Sunday Reading

I don't have much to say this week.  I'm too mesmerized and horrified by the constant flow of oil shown in the sidebar.  I'm also spending the weekend decompressing from the last week of school and enjoying my family.

This summer, I will read books.  I'm not getting an iPad or a Kindle or signing up for Facebook or Twitter.  I'm going to try to read more books.  I'll still get online.  I like frisson as much as anyone, but I'm going to be a librarian and I want to read books.  The quest for frisson by Roger Ebert.

Doug Noon sums up some of the feelings associated with the catastrophe in the Gulf in his post, Lost Offshore Oil Rig Blues.

Oh, and for Critical Thinking Sunday, here are some local events to consider: Two notable skeptics appearing in Atlanta in June.

Have a great week and an excellent summer.

How to Steal a Dog

How to Steal a Dog by Barbara O'Connor.

This one is a grabber.  The cover makes you look twice.  The title makes you pick it up.  You turn to the first page and get smacked with this first sentence:

"The day I decided to steal a dog was the same day my best friend, Luanne Godfrey, found out I lived in a car."

You can't help but keep on reading, right?  And at an easy-to-swallow 170 pages this hits the reluctant reader/animal lover/read aloud trifecta.

Basic plot is about a girl, her little brother and their mother who have recently suffered a devastating financial and emotional loss when their no-good father skedaddles and they have been kicked out of their apartment.  Mom is working two jobs and doing the best she can but when the girl, Georgina, sees an old lost dog poster with a reward she gets in her head to steal some rich person's dog and wait for a reward to be offered.

It's really about the choices we make and the stress that can be involved when it's hard to figure out what's right, what's wrong and what's the most important thing in dire situations like Georgina's family finds themselves in.

A credibility-straining wise old homeless man named Mookie shows up as a kind of deus ex machina Yoda/Mr. Miagi sage to help nudge things toward a satisfying conclusion but he's such a breath of fresh air that he's a welcoming presence.  He gets all the best lines: "Never drop your gun to hug a grizzly bear, I always say."  "I had me a dog when I was a boy.  Uglier than homemade soap, that dog was."  You'll like Mookie.

This is part of next year's Reader's Rally book competition in our county so now I gotta run off and make up some practice questions while it's still fresh in my mind.

More Martin Gardner Tributes

Daniel Loxton really sums it up well in this post.

And here's a tribute to Martin Gardner from Douglas Hofstadter, author of Godel, Escher, Bach and other remarkable books:

This is really a sad day. Not so much sad that Martin died, since we all knew it had to come pretty soon, but sad because his spirit was so important to so many of us, and because he had such a profound influence on so many of us. He is totally unreproducible -- he was sui generis -- and what's so strange is that so few people today are really aware of what a giant he was in so many fields -- to name some of them, the propagation of truly deep and beautiful mathematical ideas (not just "mathematical games", far from it!), the intense battling of pseudoscience and related ideas, the invention of superb magic tricks, the love for beautiful poetry, the fascination with profound philosophical ideas (Newcomb's paradox, free will, etc. etc.), the elusive border between nonsense and sense, the idea of intellectual hoaxes done in order to make serious points (for example, one time, at my instigation, he wrote a scathing review of his own book "The Whys of a Philosophical Scrivener" in "The New York Review of Books", and the idea was to talk about the ideas seriously even though he was attacking the ideas that he himself believed in), and on and on and on and on. Martin Gardner was so profoundly influential on so many top-notch thinkers in so many disciplines -- just a remarkable human being -- and at the same time he was so unbelievably modest and unassuming. Totally. So it is a very sad day to think that such a person is gone, and that so many of us owe him so much, and that so few people -- even extremely intelligent, well-informed people -- realize who he was or have even ever heard of him. Very strange. But I guess that when you are a total non-self-trumpeter like Martin, that's what you want and that's what you get. And so perhaps it's all for the best that he remains sort of hidden behind the scenes, known only to a special set of people. Anyway, thanks very much for forwarding to us the remarks by Randi -- very touching, very very good. Yours -- Doug

Happy Towel Day!

You either are a geek and get this, or you're not and you don't.  Enjoy the day either way!

Sh*t My Dad Says

Holy crap this is funny.  My poor mother has just had incredibly painful back surgery and is facing months of more painful and tedious recovery.  I went to the bookstore to pick up Barbara Ehrenreich's new book Bright Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America because, well, she's definitely not feeling bright-sided about this turn of events.  Frankly, she thinks it sucks.

So I thought I'd get her something funny as well and this is just the ticket.  I grew up with a family of potty-mouths (well, not quite like this guy, but we had our fun) and we had a rip-roaring time at the dinner table tearing into each other and laughing our heads off.  It was fun and we all still get along.  It's weird, I know.  My friends in high school would come over sometimes, find me gone, and still stay to hang out with my parents.  That's how awesome they are.

