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.