you don't get rid of the sources they're counting on you to have. She says the English teachers here, for instance, do a medieval studies project using library books that are truly ancient, but that she doesn't replace them because they still get used and the more modern ones available really just aren't as good.
student teaching week two
Pretty busy week this week. I'm pretty tired now. :) Highlights:
Monday I had a film studies class in here to work on a biography project. I pulled a big bunch of screen actor biographies for them and booktalked. The booktalks did not go exactly like I had planned--the class swarmed in while I was getting something from my office and picked over my booktalking books before we could even get started!--but I'm glad they got books they liked anyway, and I still got to do some. It was somewhat uncomfortable trying to booktalk, knowing that most of them already had the books they were interested in, but I got a little practice anyway and I have to reckon that even if it was not exemplary practice, the point is for the students to get books they like, not for me to feel like I had a great performance or anything.
Tuesday morning I had a low-level reading class, and I taught a lesson on searching two career websites for information. I picked the sites (Tennessee Career Information Delivery System and Occupational Outlook Handbook, both excellent if y'all want to use them at any point) and taught the lesson on browsing versus searching, how to pick search terms when it's not google, how to use the differences between the two sites to advantage, and the teacher artfully designed an assignment to make them use both of the sites to research three different careers. I was really pleased with it. Only one girl decided she'd rather use Ask.com than the obviously more suitable tools in front of her, and her teacher didn't make her stop so I elected not to push it. The others asked good questions about how to find what they were looking for, and I had a good time helping them.
Tuesday night I went to dinner with a bunch of high school librarians (it counted as inservice for them) and we all talked about library stuff, which was way fun. The intent is to meet monthly to talk about new books, what they've read, what their students are reading, so that they can all keep up on the literature, but the discussion also touched on bunches of other library issues. It was real informative, and I hope they keep doing it next year! They only do it amongst the high school librarians, so if we here end up in Knox County at other grade levels, we should conspire to organize similar groups for the middle and elementary schools.
Wednesday morning I had an English class that was starting research on historical topics related to To Kill A Mockingbird, and I taught them a lesson on catalog searching and how to navigate and use the variety of databases that would be helpful for their assignment, especially things available through TEL. The students did well with it and asked me good questions afterward about their individual searches (some of them really needed help; the Spectrum catalog search is not very intuitive for Google kids), but I was most pleased because the teacher told me at the end that she hadn't heard of one of the databases I'd shown them (Points of View) and she was all excited about using it in the future.
The teachers I've worked with have been really great about helping me figure out how to help them. Both of this week's lessons were real good first experiences with collaboration, kinda working back and forth and comparing notes each day to make sure we were preparing towards the same goal. They were also both real good about staying active with their classes while I was instructing; I had zero discipline problems. I don't know whether that's entirely realistic on a large scale, but it was real nice!
The rest of the week was full of book processing, circulation, making new MARC records, updating patron files in the ILS, lots of little stuff.
Monday I had a film studies class in here to work on a biography project. I pulled a big bunch of screen actor biographies for them and booktalked. The booktalks did not go exactly like I had planned--the class swarmed in while I was getting something from my office and picked over my booktalking books before we could even get started!--but I'm glad they got books they liked anyway, and I still got to do some. It was somewhat uncomfortable trying to booktalk, knowing that most of them already had the books they were interested in, but I got a little practice anyway and I have to reckon that even if it was not exemplary practice, the point is for the students to get books they like, not for me to feel like I had a great performance or anything.
Tuesday morning I had a low-level reading class, and I taught a lesson on searching two career websites for information. I picked the sites (Tennessee Career Information Delivery System and Occupational Outlook Handbook, both excellent if y'all want to use them at any point) and taught the lesson on browsing versus searching, how to pick search terms when it's not google, how to use the differences between the two sites to advantage, and the teacher artfully designed an assignment to make them use both of the sites to research three different careers. I was really pleased with it. Only one girl decided she'd rather use Ask.com than the obviously more suitable tools in front of her, and her teacher didn't make her stop so I elected not to push it. The others asked good questions about how to find what they were looking for, and I had a good time helping them.
Tuesday night I went to dinner with a bunch of high school librarians (it counted as inservice for them) and we all talked about library stuff, which was way fun. The intent is to meet monthly to talk about new books, what they've read, what their students are reading, so that they can all keep up on the literature, but the discussion also touched on bunches of other library issues. It was real informative, and I hope they keep doing it next year! They only do it amongst the high school librarians, so if we here end up in Knox County at other grade levels, we should conspire to organize similar groups for the middle and elementary schools.
Wednesday morning I had an English class that was starting research on historical topics related to To Kill A Mockingbird, and I taught them a lesson on catalog searching and how to navigate and use the variety of databases that would be helpful for their assignment, especially things available through TEL. The students did well with it and asked me good questions afterward about their individual searches (some of them really needed help; the Spectrum catalog search is not very intuitive for Google kids), but I was most pleased because the teacher told me at the end that she hadn't heard of one of the databases I'd shown them (Points of View) and she was all excited about using it in the future.
