Another reason it’s not a good idea to get attached barcodes

Because it doesn’t take much to set off a teenage boy.

Nonplussed

Football players were roaming the halls this afternoon. One guy really tried to act like he’d been in a library before. He said, “So what can you tell me about this book ‘Flying’?”

It didn’t ring any bells with me. I remembered that a few weeks ago his English teacher had made all her freshman classes come in and check out a book, whether they liked it or not.

“What’s it about? Can you tell me what happens?” He of course didn’t have it with him.

“I really can’t think of which book we’re talking about,” I said, stalling for time. “What kind of book do you think it’s going to be? What made you choose it?”

“I don’t know. That’s why I’m asking you.”

“Okay, well, do you know who wrote it?”

“Uh…I haven’t gotten that far.”

Blooming

Sorry, this entry will become preachy. Be warned.

Each fall I like to get an amaryllis bulb for the circulation desk. I keep it in the fridge until Christmas, then take it to school with me in January. Within a few weeks it produces a showstopping display of giant red trumpety flowers . It’s fun to watch, and it’s a bit of indoor nature during a dreary time of year.

This year I did all that. We watched and waited; we named her Amy. A tiny sliver of green peeked out of the bulb, but that was it. After about a month, there was still nothing more. People began to laugh at Amy, calling her a dud. I took her back home in disgrace, leaving her to sulk in a corner of my kitchen.

Then, some time in mid-April, I realized Amy had gotten a little bit bigger. The green sliver was maybe a half inch long. She was awake!

Over the next couple of weeks, she grew as much as an inch a day. I took her back to school, where people began to stop by just to see her. And in the first week of May, Amy bloomed.

Now, everybody had something nice to say about her. She was gorgeous. She was a superstar. The Christmas flower that bloomed in May.

But here’s the thing. Amaryllis bulbs are like us. We’re all different, and we’re unpredictable and ornery and full of untold promise. We don’t bloom on schedule either. Children are not ready to walk or teethe or say their first words at exactly the same time. They also don’t learn to read, or write cursive, or factor trinomials at the same pace either.

Yet that’s what NCLB says they have to do. Every child on the same page on the same day all over the country. Identical little widgets cranked out in the great factories of our public schools.

If we can’t make a flower bulb do it, how in the world are we supposed to make children do it?

Weeds pt.2

Chick book. Now why would anybody want to read Twilight when books like this are available? I just want to know what medications she’s on.

Guy book. I just wonder how this guy smells.

Early version of White Guilt fantasy.

Chick book. More fantasy, wrongly classified in the 600s.

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!