I'm with the books

Sorting out my fall goings-on, I noticed a trend:

• Kidlitosphere Crystal City VA October 17, to bask in the book blogging.
• AASL Charlotte NC November 5-8. I'm presenting on digital storytelling in Joyce Valenza's ALA/NECC/AASL new tools for school libraries trifecta and will be tweeting and blogging as well.
• NCTE/ALAN November 21-25. I'm presenting "Reinventing your school library to support adolescent literacy" in "Literacy as Community" Sunday morning, but I'm sticking around Philadelphia for ALAN afterwards.

So you'll glean there's no ASIST, however much I want to go to British Columbia, and probably no ALISE in January 2010. This is definitely a more bookish era for me.

Meanwhile, I'm feeling a little spoiled about taking this time off, consdering our school hasn't any money for professional development this year. It's not so much a funding issue, sine I'm not precluding any one else doing anything -- in my eight years there, I have taken a scant $150 from our pooled funds for 2005 AASL registration, and felt pangs of guilt over that ever since. It's more a sense that I can afford to contribute to my own professional knowledge -- not to mention the fact that I find it all terrific fun, practically recreational -- while not all my colleagues can do that. My feeling of being blessed at being released to go into the world and learn in turn means I never balk at presenting to my faculty or district. I just want them all to stretch the tiniest bit and become a little bit more responsible for their own professional growth.

Demented reading

Have you had the sensation? You realize it a few pages in, or chapters if it was particularly forgetable. "I have read this book before." It's especially frustrating when it's someone like Agatha Christie or Graham Greene who has so many books, so many editions existing of each, and multiple titles for many of them... an easy-to-make mistake, right?

I had the reverse sensation this weekend. I picked up Whitethorn Woods at the library resale shop. I knew I didn't own a copy, and figured a tidy mass market copy of Maeve Binchy would not be unread. I do like Maeve Binchy, and I love the idea that you can buy a new, readable book for $5, which inclined me to this edition. I would have sworn on a Bible I'd read all of hers, including this one. I could tell you the skeleton of plot: a bypass threatens a shrine. I am almost positive I checked it out of the Ann Arbor public library. But evidently I didn't get around to reading this one. I think I might have been buried in Brookner. So I had the sensation of reading, waiting to see if I recognized the next vignette, but I never did... and now I will never be altogether sure whether I have read anything, really, ever again.

Are you a books librarian or a computers librarian?

I can't be the only one feeling slightly torn. I went to library school focused on all the books held in institutions. It was only a little later that I realized how important the machines were, for retrieving bibliographic information which made the collection more useful and for accessing networked information, from citations to databases, beyond the walls.

I am no technophobe, I usually adopt early and could not manage a fraction of what I do without digital tools. I was using many of the 2.0 tools in my private life before it ever occurred to me there might be pedagogical applications for them. I'm not a content-area teacher. Not having classes of my own, playing with educational technology means I help teachers make their projects work with digital resources. There isn't a technology specialist, not here at this school, so teachers can't really envision how they can turn their projects into ones which use the read/write web. So while I have helped the teachers who have expressed an interest in this direction, setting up blogs, gcast accounts, showing students how to record digital audio and use Windows MovieMaker, I am burning out on all this. At my school, where labs are slow and hard to get into, technology hasn't become a seamless part of the content area classroom. Instead it's an add-on that gives the teacher a break while I grapple with technical issues in a space with 14 student machines, not enough for half of most classes.

Is it any wonder, four years after playing with the read/write web in the classroom, I have found myself returning to my first love, those bound bits of paper. In the past year I have done more thinking and writing about books and how they are being promoted and extended online, but the root is the book itself. A student who feels a deep engagement with a piece of literature can use digital tools in sophisticated ways to pay homage to the author, characters, and setting. Fan fiction, which existed in analog format a long time before the online archives, demonstrates the importance of content to the manufacture of information. If read/write assignments managed to relate to that fundamental underpinning, the curriculum, in the same way, I think we would see more exciting digital student work. But we struggle here with limited hardware, with teachers micro-managing assignments, and, for a faculty many of whom do not have computers or Internet access at home, with general fear of anything with which there might be even the slightest learning curve.

Meanwhile, I'll be in the stacks.

To the new faculty

It is so exciting to have new teachers in the halls and classrooms. I hope you will get a chance to meet your librarian and talk about resources to support your curriculum. I wanted to share a few guidelines to improve the quality of your teaching life in my school and I'm sure many others.

Plan ahead. When you submit lesson plans to your department chair and the assistant principal, call the library if you anticipate needing research time or audiovisual resources. It is difficult to accommodate requests at the last moment, for obvious reasons.

Communicate with your librarian about your curricular objectives. The librarian can help you tailor an integrated research task to reinforce the technology course of study or standards for the 21st century learner. The librarian can also save you time, by supplying, for example, a list of reptiles on which the library has ample resource. This also makes the research task more streamlined, so students are better able to focus on making sense of new content. And, if given some lead time, the librarian is likely to supply a bibliography of related materials, multimedia clips to embed in your instruction, and current magazine articles on the topic. That's what librarians do.

Respect the library resources. Unfortunately, a few faculty members in the past have seen the library as a place to obtain overhead projector bulbs or AA batteries, make emergency photocopies, or send a bored student or two. Consider the cumulative effect if this sort of request is multiplied by all the faculty members (79!) in the building.

About ethics

Two days ago, the Alabama state legislature made to changes to the state's ethics laws for teachers. This came after the Mobile newspaper ran an editorial claiming that, though the language was "subjective," the rank-and-file educators had nothing to worry about within the legislation, and tarred the association's challenge of the change with the damning taint of unionism.

The fact of the matter is that the new law is overly broad. It allows for dismissal of teacher for failure to supervise students sufficiently or using inappropriate language, for example. Who among us cannot think of an exemplary educator who could have been indicted and removed 0n those grounds? So the legislature, which has already succeeded in preventing any state employee, including teachers, from holding office, now wants the latitude to remove public school teachers at-will.

The two recent special elections in our area have both been won by large margins by far-right Republicans, one of whom argued with a school principal in front of a reporter in support of abolishing the state teacher's association. Both candidates claimed their cause was ethics reform, but what sort of ethics preclude schoolteachers in the state legislature and teacher's unions? I can think of no better model of citizen politicians. No, I think it is a backlash against Obama and perceived socialism. As a public school employee, I am scared.