Library Collections: An Eye-Opener about American Society

Weeding old library collections reveals a lot about what books were being written, sold, and bought for consumption by children through the efforts of supposedly well-meaning adults. Looking at the frightening titles of the dribble of the 1980s provides a view of tweens and teens as up to no good and quite menacing. Titles like "Vandalism: A Crime of Immaturity" brings to mind that this is just a teen crime, and not having bothered to read the book, in all fairness, perhaps the author said or suggested that some immature minds over the age of 21 do exist. I just know that personally I have removed so many of these books based on the fact that the title alone seems to promote poor self-esteem.

The book industry, and everything else attached to it, has a lot of power that while perhaps only subconsciously aware of its effects, exerts a lot of influence which is not always positive. I would hate to be a child with a whole social science section full of horrendous teen possibilities. I don't find nuclear warfare, toxic waste, global warming or terrorism comforting, but these topics seem less focused on a particular generation. It's a sad commentary on our culture and its interaction with our own youth.

Having said this, some of what comes up so disturbingly cannot be blamed on the book industry. A title that I would not have cringed at a month ago caused me great distress due to a recent local crime, which has been exerting its effect upon me more than Goldilocks smoking on my sofa. "The Ma and Pa Murders and Other Perfect Crimes," is thankfully old, and even though Lizzie Borden went on to jump rope ditty fame and has fascinated many, this book doesn't need to be here at this particular point in time.

On a lighter note: The unlocked display case outside the library has a display featuring my newsletter with the recipes to go with the Students Across the Seven Seas series. Given the lack of a lock, a little mild vandalism, if we need to use that word, has been going on, and it is starting to resemble an ofrenda offering of a Day of the Dead alter with delicacies like half-eaten energy bars and an occasional expletive directed to, heaven-forbid, the librarian, who probably said not to eat in the library. Could it be that vandalism is another form of free-speech protected by the Bill of Rights? I think so, even if my occupation is there as an object of derision.

Personally, I'm thinking of going with the flow, and making a multi-cultural ofrenda and just pile some more favorite foods in there, and open it as a snack bar. I even thought of putting in some incense sticks, but then I remembered Goldilocks.

Preparing for the End of the Year

Sometimes I don't know if I'm coming or going. With the textbook part of the job, which I don't officially do, coming and going are about the same. I just sent an email to the principal to keep me in the loop even if I am not budgeted for a job next fall, because I will need to know the projected enrollment to help the school be ready for fall.

Not only do I have to count the returned books to know how many we have ( I can't rely on the computer to tell me how many are here, nor the number of students we have now), but with school closures going on, I'm not even sure the enrollment will be similar to this year's enrollment.

Money is scarce, and I don't know that I will be here. That means I am going to try to clean out as many of the probably 600 excess students in the database before I go, and discard as many 1980s library books as possible.

Like I said, I don't know if I'm going away for the summer or not coming back at all. Just another year with less than desirable funding.

Older Librarians Make Libraries Look Younger

I brought my laptop today thinking I would use the wireless connection and work on my website. I'm hoping it will connect faster than my work computer. Between issuing new books to a student and getting involved with weeding some books in the morning, I never got beyond the weeding. I did some sort of inventory last year, but don't know if I completed it all, and I spent time deleting things that were not only from the 1980's but from earlier. There weren't even copies on the shelves for a lot of these items. I only went through part of the 970 range, and the sad thing is that this weeding still leaves me with copyrights from the 1990's. I am down to very few books on states and colonies, and if I don't scrounge up some money from somewhere, this library will be down to nothing if I keep weeding.

There isn't even one a good section in the library. My 000-099 section has an average copyright date of 12 years, and that is as good as it gets. If I were a 22-year old library clerk starting out on this job, I would be younger than the collection on an average. By my being older, the library looks good when compared to me. It took me all morning to do this, which, of course, is one of the things library clerks do to waste time.

The textbook side of my life is just as complicated. The school secretary calls and asks me about some kid owing a book at another school that she can see on Aeries, and I tell her that I don't use Aeries and that my system shows me less and less, so I don't see anything owed. Some of these kids went to schools that are now closed, and the books were never checked in. I have little ability to know if kids at this school actually took home the book checked out to them because the books were in the classroom when the Williams people came through to check on students having books, and when the teachers gave them out, many of them didn't get the book that had been assigned to them.

