Things that make me love my job

I'm working on a few big ideas that I've been meaning to write about, but can't seem to make the time and brain space to write about them in the way I want to. It's been a particularly exhausting few weeks, and a time when it's been easy to focus only on what's not working and all the work still left undone. But on my walk this morning (after a glorious nine hours of sleep) I was thinking about some of the projects I've been working on in the last week or two, and realizing that while I am, at times, legitimately frustrated and discouraged, I do have a lot of things to be grateful for.

1) Signing with Texas

When I was at Computers in Libraries in DC, I heard Carolyn Foote speak about how teachers in her school were using iPads in their classes, and she mentioned how her school's sign language teacher was using Skype and FaceTime to connect to other schools. My ears immediately perked up; there aren't a lot of schools with ASL programs, but we have one--and a teacher who I thought would love the idea of connecting with another school. And I was right! Last Thursday the two classes Skyped, and I have no words for how awesome it was to watch these two groups of students connect.

Learning the sign for El Paso

2) My students

Friday was the Day of Silence. I was at breakfast Friday morning handing out buttons to student participants, and ribbons and stickers to supporters. Of the 100 buttons we got last year, I had over 50 left over, so I didn't get any new ones this year. But I ran out of buttons, which is the best "problem" I could possibly imagine. I think I had about 70 ribbons, and now I only have two left. My first year here, one student participated in the Day of Silence. To see so many students from diverse social groups take a visible stand for the type of school they want to have gives me "hope for the future" warm fuzzies.

3) Momentum

I've been given the go-ahead to start planning some edcamp-style PD for our school, which is something I've been wanting to do for a while.

4) My colleagues, both near and far

In a year that's been incredibly busy, exhausting, and at times frustrating, I am incredibly grateful for the support and friendship of my colleagues. I am thankful that Twitter and Facebook and this blog and conferences and so many other opportunities have allowed me to connect with colleagues from all over the country. Those connections are invaluable to me both professionally and personally, but I am most grateful for the colleagues at my school who are "in the trenches" with me on a daily basis.

I am given almost daily reminders of how incredible the people I work with are. Their innovation and creativity and passion inspires me. I am so lucky to work with so many amazing people, and so grateful that they seek me out to share what they're doing in their classrooms.

As I've been struggling with some challenges in the past few weeks, they have been there without fail encouraging me, acting as a sounding board, and letting me know that they believe in me and in what I'm trying to accomplish. If you are one of those people (and I hope you know who you are), thank you. So much.

5) Optimism

Last week, half in jest, I posted that having examined the available options,  I had decided on relentless optimism. Mostly this has consisted of yelling the word "relentless!" every time I or anyone around me starts succumbing to negativity. It is ridiculous. But, I swear to you, it works. Both as a reminder to stay optimistic, and as a way to bring levity and stop the slide into dwelling on what's going wrong. I'm not quite ready to write a self-help book based on this experiment, but I highly recommend it.

"Do you ever come in here?"

We've just finished up Family Weekend at my school, a marathon two days of parent-teacher conferences and other events. Since I'm not a traditional classroom teacher, I only have a handful of formal conferences. I spend most of my time chatting with parents and directing them towards the right teacher's classrooms.

Fairly often during the weekend (and this has been true of every Family Weekend I've been here for) a parent will wander into the library with their student, and ask some variation of, "Do you ever come in here?"

It is usually not an idle question.

And regardless of how often I actually see the student in the library, I never blow their cover. Because most often the question is not really about how often they come to the library--it's about how serious a student they are. Serious students go to the library. And if that's the perception the student wants their parents to have of them--if that's the perception the student wants to have of themselves--I am more than happy to go along.

Do I think it's true that serious students go to the library? Yes. And no. I see very serious students who rarely come to the physical library, and not-so-serious students who are in there all the time. But there is, undeniably, a larger cultural image around library use and being "smart."

My thinking about librarianship and library as place has been shifting in very significant ways over the past few months. But this weekend reminded me that ours is not the only image we need to consider as we talk about the changing role of librarianship.

My Students in the Rainforest!

Long time readers of this blog (hi Mom!) may assume that the title of this blog is a lead up to an analogy. But I'm being quite literal. For the past 20 years, my school has sent a group of students to the Costa Rican Rainforest in order to conduct scientific research. You can read more about the project on our website. It's an amazing project in many ways.

And I'm going to be a part of it! Wendy Welshans, the project leader, approached me right before the group left on this year's expedition and asked if I wanted to go to the rainforest. After clarifying that she meant next year (you never know. . .), I responded with an enthusiastic yes! I'll be going down with them in order to help them share about the research they're doing while they're there. We'll be blogging and sharing photos and videos, hopefully. As you can imagine, it's quite remote, and we're just beginning to figure out the logistics involved.

