What my choice of footwear has to do with my being a good librarian. (Hint: Nothing)

Full, unsurprising, disclosure: I was never a cool kid.

Which may be why articles like this about the invasion of the cool librarians get my hackles up. Librarianship was supposed to be a place where I wouldn’t have to be “hip” in order to be taken seriously, a place where my substance mattered more than my style.

I have met “young, hip” librarians who are very, very good at being young and hip. What they’re not so great at is being librarians. Being young and hip doesn’t make you good at anything else besides being young and hip. So go be a trend-setter or work on Madison Avenue. But don’t act like, ipso facto, it makes you a better librarian.

I am playing post-conference catch-up with my GoogleReader, so you may have already had your fill of discussion of this article (whether or not that's true, you should check out The Librarian Kate’s excellent post on the subject), but since it still has me saying "and another thing!" while I make dinner, I figured I'd add my $0.02.

My students don’t like me because I have cool shoes, or tattoos, or like the same bands they do, ‘cause none of those things are true. I do keep up with general pop culture trends; even though I won’t be adding A Shore Thing to my collection, I am aware of Jersey Shore. I think it’s important for me (for anyone who works with teens) to be aware of what my students are interested in, and what’s important to them; it doesn’t mean I have to be interested in the same things, or find them as important.

So if I don’t have the latest style, or the same iPod playlist, why do my students like me?

• Because I can help them find the just right article for the paper they’re writing.
• Because I can find a book they’ll love to read--and then find another one that they’ll love just as much.
• Because I can help them figure how to open the paper they e-mailed to themselves (and that’s due in five minutes)--and show them how to avoid the same problem in the future.
• Because I can explain how to cite a source for the millionth time with the same level of patience as I did the first time.
• Because I will sit and guide them through the research process for as long as it takes.
• Because I find and create ways for them to find success as learners.

These, and many other things I do, make me objectively good at being a librarian, regardless of how subjectively “cool” I am.

I know that many of these articles about “hip” librarians are probably a well-intention attempt to push the librarian stereotype in the other direction. But stop it. Seriously. Just stop it.

I’ve written about this before: no matter what the stereotype, our patrons do not judge librarians collectively, they asses us as individuals. And while public perception does matter, it will not, ultimately, be changed by broad generalizations; they will be changed by each of us, one at a time, working with the people who come into our libraries.

But, despite the agita this gives me, I know, ultimately, that none of these articles matter. Just as we know the shushing librarian stereotype is nonsense, we know this is nonsense. And, more importantly, so do the people we work with. So who I am, and what I do, matter far more than any fluff piece.

Be my online friend, in real life

I met Abby Johnson at a reception Monday evening by saying, “Hi, I know you. My name’s Sara.” ‘Cause even though I’d never talked to her before, I did feel like I knew her; I read her blog, I follow her Emerging Leaders list on Twitter, and we (along with 80 or so other people) had spent an entire day in the same room on Friday for the official start of our ALA Emerging Leaders program.

The same feeling of knowing people I hadn’t met had been a common theme that day and throughout the rest of the weekend. And despite several such encounters, I never really mastered the protocol of introducing myself to someone I felt like I already knew.

Anyway, Abby and I were talking about how nice it was to be able to meet people in person before starting work on the virtual teams that are part of our Emerging Leaders project; as much as we (and by “we” I mean people who write about these things on the Internet) talk about how great it is to be able to work virtually and long-distance (and I’m not arguing that it’s not), I think those experiences are better and more productive when they’re built on real-world relationships. I know that being able to put names, faces, and conversations about Exhibit Hall strategy to the people I’m collaborating with virtually makes them far more real to me than if we’d simply exchanged Twitter names and e-mail addresses.

It is, I think most can agree, all too easy to forget that the people we connect with virtually are dynamic, real people unless we have a real-world connection to them. And I’m not just talking about being rude, or saying hurtful things, or assuming the worst of someone’s motives. It’s simply about being more able to give someone the benefit of the doubt because you have a real person’s image in your head. It’s a lot easier to empathize with someone when they’re more than just disembodied text on your screen.

