Mastering–or mistressing–technology

In the very first episode of Mad Men, Joan is showing Peggy around Sterling Cooper on her first day of work. She whips off the cover of a shiny 1961 IBM Selectric and assures Peggy that she shouldn’t be intimidated by the technology; it was designed so that even a woman can use it.

There’s a formidable typewriter in my office, too. It was the pride and joy of the previous librarian, who didn’t embrace computers. It really is the top of the line of the technology, going about as far as they went before word processing came into being. It has all kinds self-corrections and electronic tabs and other ineffable wonders. Some of the students are scared of it. It intimidates me a little bit, too.

However, I needed some spine labels. Since nobody ever used the library program to create spine labels, there is no label stock, and right now there isn’t $50-odd in the budget to buy some. I did find a drawer full of these little half-sheet things, though.

So I typed spine labels. One of my student helpers was intrigued by the machine, and I got her to do several of them, which she did perfectly, although she threw in a few like this:

Joey

l/s

Jess

and even some that said:

Jess

wuz

here

which I don’t think Peggy Olsen would have done, even when she was daydreaming about Pete Campbell that first season.

But I did a few dozen, too. I decided to pretend to be one of the secretaries from Mad Men, plucky and determined to master that new technology. I would have to be Joan, I mean, everybody wants to be Joan, right? She’s so cool and competent and drop dead gorgeous. I must have been doing it convincingly, because before I got done, there were a couple of people, attracted by the rhythmic clacking, standing around watching me go.

It was a challenge. I don’t know how to set the tabs. Typewriting is not fluid like computer writing, where you can delete, undo, redo, backspace, cut, copy, move. With a typewriter you have to nail it or start over. Fortunately with spine labels, you only have to get a few letters and numbers right at a time. I’m not sure I’m its mistress enough to type an entire letter flawlessly. I’d have to go really slowly, for one thing. Words wouldn’t flow out like endless rain into a paper cup, and I’d forget what I was going to say before I got there. I can’t imagine how Jack Kerouac managed to bang out On the Road.

Still I have to admit that a typewriter is useful for putting type in certain places, like forms and labels. I liked the feeling of being the competent professional at the dashboard of this behemoth. I loved the connection with the women who built this library. Librarians are supposed to embrace technology, right? I’m working on it.

Weeds

I have inherited a high school library in which no weeding has been done in decades. Generations. A lot of what I dig up is a real hoot, and in order to pay tribute on its way to the dumpster I may as well share some of it.

Boys’ Own Arithmetic, c1924. Because everybody knows girls can’t do math.

How to Ride Your Hobby, c1935. Most of the materials for the projects in this book don’t exist anymore, and stamp collecting is pretty lame next to an xbox.

Flowers and Their Travels, c1936. This charmingly illustrated volume on seed dispersal dates back to when flowers apparently had feet, and free will. “Since the world began…plant families have sent their children out to seek their fortunes,” writes Frances Margaret Fox. Plant babies travel “from port to port until a gay adventurer like the dandelion has traveled round the globe.” Yes, this is what passed for nonfiction in the 1930s. You can almost see the fairies in the dewy morn.

Modern Medical Discoveries, c1948. The most up-to-date chapter is “Penicillin Comes Into Its Own.” The cover teasingly promotes information on “Space Medicine.” How much space medicine was there before the Mercury flights in the early 60s?

Genghis Khan and the Mongol Horde, 1954. This was in the biography section. Arrrrrr!

Another one that walked off before I could get a picture of it was called He-Manners, c1938. It was a book of etiquette and dating tips for boys, such as how to make a good impression by finding an out-of-season gardenia corsage. It included a chapter called “The Gay Young College Man.” I made the mistake of opening up to that page in the middle of a faculty meeting & it made me snort.

Is this a subtle form of censorship?

Today I changed the processing specs from my main library book vendor, who shall not be named. The previous librarian always ordered the barcodes attached, and being new, I didn’t want to mess with that. But look.

I mean really.

In a season of schools refusing to show the President’s back-to-school speech, vicious oppositional politicking, and hate radio, this seems a little like a political statement.

Surely the person who pasted on this barcode was a human being, maybe even an American. Sometimes this company sends a polite little note rubber-banded together with the unattached barcode, telling you that if they attached the barcode it would cover up something important.

But not on this book.

So I had to fix it. Wasn’t easy; it took a label scraper and a lot of Goo Gone.

After this I emailed the book jobber and told them to send the barcodes unattached from now on. My tiny contribution to world peace.

Gentle Reads

I was fortunate enough to read an ARC of Polly Horvath’s “My One Hundred Adventures” just before school started. It’s lovely and gentle, funny and quirky. like and unlike a dozen other books I cherished as a child.