For this year, we're working on sharing the results and process of the group that's just returned. We've started a Forman Rainforest Project blog, and a Flickr group , and a YouTube channel (all in the beginning stages, with more to come). The blog includes a separate page for each different project, where we've posted the papers they wrote before heading off to the rainforest, and where we'll eventually share their final dissertations. We'll also be adding interviews with students about their experiences in the rainforest.

This is where I'd like to enlist your and your students' participation. Please, share the blog with teachers and students in your school, and encourage them to comment and ask questions. These students have a ton of great information to share, and their work deserves a wider audience. So share it! Share like crazy! And ask us questions!

Check out our Flickr slideshow and an awesome video of some leaf cutter ants below--if that doesn't pique your interest, I don't know what will.

Understanding introverts

I am way, way late on writing up anything from ALA Midwinter, but I told a few people I'd write up my reflections from Susan Cain's talk about introversion--and I'd also like to write them up in a more formal way for my own reflection purposes. Given the amount of time that's passed however, this is going to be more of a "what she said/what I thought" list rather than something cohesive.

Cain started by asking everyone in the audience to think about a moment in their childhood that illustrated their introversion or extroversion, then gather in groups of six to share those stories. Everyone shifted uncomfortably for a moment before she said she was kidding. You could feel the entire room relax.

I think it would be fair to assume that the majority of people in that room were self-identified introverts--and I think we've all been in situations where a speaker actually wanted us to actually do something like that. And then all tried to figure out how to escape. It was nice to have a speaker instead acknowledge how terrifying such requests can be.

The idealized extrovert:

What Susan Cain had to say:

• In this extroverted world of ours, we all act more extroverted than we really are
• We internalize the biases against introverts from a young age
• We view introversion as something between a flaw and a pathology

My thoughts:
I know I, as an introvert, internalized biases against introverts. I figured there was something wrong with me because I didn't like being around people all the time--and often find social situations overwhelming. Some of that was shyness, but a lot of it isn't. No one who knows me well who would describe me as shy, but I am definitely still introverted.

I think part of this is that extroverts are more likely to be public figures--and introverts who are in the public eye put on an extroverted face. Which always makes me think: we're being told extroversion is the ideal--but who are the ones telling us that? Extroverts. So maybe their viewpoint is a wee bit biased. I'm not saying there's anything wrong with being extroverted--just as there's nothing wrong with being introverted. I think these two personality types can exist without value judgments.

Different kinds of attention:
What Susan Cain had to say:

• Introverted children absorb information by observing rather than by participating, but they’re still involved.
• When given a math problem to solve, introverts performed better when there were low levels of background noise, extroverts performed better when background noise went up.

This made me think of the constant debate around multitasking, and students' constant insistence that "I work better with music!" I'm also curious about what this looks like for people who have ADD/ADHD or other executive functioning issues. Does more noise still help? Or hinder? I don't know if there's been any research on that, but I hope there will be.



I also know that I, as an introvert, tend to absorb more by observing than by participating; I think "l'esprit de l'escalier" is the curse of the introvert. In meetings or other groups I am often so busy trying to absorb and process what's happening that it's not until we've moved on (or the meeting is over) that I'm ready to respond. Given the option, I prefer asynchronous communication on group projects--or at least the ability to follow up in writing afterwards (writing helps me figure out my thinking on a topic). Unfortunately, following up with an e-mail about something you "should" have shared in a meeting is often viewed as weak or passive-aggressive (and this is not me projecting insecurities--I've had people tell me this). I've tried to get better in these situations about at least speaking up to say, "I need to think more about this; I'll follow up with my thoughts in an e-mail later."



Lessons for teachers and schools:
What Susan Cain had to say:

• Classrooms used to mostly involve individual work; focus has tilted almost too much to group work. We need to have room for both.
• We do a good job facilitating the needs of extroverts; we need to be better at facilitating the needs of introverts
• Small groups (managed well) can be good for both introverts and extroverts.
• People learn well in groups, but that’s not the full picture; in real life, these groups are different than the “ideal model” being studied. And really, we learn best 1-to-1
• Introverted students love to work independently and autonomously, and it drains their energy in order to have to work as an extrovert. 
• In our push away from “one size fits all” education, are we just trying to cram students into a different mold when the old size actually fit them well?
• We need balance. And we need room for both.
• Solitude is an important catalyst to creativity, and introverts are comfortable with solitude. 