Making virtual connections more real can work in the opposite direction as well. I’ve tried, unsuccessfully, several times to explain Twitter to my mom. I was able to explain how things worked, but a grasp of the “why” eluded her. Until I told her about #strandedatala, the hashtag a group of us whose flights had gotten cancelled used to organize ourselves while we were still in San Diego. Tuesday night I ended up having dinner with 18 or so people I’d never met—and never would have met if we hadn’t been able to use Twitter to organize ourselves. And, given that it was mostly East-coasters who were stranded, I made connections with several people from Connecticut. These real-world connections would not have been possible without an on-line connection—and those real world encounters will be made stronger as we continue to communicate on-line. And yes, it’s distinctly possible I could have made these connections strictly online, and made a professional relationship that way. But if I’d never had a real-world encounter with these people on-line, I think something would, inevitably, be missing from our on-line communications.

I’ve noticed, too, over the past several years, the value that communicating via Facebook or Twitter has added to long-standing offline friendships—even friendships I have with people that I see regularly, but even more so with people that I see less often. I know everyone complains about mundane status updates, but knowing about the details of day-to-day life is important to a friendship.

Think about where some of your most intense—if not long lasting—friendships happened. College, right? Living in a dorm? Where you couldn’t help but be immersed in the day-to-day mundanity of your friends’ lives? I don’t think that’s a coincidence. And that, too, is likely why not all college friendships—even the ones that seem most intense—stand the test of time. When you’re not immersed in the day-to-day, you lose that level of shared experience that contributes to a friendship. Online social networks make it possible to stay connected to the day-to-day of your friends’ lives.

I would also be remiss if I didn’t note that when I posted about multiple flight cancellations, and worrying about being stranded overnight or having to unearth my car when I got home, friends responded immediately with offers of a place to stay or a ride. To have friends reach out with offers of help, especially from so far away, especially friends I hadn’t been in touch with for a while, was, well. . . the word “awesome” comes to mind.

I know this blog is, ostensibly, student and learning focused, so I’m gonna try and bring it around to that. The chances are pretty good that our students will need to work virtually—both with people they do know in person, and people they don’t. This is the value in having students who are in the same school and in the same class work on projects that involve virtual communication; students can learn how to build on-line working relationships that are built on the foundation of an off-line relationship. And knowing how to do that is a crucial step in learning how to communicate productively with someone you don’t have an off-line relationship with.

Do teenagers always behave themselves when communicating in online environments (whether for school or not)? No. And we already know that. But they’re not going to magically figure it out either. Their world—our world—will involve virtual communication; isn’t it a good idea to teach them how to go about doing that? And where better to teach them in a classroom, where not only are they answerable to their peers, but there is a teacher to guide everyone through the process.

Travels with iPhone

I recently fell victim to the siren call of the smart phone. More specifically, a friend

recently upgraded to an iPhone 4 and gave me her old phone.

I recognized pretty quickly that having an iPhone was changing my behavior in small but

noticeable ways. My laptop (which is so old it's practically a desktop) gets turned on a

lot less frequently. My e-mail responses--those that are sent from my phone, anyway-

-are a lot more terse (though not always, as it will take more than a radical shift in

technology to curtail my verbosity).

And while having this phone means I'm checking Twitter and Facebook and my e-mail a

lot more frequently than I used to, in some ways I feel less immersed in (some kinds of)

information. I'm still not crazy about reading anything of significant length on the small

screen, so I find myself either not reading (or marking as to read later) links that I would

likely have clicked on if I was checking from a regular computer.

But traveling this week is when I really noticed the change the phone had made in how

I approach things. I am a very type A personality traveler. Before I go somewhere new

I have all my flight and hotel information printed out, a plan for getting between airport,

hotel, and other spots I'm going to (including, but not limited to, maps, addresses, public

transit info, and turn-by-turn walking directions), and a print out of my schedule if I'm

going to a conference.

This time, I have none of that.

