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.)
Friday, May 1, 2009
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.
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