My thoughts:

The more we value collaboration in school, what is the impact on our introverted students? I think it's vital that we create ways for both extroverts and introverts to play to their strengths--and to stretch a bit beyond their comfort zone. Collaboration is, I believe, important to learning, but there are different ways to collaborate. Asynchronous collaboration is possible; it doesn't all have to be active group work.

I also think this needs to impact the way we teach and manage our classrooms. Having "active" classrooms is great for extroverts, but overwhelming for introverts. It's important to create room for quiet, too. Just as introverts can benefit from developing the ability to be more active in groups, extroverts can benefit from developing the ability to sit and be still.

Cain also said something else that made me think about how I, personally, work in a school setting. She said that introverts prefer to devote social energies to people they know well. I think this is, likely, why I like working in a small school--working with fewer people, it's possible to develop meaningful working relationships with a higher percentage of the people you work with. And given that librarianship, at least in my mind, is about relationships (more on that in an upcoming post), being able to build those relationships is important. I'm sure I could build those relationships in a bigger school, but building them with a greater percentage of my colleagues feels more possible for me in a small school.

General takeaways:

• We are losing out on the skills and talents of introverts by compelling them to pretend to be extroverted.
  Introverts are social beings, too. We just express it differently. 
  Extroverts seize the day, introverts make sure there is another day to seize.
• Everyone shines, given the right lighting. For some it’s a Broadway spotlight, for others it is a lamplit desk.
• Collaboration between introverts and extroverts can be powerful. Each brings different strengths. 
• I’m not saying John Donne was wrong and man is an island after all. We need each other.
• We need a world where it is culturally permissible to go off and be quiet. At work and at school.
• We need to let our children know that it is okay to be introverted

That last one is the big takeaway for me. We need to stop teaching--directly and indirectly--that extroversion is the ideal, and introverts better learn to measure up to it. Or we're all going to miss out.

One School, Many Books

My students have all headed off for Spring Break--a welcome break for all involved! I'm relieved to be on break (goal for break: get my sleep back in functioning condition), but also excited about what will be happening when students come back from break.

We started a program I'm calling "One School, Many Books" this year. I'd long been interested in doing a One School One Book program, but had no idea what book I would choose for such a program. As a result of working in a very small school with students with very diverse reading interests, all of my top ten checkouts have checkout totals in the single digits. What book could I possibly choose? Especially since much of my population is comprised of VERY reluctant readers. If the book doesn't appeal to them, there's no way they're going to even give it a shot.

But then I started thinking about what could motivate students to read a book over Spring Break. And I realized, as with so many other things, it's about making connections between people. A student who might not be interested in reading a book (or only have a passing interest in reading a book) might be more interested if reading that book was tied to a book club being hosted by one of their favorite teachers.

We have an amazing faculty here, and several of them stepped up right away to host book clubs. Each of them have different interests, and connect with different kids, and so picked out very different books. Which I love. We've got groups reading The Hunger Games, The Art of Racing in the Rain, Lola and the Boy Next Door, Gentlemen and Trapped.

Once I announced the book clubs, students would come in looking for "the book that Ms. _______ is reading." Didn't matter the book, they wanted to spend time with the teacher. They knew the teacher, liked the teacher, assumed

We're building on relationships that already exist in order to foster a love of reading. And it's really cool to watch it happening.

As part of this, we're hosting a visit from Michael Northrop (author of Gentlemen and Trapped) in April. Handing out those books to kids has been particularly cool. "This is mine to keep? Do you think he'll sign it for me? Awesome!"

In honor of that visit--and in the interest of generating more interest in those books, I made a couple book trailers.





I love making book trailers, as it pushes me to think in ways I don't usually think. "Thinking in pictures" is generally a weakness for me, but many of my students connect really well with images, so it's a skill I work on a lot--and making book trailers is a really fun way to develop that skill set. I use flickrCCBlueMountains for images, and have recently added PhotoPin to my "go to" sites for CC images. I use Jamendo for music, and I don't know what I'd do without it.

Overall we have about 30 (out of 180) kids involved in the book clubs in some way. I'm looking forward to the book club discussions that will be happening after break!

I'm not "just" anything

I have been kind of completely and totally overwhelmed at the response to my most recent post; it's amazing to me that something I wrote could resonate with so many people. What's been even more gratifying is the conversations I've been able to have with people about the role and perceptions of school librarians. 

In that post I hinted at--but did not make entirely clear--one of the two words that bothers me most when we talk about images of libraries and librarians.

That word: make.

The point I didn't make clearly enough in that post is that I have no problem at all with the doing what we can to help educators, administrators, and legislators understand what we do and why it's important. I think we should demonstrate, I think we should teach, I think we should share, I think we should tell. I think we should be very deliberate and purposeful about taking our lights out from under the bushel. But those are not the words I most often hear--the word I hear more often than not is "make"--and as a reader and recovering English teacher, I know that verbs matter.