What I have, instead, are apps. A conference schedule app, along with my personal

calendar for other events and details. A San Diego map app, as well as a conference

map saved to my home screen. A few other pages of info I'll need are saved there as

well. Everything else I'm planning (hoping) to access through my email.

This is very, very unlike me. And while I kind of like not having to carry and organize a

sheaf of papers, the fact that I don't have all those papers is kind of making me nervous.

I'm not ready to make any generalizations about my future behavior ('cause it's likely

one of the reasons I feel so unprepared for this trip is the non-packing, non-trip prep

work I had to do before I left), let alone anyone else's, based on this one experience.

And while I do have a lot of info for this trip on my phone, it is nowhere near well-

organized. But it is interesting to see yourself making such a significant change about

how you do something in such a short period of time.

A Whole New Research Project

Every year the sophomores do a major research paper in their history class. And every year it is a disaster.

Okay, okay, disaster is too strong a word. Let’s just say that my vision of how the process will go and the way the process actually goes have less in common than I would like them to.

But every year it is a disaster in a slightly different way, and every year we tweak it and change it and try to make it better. Having done this several times, we’ve been able to really hone in on the areas our students really struggle with:

• Most of the time students are learning the PROCESS of research at the same time they’re learning new CONTENT for their class. Trying to master (or even manage) both is overwhelming. Trying to synthesize everything into an essay? Oy.
• Students are often so focused (and stressed) about the end product, that they want to rush past the process and right into writing the paper (they do a lot of the things I mentioned in my post about why I want to teach a stand alone class).
• We usually require students to find and evaluate X number of sources; students then find X (or sometimes less than X) number of sources, enter them all in NoodleTools, read 1 source, and get all their information from that one source
• Thesis statements? *sigh* Well-integrated evidence from their research to support that thesis complete with appropriate citation? *sigh times a million*

I realize, of course, that none of these issues are unique to me or my situation, which is some comfort.

However, this year we have a whole new schedule which is going to allow us to do something entirely different, and I’m really, really excited about it.

We’re on a modular schedule this year. Our year is divided into 8 mods; students take classes A-D during mods 1, 3, 5, 7 and classes E-H during mods 2, 4, 6, 8. Classes are 75 minutes long, as well, which I love (in years past students took 7 classes--all of which met all year long--and classes were only 40 minutes long; with that schedule it was hard to both introduce a skill and have students get meaningful practice with it). Also, this year all sophomore are taking Thinking & Writing, a class which I think pairs very naturally with teaching the research process.

Today, I met with the chairs of both the Thinking & Writing and History departments, as well as the other teacher of sophomore Thinking & Writing, about collaborating across all three departments on the research project. We wanted to make sure students we’re able to grapple with the whole process of research from topic selection to finished project, while also hitting all the steps in between.

So. In the 5th/6th mod (depending on individual schedules) students will, in their Thinking & Writing class select a topic for their History research paper, develop research questions, find and evaluate sources and then create an annotated bibliography of all their sources (this bibliography will also include a sentence about how they found and selected each source). We’re doing this to emphasize to students that gathering information from multiple sources and viewpoints is a crucial part of the research process. By the end of the mod, having done this initial research, they will develop a working thesis for their paper.

Then, in the 7th/8th mod in their History class, students will, building upon the research and thesis from their Thinking & Writing class, refine their thesis, find additional sources as needed, outline, and write their paper. Students will be able to focus on taking the information from sources and integrating it into their paper in order to support their thesis, using information to build a well-supported argument. Students will also create a presentation about their research findings (we talked briefly about doing some work on avoiding death by PowerPoint).

Time devoted to process, and time to devoted to content, honoring all parts of the research paper writing experience. I think this will help, too, students better understand that the habits of mind involved in the research process are not isolated to one project or one class; they really exist and are applicable across disciplines.

We’d been playing with and talking about this idea from the start of the year, but things really crystallized today and we were EXCITED. I came to the meeting prepared to try and coerce these teachers in to doing things the way I wanted, but they brought even better ideas to the table. I’ve been working with the History chair on this project all four years I’ve been here and I feel like I am reaping the benefits of having really invested time in building that collaborative relationship; I honestly believe that I could not have made this project happen two years ago.