In fact, since it was summer and time to indulge myself, I read the book through child eyes. It’s about a girl on the cusp of self-discovery, most of the mysteries around her the product of her own ingenuousness.

The adult in me found the adult characters most tantalizing. The mother in this book, seen through 12-year-old Jane’s eyes, comes across as an Earth Mother, or perhaps a sea goddess. She is an award-winning poet raising four children on the beach, feeding them on homegrown veggies and homemade jam and needing no one. Men strange to Jane appear to know her mother intimately, and one is even introduced as her father. The mom is both happy in her solitary romantic beachcomber life and perfectly willing to come to town and care for cranky, delusional old church ladies as the need arises. I mused about the possibilities of the story told from the mother’s point of view.

Jane’s adventures include dropping Bibles out of a hot-air balloon, going on a wild goose chase to find a transparent “poodle,” (portal?) into the future, and being guilted into babysitting a passel of trailer trash rugrats. There aren’t a hundred adventures,  but by the end of the summer much of Jane’s longing has been resolved and she is ready to face the inner adventure of forging a new family unit. The ending is satisfying without being predictable.

This is the kind of book old people like me tend to love, but will it find its presumed audience among middle schoolers? A recent thread on the LM_NET listserv asks whether actual children are reading Jeanne Birdsall’s lovely, old-fashioned Penderwicks books, or whether these are just books we wish they would read while they’re busy pretending to be 18-year-old hotties on myspace.

I can’t answer that. I teach in an inner-city high school where Dave Pelzer’s memoirs and street lit are the big faves. My students actually believe, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, that drugs and gangs are cool, they look good with their pants hanging below their buttocks, and it’s hard out there for a pimp.

Is there an audience for the gentle read? I hope so.

Sporty girls

  I took up tickets at a basketball game the other night. Despite sleet, there was a fair-sized crowd.

As the team entered the building, I made a colossal blunder. We at the gate were trying to figure out which were the visiting team, and which were just trying to sneak in for free. A bunch of girls came through. “Here are the cheerleaders,” I said, like an idiot. Their coach gave me a well-practiced drop-dead look and said with aspersion, “These are players.”

“Of course they are!” I babbled, realizing the damage had been done and there was nothing I could say to take back my ignorant remark.

Meanwhile it was Old School night at the gym. Former players from all years were  recognized. This is only my second year at this school, which has a long and proud history, and I haven’t quite clued in on all the former athletes who are now teaching at their alma mater.  Also I should say that I came from a town that had no organized women’s sports in the 1970s, and that I was into baseball and tennis back then anyway.

The teacher sitting next to me brought over a poster of the girls’ basketball team from 1968…both group photos and action shots from the yearbook…and there she was, her teenage self, looking confident, young, and quite lovely. The first thing I noticed was the hair, a perfectly lacquered bouffant worthy of Diana Ross and the Supremes.

“How did you get your hair to stay like that while you were playing?” I just had to ask. She told me the photo was staged. They got all dressed up and then dribbled a ball or faked a shot for the camera.

I had this sudden mental image of women dressed like stewardesses or girl-group singers or even drag queens, ultrafeminine, trying to run around a gym on high heels, squealing, more worried about breaking a nail than nailing a free throw. Before Title IX, how hard was it to be a girl and an athlete? How many different kinds of looking good were there? Was it a choice between beauty queen or tomboy?

Then I went and watched the girls’ game. Our team won and looked really good doing it. Their hair was braided or ponytailed and not a problem. Their hands were precise and strong, and they played hard and trusted each other to be there for no-look passes. Their brand of femininity is feline, sleek, but not fussy. Hair, nails and makeup are beside the point.

Of course the old-school ladies are to be commended for doing it all. Their hair probably did stay put as they managed to be pretty while playing the game. (I just found out they played half-court in those days, which probably helped keep up the ‘do). They went on to have these daughters that formed the WNBA and figured out how to play the game their way.

We look at our daughters and think about all we have had to learn about what it means to be a woman…then, now, and in years to come. We remember (barely) girdles, sleeping in giant plastic hair rollers, and eyebrow plucking, and how it was social death to be “butch,” and today we embrace sports bras, cornrows, and stretch jeans. And we cheer for these sporty girls who own their identities and own the game.

How to Read a Book (A Study in Four Parts): Nov. 21, 2007

 

How to Read a Book (A Study in Four Parts): Nov. 21, 2007

Originally uploaded by cmt2779
Recently I was asked to give a two-minute presentation to the staff on creating a print-rich environment. This I did happily. I might have gone a few seconds over, but considering I could have talked for three days about it, I guess I did okay.