I am a smoke and mirrors textbook clerk, since I really am a library clerk and not a textbook clerk. The whole system doesn't work from the top to the bottom beginning with the principals borrowing books from each other without getting them off of the original site's inventory. Each layer down has its own problems, and a lot of books don't come back or get paid for no matter how much I growl or how many bills I mail. I am not going to stress out over it. I rather imagine that the ACLU wants kids to have access to an education, and next layer up can try charging for those books if they think they can convince a parent to pay.

Now that lunch is over and my little friends are off with their teachers, I hope to hook up the laptop.

Reading Chuckle: the little news item on Yahoo about the guy who got a $11,000 bill after letting his kids stream videos while on vacation from Canada to the southwest of the U.S. I bet he never spends a $1,000 on books for them, which is what he settled the bill for with the wireless carrier. He could have bought each kid a ton of activity books for a $1,000! I wonder if he thinks reading is an option now!

Iditarod Dog Sled Race Classroom Projects

The annual Iditarod Dog Sled Race that commemorates the 1925 emergency dog sled run to bring serum to diphtheria-stricken villagers in Nome, and the race's website offers a lot of instructional ideas and tools for teachers who might like to follow the race and help their children learn according to standards.



One option is to write letters and send them with the mushers (drivers). Read the instructions carefully and observe the deadline for mailing on February 12 if you want a musher to carry your class letter. I haven't done this in a while, but it was easy as it came with the requirement of one-page only since this stuff is going by dog sled. You should also tell your students that the letter might not get returned due to sled spills, driver's not sending it back, or it might get back, but not until late. You can follow the progress of the race which begins March 3rd this year. The race takes between 10 to 17 days for the racers.

My musher for the year I did this was great, and an interesting man who was born in Switzerland, married an American, lives in Alaska raising sled dogs, and fights fire in the lower 48 states during the summer.

The website has a very nice list of books for all ages that can provide you with reading that ties in with the race and the habitat.

http://iditarodblogs.com/teachers/iditarod-books/


This is the link to the website.
http://www.iditarod.com/learn/

This is a link specifically to the instructions on sending material to be carried by dog sled. Read carefully.
http://iditarodblogs.com/teachers/writing-to-mushers-must-read/

This is a great way for students to learn about different lifestyles and different habitats.

Yahoo! for bringing you my shout out on this dog sled race.

A Fairly Normal Friday

Working 4 days a week at one school and 1 day a week at another school is a challenging schedule to say the least. The one day a week school doesn't have much of a chance for me to do more than lexile level the library, and I always feel that I have dropped in to do my job, but people and occurrences are making it difficult. My mind feels like I have just woken up from a dream and can't quite decide what is real and what is a dream.

Today is fairly calm, and I handed out free RIF books to half the students, and will hand out books next week to the other half. As easy as this sounds, it, too had its challenges. The boxes of books were moved into a storage space, and the boxes were hard to access. I pulled out books for the older children and concentrated on them today because I could get to them. The shipping boxes arrived at school in very poor shape, and so many have come apart that I am hoping I will be able to fit the books on the tables back into some box at the end of the day.

Meanwhile, I continue to lexile level the library, and we will order the spine label and protector supplies on Monday. Eventually, this library will come together. I still have quite a bit of work to do on the non-fiction and some odds and ends, but I think progress is being made. I will be off the system and cleaning up around here at 3:30 pm when the district shuts me out while it maintains the server. I'm looking forward to the weekend.

We Need a List of Computer Skills for Students

We need to come to some list of say up to 10 skills or types of programs our kids can have access to through the internet and computers and find ways to allow it without all the filtering by the district. Many of the kids are starting to use this stuff at home, and probably with varying skill levels. Many kids have lots of little clever things they have learned to do such as make pictures and then post them to the desktop but at the same time they are lacking a consistent set of realistic and reasonable skills. For instance, they don't understand the word processor program to a middle school level of competency. They are not familiar with flash drives and how to use them.

A paraprofessional brought a seventh-grader into the library during lunch today, and said that the boy was making a website at home with his uncle. The boy didn't seem to know where to go to get to the website which might not be hosted at this point. He wanted to show his content to us in notepad for some reason, and the district doesn't allow notepad to be utililzed. We are worried about kids writing programs and being hackers probably..

