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.