The “print-rich environment” concept is usually tied to emergent literacy and early childhood classrooms. You go into preschool, Headstart, and even church nursery classrooms and see sentence-strip cards on everything: “shelf,” “books,” “plant,”"window,” etc. Days of the week, color words, weather words, and students’ names are all around. This is done to reinforce the concept that everything has a name, and that names can be written in print.

In preschool, it’s great. There’s lots of research to support the concept and lots of examples of how-to. In high school, however, the teachers take a bit of convincing, and it’s harder to find supporting research. Many of our teachers do not come from an elementary school background, and they will tell you they chose high school because they didn’t want to babysit or do cutesy Mickey-Mouse stuff.

I went to the reading gurus, Stephen Krashen and Jim Trelease, for guidance. I had heard Mr. Trelease speak recently, and was struck with one piece of a study in particular. In The Read-Aloud Handbook, Trelease points to a strong correlation between poverty and illiteracy, and between illiteracy and prison populations. When he spoke recently, he showed a Krashen study in California which counted the number of books owned by families in the communities of Beverly Hills, Watts, and Compton.

I’ve seen variations on this theme, but this is the most dramatic. The average Beverly Hills household has 199 books. In Compton, it’s 2.7 books. In Watts, it’s .4. Yes, four tenths of a book.

The point is, in order to become readers, one must have something to read. Students from backgrounds of poverty do not have much material upon which to practice reading. Even at the high school level, we can do a little something to remedy this.

I expected the indifference of callous sophisticates among all but the English teachers. Yet several of the teachers actually have been receptive. I’ve been happily pulling dozens of books for science and history classroom reading centers. I imagine students in the back of the class sniffing them the way they did in Dangerous Minds (1995), but eventually coming around.

In the meantime, the library is looking rich with this fall’s new books added, as many covers face out as possible, new signage around the place, student art displayed on the walls, and new book carts for impromptu displays. Hooray print!

School Library Learning 2.0: #13 WEEK 6 Learn about tagging and discover Del.icio.us a social bookmarking site

School Library Learning 2.0: #13 WEEK 6 Learn about tagging and discover Del.icio.us a social bookmarking site

I really want to finish the SLL 2.0 tutorial. I realized when I started it last summer that I would not be able to zip from one thing to another without taking some time to let each new thing percolate in my mind. I’m just old and slow.

I’ve been using del.icio.us for a while now, just for the convenience of keeping bookmarks between computers. I do like that. However, at this point I don’t really care how many other people have chosen the same tags or tagged the same site.

In January my district is upgrading to web-based library software, so I’m just biding my time until I can use the new program to organize stuff for the kids online. Book lists, research tools, and maybe del.icio.us can be part of that. If we can create a list for us, then the students can add to it as well. So that will be cool.

I probably need to work on some hierarchy for organizing the bookmarks, because chronology doesn’t work. I’d rather organize them in terms of their usefulness to me. Just because I found something marginally interesting on Wednesday doesn’t mean I want it above something I use more often.

I like the idea of tagging as being more democratic than, say, Dewey/Sears. But the cloud seems chaotic & not representative of my mind. Will work on this. Stretching mind and all.

moby who?

moby who?

Originally uploaded by ritagoodbook
I’m weeding. De-selecting. Discarding worn, outdated materials. And I’m not scared, even though I don’t yet have tenure at this school.

Or at least I wasn’t scared, until I came across THIS. If you, a high school student, were hesitant about American literature before, old scary staring guy isn’t going to help matters. This photo does not even convey the musty smell and the yellowed, grimy, graffiti-spoiled pages inside this 50-plus-year-old copy. It also doesn’t convey the complexity of Captain Ahab’s character in any meaningful way.

This is pretty much why I’m weeding. As I look in the stacks for various materials, I know there are many new, inviting, current, gorgeous books in there. But I never seem to be able to find them because I keep running into the 50-year-old musty, yellowed, torn, ridiculous books that crowd out the good stuff exactly as weeds do in a garden. One look at this, and kids head straight for the video games. Books…bah.

Of course I need Moby Dick in my library. I do have a few students who can appreciate it. Just not this particular copy.

lesions

lesions

Originally uploaded by kawaface

I’ve been trying to catch up on YA novels so I can make recommendations to my students, many of whom are boys. As we approach fall break, these books are starting to run together in my mind. I just had a student read, and like, Uglies by Scott Westerfeld, even though it ends with a bit of a cliffhanger and the other two books in the trilogy are on order for us. He was okay with waiting. He felt he knew where the plot was inevitably headed. He thought Tally would remember who she was after she had the Pretty surgery, and David and his mom would go back and kick butt. (Neither of us has read the next two books). “But what about the brain modification?” I asked. “What about the lesions?”