I know, of course, that other parts of speech matter, too. Which brings me to the other word I hear again and again in these discussions, and that bothers me even more.

Just.

As in "more than just a librarian." Or "more than just books." That we need to "make" people see that we're more than "just" librarians.

I am often described by colleagues as being "more than just a librarian" and while I know they're trying to be complimentary, it always makes me cringe. Is there something wrong with being "just" a librarian?

It just seems so. . . dismissive. As if being a librarian isn't much to be impressed by.

It seems that people are looking for a term that encompasses more than traditional, stereotypical definitions of what a librarian is. In school libraries in particular, they seem to want a word that encompasses both teacher and librarian--and the term they most often go for seems to be "media specialist." For the record, I hate the term media specialist. I think it makes me sound like a PR consultant. Not that there's anything wrong with being a PR consultant--it's just not what I am. 
 
We seem to be in a bit of a "redefinition phase" and I think we need to be really thoughtful about the roles we're playing as people make up their minds about the terms they use to describe us, and the definitions attached to those terms. The dictionary definitions of librarian are vague enough that it's really up to us. And beyond the dictionary, it really is up to us as librarians to define who we are and what we do; we won't be able to "make" anyone have a particular definition of librarianship, but our actions will determine the limits of that defintion.

I really hope that the end result of these growing pains is not a new name for what I do, but a new definition of the term librarian. I don't want the idea of librarianship to be limited by "just"; I want to expand the limits of traditional definitions.

I worry, too, about the use of the word "just" when we talk about being about "more than just books." Even though what I do extends far beyond paper books, I don't think that the work I do with connecting readers and books (no matter their format) is anything to be dismissed; it's important work, and it's work I love.
  
I've heard other school librarians use the term "more than just a librarian" too (usually in the context of "how do we make them see we're more that just librarians). I always find this a little dispiriting--if we won't own the title, how can expect anyone else to?


I don't want a new name for what I do. I love being a school librarian, and I think that title fits perfectly for what I do and who I am.  Rather than looking for a term that means more than "just" a librarian and encompasses all that we do, I would love to see us broaden the definition of librarian to include all that we know librarians do.

I am not "just" anything. I am a school librarian. No more, no less.

"You're not really a librarian"

The other day I got into an "argument" with a student about whether or not I was really a librarian. His position was that I wasn't a librarian--I was actually a teacher who happened to have an office in the library.

It was a weird discussion to be having. As the conversation continued, it became clear that he was, in no small part, trying to annoy me. But I don't think the original statement was meant just to taunt me. We ended up trying to pull in other students to make our respective cases--his that I wasn't a librarian, mine that I really was. The general consensus seemed to be that I was definitely a librarian. And probably also a teacher.

I was thinking about the discussion I had with him, and with other students, in light of one of the phrases I so often hear when it comes to changing the perception/image of school librarians:

"how do we make them see that librarians [fill in the blank]"


This was not a student I know particularly well, nor have I worked with him a lot. He's new to the school this year. There's nothing I've done to try and "make" him see anything. I've just been doing my job the same way I've been doing it for years, and he came to his own conclusions.

We will never "make" anyone understand anything about school librarianship. We will do our jobs, and people will come to conclusions. It is frustrating that our colleagues, our administrators, and our legislators don't always understand our jobs. But there is no position statement or pamphlet that will truly change that. They are carrying with them perceptions of school librarians formed when they were in school.

If we concentrate on our students, our future colleagues, administrators and legislators won't need to be "made" to see anything. They will carry with them the perceptions of school librarians they are forming right now. Which is why we need to hold ourselves--and each other--to a high standard. Unfortunately, there are school librarians out there who are not doing us any favors when it comes to the perceptions of school librarians students will carry into the future.

I have met librarians who say, "this tech stuff is interesting, but it has nothing to do with my job." Or, "collaborating with teachers just takes too much time." Or librarians who express, in dozens of little ways, their general disinterest in students who don't come naturally motivated when it comes to reading and research.

We don't know which students in our library today are going to be future teachers, administrators, or legislators--but I guarantee their rosters are going to include today's unmotivated or struggling students who don't feel welcome in their school library. And by the time they're adults, there's nothing we will be able to do to "make" them change their perception. The only time we have for that is right now, with the students in our schools.


I don't know what to do about school librarians who are unconcerned with the perceptions their students are forming about libraries. It's a bigger issue than I feel equipped to address. So in the meantime I go to my library, and I do my job. And if my students graduate thinking of a school librarian as "a teacher who has an office in the library," I like to think I've done a pretty good job.