Miraculous Day

The Assistant Principal's nephew is helping around the school, and is going to clear out the disassembled pieces of old card catalog, old 50 year old light bulbs to some piece of obsolete equipment, old maps, and heaven knows what else. I didn't think any of this stuff would go away. Every parent work day has enough work assigned to it, before I ever weigh in on what we need here.

Half of my book order came in from the "Reading is the Way Up" grant. Now to see if we can get some of these kids reading together.

When the computers are moved out of here, we might be able to set up some sofas and make a comfortable sitting area for teen readers. It would be so nice to get this place looking a little more modern and inviting.

Busy Week of Tasks

Some weeks just seem to disappear with lots of little pieces of work filling up time. This last week has gone to finishing up book orders for money awarded from a grant, doing another application to submit later, classes coming into the library to do research projects on the computers, and the attempt to create a Google calendar that everyone wanting computer time can view for availability before contacting me. Besides this, a monthly library meeting, cataloging of books, and updating of records. I have signed up for a cataloging class, and am looking forward to learning some new material, and now have an operational computer that I can use.

A book fair is located in one of the schools at which I work, but I haven't been participated in that because I want to finish up the Lexile level project. I have a couple more days' work adding levels to spine labels, and have some books that could be covered, if I get to them. Once the labels come and I have the printer cable, I should be able to do the labels, provided the printer cartridge is operational.

Outside distractions include needing to look for a new rental. I am ready for a change, and just wish it were easier to find something affordable. I want this settled so I can get packed and ready to move and do other projects and do some writing.

Just Another Week

The year is coming to an end very soon, and all the teachers are trying to reserve the computers for class projects.

Monday was spent printing out more information on my research the previous week on textbooks that didn't come back. A bare minimum of $7,000 worth of books from last year's 6th and 7th graders did not come back, and we have no money to buy more.

Tuesday and Wednesday were taken up with STAR testing, which was a paper and pencil matter, until the students were through with it, and then some went on the computers to play games. Skills are incredibly low, and more gang graffiti signs were on the tables than writing on the books.

Today was spent with a class doing research on a tourist site they wanted to visit in a foreign country. Low skills were evident again, with someone not knowing how to begin with an encyclopedia. Some people checked out books on their country of choice, and some people were denied that privilege because of the failure to return textbooks from last year. I hate to do it, but something needs to happen.

Meanwhile, I had a visually-impaired student with some ability to read print asking for special library services that send books to the house. She might qualify but the teacher is reluctant to have her do anything because the parents will probably just put the stuff away and she probably wouldn't be able to use it. She's from a middle eastern country, and there are truly at least fourteen people living in the household. She will probably have to do home schooling after 8th grade because they don't want her going to high school with students from here, as it will make her an undesirable on the marriage market back home. She'll be married before she's 18 years old. She does want to read and learn, but also seems happy with her situation at home from what her teacher says.

The Count and the Amount

I'm wearing my invisible textbook hat, trying to "guestimate" how short we will be on particular textbook titles, which will be fun because we have no money anyway. All of this takes me back to my middle school days and after school rituals.

We didn't even have television at home until I was in middle school so I had to go to my grandparents, which is where I watched the Beatles on the Ed Sullivan show. I was so young for that event and didn't go into screaming fits or quite catch the significance of it. I think my parents wanted an environment without the television until I was in middle school. All of a sudden it seemed like the reception had picked up enough that out came the television and the antennae. No cable in those days, especially out in the country with your closest neighbors a mile away. If you didn't like those half dozen channels that you could pull in, tough. Go read a book or do something.
After school and on hot days in the summer, I'd come home, turn on Channel 2 Oakland, and watch "Dialing with Dollars," hosted by Pat McCormick who received these post cards from viewers with their phone numbers. He had this count and amount system, and he'd call homes and say with his very distinctive voice, "Pat McCormick, Dialing for Dollars, calling. Are you watching? What's the movie, and the count and the amount?" If you could tell him, you won a prize, some money and maybe some restaurant coupons. My mom was so uncool because she didn't send in a post card. I guess she thought we lived too far away for someone to call long distance.

Pat McCormick must have been the equivalent of a babysitter for latchkey kids because he also broke up the movie screening with little puppet intermissions, and he had two of the greatest puppets I ever saw; Humphrey and Charley. One was a bull dog, and the other was a horse. McCormick was always off screen when the puppets talked, and he did a great job with his voice. I would forget McCormick was behind them, he was so good.

Anyway, the count and the amount is the name of the game with textbooks. I'm almost afraid I will have to go dialing for dollars to meet the needs of starting the next school year.