Also out of this discussion came the idea (also from the teacher) that we should develop a research paper rubric to be used across all classes in the History/Social Studies department, with increasing levels of complexity in grades 10-12, and with separate areas for the content area teachers to assess and for me to assess. This is something I’ve been wanting to move to for a while, and to have the idea come out of someone’s mouth besides my own feels like a major victory.

I’m either starting from scratch or totally revamping everything for this project, but I think it will provide a great way to try out some of my ideas for the class I’m teaching next year. It’s going to be a lot of work, but after years of trying to shape the research process to look more like this, it’s exciting to see it really take that shape.

Why We Read

There has recently been much discussion about Grant Wiggins’ proposal to ban fiction, which has, of course, got me thinking a lot about reading and fiction.

I had read (quickly) the original post by Grant Wiggins about banning fiction and had intended to return to it and read it more thoroughly but couldn’t find it again. Which, it turns out, is because Wiggins didn’t really mean it. (Note to aspiring satire writers: satire is a good way to make a point, but it’s not always as easy as The Onion makes it look)

His attempted point about needing to revisit the materials we use in the classroom is a good one, and one that Nicholas Provenzano makes far better than Wiggins did, and since I’d just be repeating everything he said, I’ll just tell you to go and read what he wrote.

But the other point--the one about students needing to be prepared for the mostly non-fiction reading they’ll be doing in the future--is the one that won’t stop rattling around my brain.

Reading and thinking about this issue I was reminded of a conversation I had with a colleague at the beginning of the year. She was returning Gayle Forman's amazing If I Stay, which she had checked out and read because it was on my summer reading list. I was excited to talk to someone new about what they'd thought of the book, so I asked her what she thought of the book. Her response (not completely verbatim):

"It was okay. The vocabulary wasn't very sophisticated."

I was floored. I just stared at her blankly for a moment and then said, "You and I read books for very different reasons."

'Cause seriously. I was so completely absorbed by If I Stay that it didn't even occur to me to pay attention to the vocabulary level. I was there for the story. I was so caught up in Mia’s decision that I completely failed to notice whether or not the words she was using would also appear on the SATs.

I’ve also had a teacher ask me if I could contact the editors of short story publications to ask them to use more standard grammar. I neglected to follow through on that request.

Reading fiction is about far more than learning new vocabulary and studying grammar in its natural habitat. One of the most critically important skills we develop by reading fiction is the ability to see and understand a world and viewpoint completely different from our own.

Reading fiction helps us develop our ability to empathize. Seriously, it's been studied (go read that article, right now). Being able to put yourself in another person's shoes is an invaluable skill for reading fiction, non-fiction, and, you know, interacting with the world at large.

This has been at the forefront of my mind as I've recently started reading Jason Ohler's new book, Digital Community, Digital Citizen. In the introduction he talks about helping students learn to balance the rights and responsibilities of interacting with people in a digital environment. Understanding your rights is relatively easy--you only have to understand your own perspective; but when you start talking about understanding responsibilities, you need to be able to understand the world from someone else’s perspective.

The concept of empathy is at the core of so much of what we, as librarians, are trying to teach. You want credit for the work that you do? Then give credit to others. Don't want to be bored to tears by a boring paper or presentation? The don't create a boring one yourself. Don't want to be harassed online? Don't want to be misled by false information? Want to be respected? You get the idea. It is hard to thoroughly grasp the underlying concepts that make these things more than just actions and turn them into attitudes unless you have developed an ability to empathize--particularly the ability to empathize with people completely unlike yourself.

You can't directly teach empathy. There's no way to say, "Look, this is how you empathize. Now empathize with problems 1-6 on page 43 for homework." What we can, as educators, do is to create an environment in which students are routinely exposed to views and lives that are completely foreign to them. That's a skill that they will need when reading non-fiction that discusses lives and experiences that are completely foreign to them.