The paraprofessional helped him set up a blog on blogger( which the filters didn't him even though sometimes I get a message saying it isn't allowed in the district, and then I do another search and login to with sucess.) The only thing the kid was typing was a list of character names, maybe for Pokemon characters. There weren't really any sentences that I could detect. I am not sure if this kid is resource or if there are some special needs. I seriously doubt that much of his website is really being done by him rather than his uncle. The kids want to do this work, but we are not teaching them even the most basic of skills.

This is my suggested list.

They should have a flash drive and know how to save to it. The district doesn't allow saving anything to desktops. Some kids seem to know a way around that, I think.

Basic parts of the computer: the hard drive, the monitor, the keyboard, the printer. A lot of our students think turning off the monitor is turning off the computer.

Keyboarding: I know of only one teacher who has had students work with the free online games for keyboarding.

Open a free email account, send emails, save and delete mail and contacts.

Microsoft Office Word proficiency: Insert dates, select text, cut and paste, apply bold, italic, underline; spell check, bullets, lists, page alignments, do a simple table, save and send a document by email, print.

Microsoft Office Excel: Know about worksheets, columns, rows and cells, change the name of a worksheet, change the color tab of a sheet, make a list, sort alphabetically, be able to enter amounts of money, and generate a sum, and do simple pie and bar graphs.

Microsoft Publisher: Students should be able to do a simple newsletter, and design an event poster, be able to upload clip art into their documents.

PowerPoint or other slide show type program: They should be able to put together a short slide show, and include video clips if our filters allowed them to do it.

Blog: They should be able to start a blog, select a template, write some text, and upload some pictures and widgets if our filters allowed that.

Google docs: Our students need to be familiar with these documents and know how to share their work with their teachers or other students working on collaborative projects.

Google website or other free website program: The google website tools are not that easy, but they are not that hard either. Students could do a simple 4 to 5 page website on some topic.

Noodletools citation generation: Students should be able to use Noodletools to produce papers and generate a bibliography at least in the simplest format, share work with teachers.

Those are 12 skills I would like students to learn. I hear statements like we don't know what to teach them because we don't know what they're going to need. Technology changes, but if they learn these basics they will adapt to whatever comes along. As it is, they know a fair amount, but it isn't from a taught curriculum and its just bits and pieces. They don't need to be experts but they should have some knowledge, and I think why we don't do it is that it isn't tested by the State of California. I think by the end of eighth grade, they could know these skills, and know about cyber issues.

Gotta Go, Gotta Go, Goldilocks and To Build a Fire: In My House!

I just issued textbooks to a new student in my unofficial textbook capacity, and we have been getting more students coming in than going out. That is good news for the school. Of course, I might find later that a whole bunch of students left without coming through the library first, and change my assessment on that trend.

Remedial math happened in here this morning on the very few functioning computers, and AVID students will be here doing something later in the morning. Otherwise, I am cataloging and processing books with a somewhat distracted mind. The office is calling with calls that when I try to pick up the line, I get no one. Finally, the RIF contact got through to me, and I am going to fax off a UPS shipping bill to them because I'm being billed for shipping which we don't have to pay on RIF. Most of these calls are probably sales calls.

There's a book, or two, for any occasion, and the distracting dramas of my week have included numerous trips to the bathroom, which in our district is never in the library. My doctor has my water pipes under treatment, and I look forward to less locking up and trekking during the day. I guess that book is "Gotta Go, Gotta Go."

If there were not enough distractions to my days, neighbors and the Lake County Fire Protective Services informed me on Sunday that some young male, who probably answers to "Goldilocks," took up residence in my house. Goldilocks must have liked the feel of Mom's old sofa (which I put in the house only out of filial duty, because I hate(d) it). I suspect Goldilocks was reading "To Build a Fire" while he sat on that sofa, and was inspired to cause $25,000 in damage.

Maybe he didn't like the sofa either. I haven't seen the mess yet, but I will be taking off from work on the 15th of this month to talk to the insurance adjuster.

That house needed repairs which were on hold, but with some insurance money, repairs might speed up to this summer.

No one was hurt, and the neighbor's property is fine, and if they convict Goldilocks of anything, maybe he can do community service reading to senior citizens, tagging bears, or cutting weeds as part of fire abatement. I think he already did me a service, and I am not going to say a word to my mother about her sofa.