I next suggested M.T. Anderson’s Feed, which I had liked a few years ago, and he agreed to check it out. It had been a couple of years since I read it, and I did remember that it had some bad language, which I pointed out, and said I hoped his parents wouldn’t be upset. Slow senior brain, two minutes later, remembered more about Feed. I was headed to the cafeteria when I met this student in the hall again. “Matt!” I exclaimed. “there are lesions in this book, too!”

He grinned. “Why are there always lesions?”

In the world of science fiction being published for teens these days, there are lesions in our future, among other medical unpleasantness. In Feed and Uglies, lesions are a side effect of psychosurgery performed to keep people compliant and happy. In Feed, it’s a little internet computer right in your brain. House of the Scorpion has the brain mods but no lesions, only horrendous acne from a diet of plankton. Does this plot element address some common teenage fear of becoming an ordinary drone, of living a life of quiet desperation? Does it speak of a need to fight for one’s individuality and self-determination? Didn’t Catcher in the Rye cover this ground without the medical issues? Isn’t there some other plot device that could carry out this theme?

The 21st century teen dystopia may have started with The Giver. Society’s problems can only be solved if the general public is kept clueless. Then the real cost of this anesthetized utopia is discovered by one person, who tries to escape/tries to stop the madness/resigns himself to his fate.

Then there is the organ harvesting. I would have been horrified that the clone Matt in House of the Scorpion was created for the purpose of providing organs for the 140-year-old El Patron if I hadn’t already read Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go. Ah. I see. Life in the future will be extended by organ donation, voluntary or otherwise. The urban legend about the man who is kidnapped and wakes up in a hotel room with a kidney missing will come true.

I don’t even want to get into the chicklit. There’s always a new girl at school, who’s a bit of a misfit…a country bumpkin, a brainiac, a Luddite, a traumatized soul. Speak, Stargirl, Feed, and this latest Meg Cabot fluff I made myself read. There’s a gaggle of really mean girls who make her life miserable, and there’s some huge misunderstanding, but eventually goodness and light will prevail. In The Lovely Bones, the character is misunderstood, traumatized…and dead. And so it goes.

I actually liked all these books, for different reasons–well, except the Cabot. House of the Scorpion also brings in a bit of environmental consciousness we’re beginning to see in these books, the logical conclusions that might be drawn about the future if we continue to trash the present. I like that. I’m happy that ecology is sexy again after the greed and materialism of the 80s and 90s.

Cameron Diaz said that in Hollywood there are only 14 different scripts, and the 15th was Being John Malkovich. So, too, it would appear, is YA fiction.

My students and I are looking for that 15th script.

 

 

 

 

Thing #11, cont’d: The search for greatness

sharpied

Originally uploaded by hildoll
I joined facebook, almost causing my beautiful college-student daughter Tinkerbelle to have an existential meltdown when she found out. I only did it so I could see some pictures she had tried to send me in email. I checked back the next day, and two people I don’t particularly keep up with sent me messages. I promised Tinkerbelle I would reconsider facebook. As we say in this part of the world, it’s too much candy for a nickel. I still cherish my privacy. And like my dear nonagenarian friend Miss Martha says, why would I want to join a group to meet more people? I have enough trouble keeping up with the people I already know I like.
Anyway, it was better for us to share the pictures on flickr. Here’s one I like best…a statue in Caen, France.

Another award-winning site I’m familiar with is YouTube. I’d like to say a word about YouTube. It’s video anarchy, like the internet originally was. EVERYTHING is there, unsifted, unrated. Right now, that’s the problem. Before the site was blocked in my school district, kids would use the library computers to watch ultraviolent, oversexed garbage they were sending to each other. Thus the blocking. However, as a whole it’s a record of our culture, such as it is.

I just watched the Muhammad Ali documentary When We Were Kings, and I was trying to think of how I would use this in a classroom. The Will Smith commercial film is not strong enough to use as a teaching tool, in my opinion, but this documentary is the real deal. I wanted to show the film, then show Ali as he is today, physically ravaged but still a hero. I looked on YouTube, and sure enough, there are not one but several videos showing that great moment when he lit that torch at the 1996 Atlanta Olympic games.

There is also TeacherTube. I think we are going to have to post the higher-minded stuff there, or at some other refereed site for educational use. Services like United Streaming are okay for schools, but they don’t have everything, and they are expensive. Although the greatness of sites like YouTube lies in the fact that anyone can post video, that’s also their weakness.