Then there's this article, from a while ago, which I found both interesting and really, really obnoxious. First of all, could we please have an article about teens and reading that either a) mentions books other than Harry Potter and Twilight (I’m starting to get to that point with Hunger Games, too) or b) better yet, doesn't mention them at all. I know they are the "big titles", but teens read LOTS of other things, and any time I read an article about teens and reading that mentions only those two series I can't shank the feeling that the writer is less than well-informed about the real landscape of YA lit.

Things like this paragraph:

So they are in fact not about what is it to be an adolescent, but what it should be, since, perhaps unconsciously, adults want to instruct young people and guide them into adulthood. So images of adolescence in YA fiction are images of what adults want teenagers to believe. It’s a very powerful ideological tool.

make me so annoyed I cannot even articulately respond with anything beyond wondering if Maria Nikolajeva has read any YA lit, or if she was ever actually a teenager.

Though, in fairness, I will point out that she redeems herself significantly when asked what parents should do about teens reading dark literature. Specifically, "Nothing." :

So it is important to let young people be exposed to all kinds of literature and culture, dark and light, serious and entertaining; and it is always a good idea to talk to kids about what they read, watch or listen to.

Anyway, slightly ranty tangent aside, the major takeaway from that article (for me, anyway), is that what we read effects us. Which is both an excellent point and a major duh. Obviously what we read affects us--and it affects us differently at different ages, because we read it through the lens of different life experiences. I read The Great Gatsby in high school and HATED it. A lot. I re-read it at 23 because I was going to have to teach it and LOVED it. And understood why 16-year-old me thought it was awful; there was no way I could relate to that story in any meaningful way. Knowing that did not make it any easier to teach it to a room full of 16-year-olds (one of them, quite memorably, said the book made him want to forget how to read).

Anyway, yes. What we read affects us--good, bad, in between. It changes both how we see ourselves and how we see the world. This is true of both fiction and non-fiction (one of the reasons I read so many blogs by people in my field is that I love being able to learn from their experiences and see problems--and solutions--in a new light). I believe that I would not be as adept a reader of non-fiction without hours (and hours!) of fiction reading under my belt. Good fiction makes it easy to imagine yourself in someone else's place--a skill that is vital to effective reading of non-fiction, particularly if you want to learn anything from it.

And learning, really, is what it’s all about. And if we want to learn about people other than ourselves (and I don’t think anyone is arguing otherwise, even satirically), reading fiction is an indispensable part of the process.

Every Brain is Different

photo © 2009 Janine | more info (via: Wylio)One of the most common misconceptions I encounter about learning disabilities is that they all affect everyone the same way--every student with dyslexia is the same, every students with ADD is the same, every student with executive functioning issues is the same, every student with X is like Y. And oh if it were that way, education (and life) would be so much easier. But every student with dyslexia/ADD/whatever is very, very different. These are big umbrella diagnoses, and there's a lot that fits under them.

Think of it like being diagnosed with allergies--everyone who has allergies is allergic to different things, reacts in different ways, and is best treated by different methods. There's overlap, sure, but it's still a highly individualized diagnosis. So it is with learning disabilities--there's overlap, sure, but what works for Dyslexic Student A is by no means guaranteed to work for Dyslexic Student B.

Which is why I find the research reported on in the article Dyslexia: Brain scans predict reading skills so fascinating and so, so important. Not only does it give us a better understanding of what is going on in the brain, it could help us fine-tune how we work with individual students.

These are the two paragraphs that resonated with me the most:

In contrast, the battery of standardized, paper-and-pencil tests typically used by reading specialists did not aid in predicting which of the children with dyslexia would go on to improve their reading ability years later.

“Our findings add to a body of studies looking at a wide range of conditions that suggest brain imaging can help determine when a treatment is likely to be effective or which patients are most susceptible to risks,” says study leader Fumiko Hoeft, associate director of neuroimaging applications at Stanford University.