The teachers I've worked with have been really great about helping me figure out how to help them. Both of this week's lessons were real good first experiences with collaboration, kinda working back and forth and comparing notes each day to make sure we were preparing towards the same goal. They were also both real good about staying active with their classes while I was instructing; I had zero discipline problems. I don't know whether that's entirely realistic on a large scale, but it was real nice!
The rest of the week was full of book processing, circulation, making new MARC records, updating patron files in the ILS, lots of little stuff.
student teaching week one
I'm at Central High School for the first third of the semester, and I am having a blast so far! It's exhausting, though. I'm well accustomed to school schedules, but it keeps surprising me how late it is when I get home after staying to keep the library open till 4:30! That's get tough next week when my evening class starts up...
I didn't start till wednesday of this week, because I wasn't totally sure about being able to count days before UT's semester started, but I've ended up with a ton of projects in just three days and will almost certainly have more on the way. So far, besides all the good stuff I'm getting to watch and help with, these are the projects I have in the works:
--Prepared selection of biographies, with booktalks this monday morning for a film studies class
--Lesson on how to use two career information sites for a research activity this tuesday with an english class
--Review of the catalog and using TEL, plus preparing reference materials, for an honors english class this wednesday
--More intensive review of catalog searching and basic library use for an english fundamentals class in two weeks
--Preparing a bibliography of web resources for a teacher with geography and world history classes for mid-february
--Two inservices for teachers on making use of the electronic resources they may not know they have available through the school
--Designing an alternative layout for the library shelves to fix some accessibility problems
That last is kind of an interesting problem. Central has two striking points in its library situation: 1) It's got the biggest space I've ever seen in a school library, really ginormous, way too physically big for the size collection that they can afford to maintain, and so they're able to play with their layout and where they put their books, but the shape of the library and the various non-library uses it gets force some constraints on how they can use all that space. The library is laid out with a long open central space and two wings to the right and left in the back, kind of like a cathedral sanctuary in the shape of a cross. The fiction currently lines the front part of the library, half on each side of the central space before you get back into the wings. 2) Central is badly overcrowded with its student population. They have a lot of traveling teachers, who push carts around and use other people's classrooms during their planning periods; since there are only one or two teachers in the whole school who DON'T have a traveling teacher in their room at some point, they all need somewhere else to go during their planning periods while their rooms are being used. Many of them go to the library, and there is a row of desks and computers for teacher use down one side of the front central space before you get back to the wings. Now, these are both good problems for the library to have, but they are coinciding poorly; as you may have noticed, the teacher desks are in front of half the fiction section, with very little clearance between, and the students won't go behind the teachers to get books from that part of the library! They've got some other layout issues too, even though they did some moving in the fall and improved it from where it was before, so I'm going to try to propose something new.
I didn't start till wednesday of this week, because I wasn't totally sure about being able to count days before UT's semester started, but I've ended up with a ton of projects in just three days and will almost certainly have more on the way. So far, besides all the good stuff I'm getting to watch and help with, these are the projects I have in the works:
--Prepared selection of biographies, with booktalks this monday morning for a film studies class
--Lesson on how to use two career information sites for a research activity this tuesday with an english class
--Review of the catalog and using TEL, plus preparing reference materials, for an honors english class this wednesday
--More intensive review of catalog searching and basic library use for an english fundamentals class in two weeks
--Preparing a bibliography of web resources for a teacher with geography and world history classes for mid-february
--Two inservices for teachers on making use of the electronic resources they may not know they have available through the school
--Designing an alternative layout for the library shelves to fix some accessibility problems
That last is kind of an interesting problem. Central has two striking points in its library situation: 1) It's got the biggest space I've ever seen in a school library, really ginormous, way too physically big for the size collection that they can afford to maintain, and so they're able to play with their layout and where they put their books, but the shape of the library and the various non-library uses it gets force some constraints on how they can use all that space. The library is laid out with a long open central space and two wings to the right and left in the back, kind of like a cathedral sanctuary in the shape of a cross. The fiction currently lines the front part of the library, half on each side of the central space before you get back into the wings. 2) Central is badly overcrowded with its student population. They have a lot of traveling teachers, who push carts around and use other people's classrooms during their planning periods; since there are only one or two teachers in the whole school who DON'T have a traveling teacher in their room at some point, they all need somewhere else to go during their planning periods while their rooms are being used. Many of them go to the library, and there is a row of desks and computers for teacher use down one side of the front central space before you get back to the wings. Now, these are both good problems for the library to have, but they are coinciding poorly; as you may have noticed, the teacher desks are in front of half the fiction section, with very little clearance between, and the students won't go behind the teachers to get books from that part of the library! They've got some other layout issues too, even though they did some moving in the fall and improved it from where it was before, so I'm going to try to propose something new.
Thursday, April 30, 2009
first post
Hi everybody! I thought I'd start myself a little blog to record stories of being a new librarian, because I know we will ALL want that archived for later. Plus, then when you want to know of my many exploits, I don't have to type the same story in 18 different emails. :) I reckon I'll start by posting my weekly updates from my student teaching semester, and then we'll see how it goes. Assuming I get a job, I will have some more stories to tell.
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