The middle-schoolers today wouldn't take to Charley and Humphrey, but television, even if it was black and white, had such better shows then. I cancelled my cable last year- I just can't deal with 100 channels of nothing, half of which are scooping me on the tabloid issues of the day. Back to reading those books because I don't like what comes to me on 100 plus channels.

For Librarian Entertainment

After weeding books with ridiculous sounding titles, I found that a prize exists for books with the oddest titles. I was listening to National Public Radio when they ran a story about the Diagram Prize list of winners which British trade magazine for the publishing industry, The Bookseller publishes annually. If Wikipedia is at all credible, the list and the prize originated as entertainment during the 1978 Frankfurt Book Fair.

This list is a short seven titles, up one from six because I guess someone just couldn't decide between two terrible tomes. I am not going to take the time to give you the scoop on all of them, but the titles are "must reads" even if the books are not. I am going to share a couple of my favorites, and then you can go to the link to The Bookseller.

"The Mushroom in Christian Art" by John A. Rush and "A Taxonomy of Office Chairs" by Jonathan Olivares are titles that just make you want to cuddle up on the sofa and read.

Read on:

http://www.thebookseller.com/news/diagram-prize-shortlist-revealed.html

If you want to see the whole history of Diagram Prize winners, go to the Wikipedia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bookseller/Diagram_Prize_for_Oddest_Title_of_the_Year

Bambi-Eyes are Smiling- and Laughing for Now

This is our Rite of Almost-Spring when the school counselor brings the 8th graders to the library, has them calculate their GPA, and helps them do a reality-check on where they are with their grades and test scores, and where they need to be at the end of the year. All the little Bambi-Eyes are laughing now, but in 3 months or less, I'll be seeing a lot of these little faces in here crying because someone doesn't want to promote them to High School.

I had a teacher send two students down last week to see if they had an English Handbook that they needed for homework, and of course, they had sworn that they never received the book. My system shows they did, and it is amazing how their stories change 3 times within the same conversation, and the parental part of my brain is screaming neither of these students has done a lick of homework in months. They probably haven't cleaned their rooms since before Halloween, either.

I should run a side business as a bookie, taking bets on their GPAs because I could predict fairly accurately who is going to rise above that comfort zone of a 2.0 GPA and who is going to be finishing near the back of the pack from what I see and hear in the textbook room.

I'm betting that one-half of the 8th grade is going to be saying special prayers, polishing apples for teachers, and trying to do a lot of work in the next few weeks, about half of which will be illegible, inadequate, and off-topic. Oh, well. They've got to learn sometime.

Programs and ebooks in the Library

Recent trends indicate ebooks selling more copies and publishers fighting less against the trend. I think school libraries should go more in that direction also because I seem to be spending more time hosting events in in the library than checking out books. If we have ebooks and train everyone to access them, we might actually have readers. Not to mention, weeding might be an entirely different matter. Perhaps after 20 years, the title just melts into cyberspace.

The Men to Boys program held a meeting in the library during lunch and 5th period about bullying. They had a speaker, a Mr. Hernandez, who did an excellent presentation, and even addressed cyberbullying. Mr. Hernandez mentioned how one of his sons got caught up in a gang. After the program, I had the opportunity to speak with him, and his story is truly one of extraordinary effort and love to remove his son from the gang, including sending him away from the Bay Area to Samoa for an extended amount of time.

While the program was in progress, I continued going through Destiny and eliminated more ghost records for books that probably haven't been seen in 30 years. I also found a number of books for which fast records had been created without including the copyright date. Most of those books had copyrights as recent or later than 2000, and I took them out and recatalogued them by attaching them to an entry with a MARC record. That should help the average age of the collection.

To archive or not to archive: my take on the school library is that it is not an archival institution, and more than one or two books of 20 or more years of age within a 100 span range of the Dewey Decimal system is too many. We all form attachments, and yes, some of these books still have good information, but let them live on in the classroom libraries of the history teachers. Too many titles are unappetizing, and when you open up the book, the copy is dirty and disgusting. A whole bunch of other titles might inspire a new generation of writers to reexamine the subject matter. Some subjects and persons would be better put into books more general in scope or into collective biographies. Single book titles devoted to each battle of World War II are about as necessary as a single book titles devoted to each of Napoleon Bonaparte's engagements. History moves on, and unless students are specializing in history at a university, they don't need that much World War II detail. Less shelf space devoted to some of this stuff is better for a middle school.

In my case, most of what I am deleting are ghosts; mere records in the system, and I really don't know why someone barcoded all these books from the 1940s through the 1970s. I guess we all get attached to these books.

I think I should do a book featuring all the literary shrines of my life, and it will probably have an audience limited to myself, but perhaps it will help me let go of library books.