Paper and pencil tests (or any standardized test, really) will do a good job of telling us what a student doesn't know or can't do--but they fail miserably at telling us why. And the why could be any number of things, depending on the student--even a student who we think fits in a particular box because they have a particular diagnosis. I think we're a LONG ways away from having up-to-date brain scans on every student (and I'm not sure about how I would feel about that, though my initial reaction is ew), but research like this will, hopefully, lead to discussions about the fact that there ARE differences in why and how students struggle with information, even if they're struggling with the same information.

If I haven't already recommended Maryanne Wolf's absolutely amazing Proust and the Squid a million times, I am severely negligent. You will come away with a new-found amazement at the sheer complexity of process of reading, and learning to read (and it's the most accessibly written book about neuroscience you'll ever read). Of particular resonance for me was the final section, on the dyslexic brain and how it doesn't learn to read--but does learn to do many other things. Wolf raises an excellent (but currently unanswerable) question about whether the over-development in certain areas of the dyslexic brain is a cause of or effect of struggles with reading--and also asks us to think about the talents that many dyslexics have that those of us with "normal" brains couldn't conceive of. If you're interested in this topic at all, you should go read it, like, right now. I'll wait.

We owe it to all our students--diagnosed, undiagnosed, misdiagnosed, undiagnosable--to do our best to understand and believe that having dyslexia, or ADD, or dyscalculia does not put them in a particular box. The same goes for "smart" kids--the ones who typically do well in school. If we tell them (through words or actions) that we think they can/will only learn a particular way, imagine the crushing defeat when that way just doesn't work for them. For resilient kids, or the ones for whom school usually "works", chances are they'll find or ask for another way. But LD kids generally won't--because, sadly, they've gotten the message that they just can't "do" school so many times that one more failure doesn't seem noteworthy. So it's up to us to notice, and adapt, and change, and work with them to find the how and why that DOES work.

Even if we don't have an fMRI in every classroom.

"Whatever you are, be a good one"

I will potentially catch flack from my mother, several friends, and a number of colleagues for sharing a blog post with this title and agreeing with most of what is said, but I'm going to do it anyway (I live life on the edge, clearly):

My Job is Not What I Do, It Is Who I Am

During my first year as a librarian I remember a colleague asking me how things were going, and when would I be done and able to take some down time. And I remember saying, "There's no point at which I'm 'done.' There's just a point at the end of every day when I say 'enough for today' and I stop."

That is, I think, the nature of working in education (and in a lot of other fields, I know; it's just that most of my experience is in education). I get frustrated with colleagues who want to do something "like we did it last year." Even if a project went perfectly (ha!), I always want to try something new, make something better. And every year we're working with new students who bring different strengths and weaknesses to the table. No matter how good a lesson or unit is, it never feels "done" to me.

Which is not to say I never drag my feet through a day, or want to do something that's just "good enough" or get frustrated or feel like work has consumed my entire life to the exclusion of the possibility of social interaction. 'Cause I do. But 9 times out of 10 a positive interaction with a student (whether that's working with a kid on a major project or someone just stopping in to say hi and ask for a book recommendation) will bring me back to where I need to be.

This is, I think, part of how I'm wired. Even when I worked in, um, let's just call them "jobs not crucial to the future of our nation" I often spent too much time at work or thinking about work. I'm not very good at just leaving half-done things aside at 5:00 and not thinking about it till the next day. And I took any feedback on my work--good or bad--to heart. Often too much so. So I suppose it's a good thing I'm in education, as leaving half-done things aside at 5:00 is never really an option, and taking critiques of your work--good and bad--to heart is incredibly important.

Like the quote that is the title of this blog post (attributed to Abraham Lincoln, who I think it's fair to say took his own advice to heart), whatever it is I do, I think it's important to be--or try to be--good at it. But I've come to realize, too, that being good at what I do also means taking time away from work; it's important to create balance, and perspective. Spending all my time immersed in and consumed by my work creates a kind of myopia that is counter-productive when it comes to actually improving.

My job is who I am; there is no way I could feel as passionate about my work, or unbegrudgingly give over so much of my life to it if it didn't speak to something deep within me. But it's not ALL of who I am.