Yes, Justin Halpern's dad says some colorful and hilarious and politically incorrect things that will make you pee your pants laughing.  Or it will at least make my mom pee her pants laughing and that's all I care about really.  But that's not all the book is about.  It's full of the love this guy has for his family and people in general.  The chapter, "Not Everyone's Balls Should Be Busted" is a perfect case in point.  The dad, Sam, gives up coaching his son's Little League team because the kids and parents are  just too spoiled for him.  But he continues to not only coach his son, but another boy who is a bit of a misfit.  During a game, another father loudly berates this poor kid, destroying any confidence he may have had.

Sam confronts this other parent and has it out with him.  Not in some violent tirade, just someone demanding a little human decency.  "The kid's dad's a drunk.  His family's a goddam mess, and you know that.  And you're sitting out there screaming at him, trying to rattle him like this is the goddam Major League so your kid can win a Little League game?  You're a grown man, goddam it.  What the hell is wrong with you?"

My dad would have done the same thing, no question.  Those guys are awesome.  Shaming that other dad was by far the best way to handle it.

This is obviously not for everyone, but it'll crack up my mom up and make her feel a bit better and there's not much more I could hope for.

Here's more on the book.  (I hear it's even going to be a sit-com with The Shatner).

Martin Gardner, the Mathemagician

This is the first part of a 46-minute documentary on Martin Gardener (via Podblack). It links to the other 4 parts and is well worth your Sunday morning to watch them all.

It's strange because just the other day one of the teachers in the gifted program sent out an interesting little math puzzle through the school email. It immediately made me think of the work of Martin Gardener.  How could it not?  As John Tierney states in this appreciation written this past fall, Gardner "has probably introduced more people to the joys of math than anyone in history."

I also used his wonderful Annotated Alice back in college for a class I took on the Carroll books.  (Yes, I took a whole class just on Alice in Wonderland.)

The Martin Gardner Wikipedia entry.

Martin Gardner 10/21/14 - 5/22/10

Someone on Twitter said the world is a little less smart now, but I disagree.  He shared with us all of his work and inspired so many that it is a bit more smart because of him.

What's the Most Useful Book You've Ever Read?

That's this week's Booking Through Thursday.

At first I was tempted to be snarky (I know, what's new with that?) and go with the phone book.  No one really uses them anymore but I definitely got quite a bit of use out of them back in the day.  Before the internets, they had the best collection of information.  Everything from maps to seating charts for theaters to school district information and more.  You could use them to show feats of strength, get a higher seat for shorties, hold down papers needing glue to dry and provide hours of entertainment for crank calls.

But you didn't really read the phone book, now did you?

I'm not one for self help or business books so none of that works for me.  I'm not religious and while I've found some useful things to ponder in various ethical writings, I'm thinking the questioner is referring to more practical matters.

I'm a teacher first and foremost and while Stephen Krashen's The Power of Reading: Insights from the Research isn't the book that made me want to be a teacher (that would have been this depressing Jonathan Kozol book), it's the first professional reading I did that really hit me.  It's useful in that it covers a whole lot of research that I've subsequently investigated that backs up his simple but powerful thesis that reading begets reading.  Not skills, not sticky notes, not workbooks.  Reading.  Finding interesting books that kids want to read makes them want to read more and by reading more they read better and hence enjoy reading.  This book, along with things I learned about literature circles and the magic of reading aloud are what that led me to be the teacher I am today.  I've told this story many times, but here it is again: the power of reading.

It's a slim book packed with great anecdotes about what works in reading, backed up by much research.  If I could make sure all teachers and librarians and administrators read one book, it would be this one.  (For parents, I'd probably go with The Read-Aloud Handbook, which also refers to Krashen).

This  book made me a better teacher.  What's more useful than that?

Horseradish: Bitter Truths You Can't Avoid

I do not like those annoying, cloying Chicken Soup for the Soul books, but I've seen them and, unfortunately, even paged through a few.  Just one of the many trials a bookseller and librarian must face.  This book is the perfect antidote.

Lemony Snicket's new collection "contains a bouquet of alarming but inescapable truths" that are bittersweet wonderfulness (if, like me, you like that kind of thing).

The aphorisms are silly like Jack Handy's deepest thoughts and the writing is as wry and dark as anything by Dahl.  It's a perfect bitter brew for lovers of Mr. Snicket's unfortunate writings.

Although characterizing them as "silly" isn't entirely fair.  Most of them are dark in a light, fun, snarky way.  A few of them are just plain old solemn and sadly true.  Such as, "Grief, a type of sadness that most often occurs when you have lost someone you love, is a sneaky thing, because it can disappear for a long time, and then pop back up when you least expect it."  Or the even better, "The way sadness works is one of the strangest riddles in the world."

But there is plenty of comfort to be had as well, especially for the librarian in me.

"A good library will never be

too neat, or too dusty,

because somebody will

always be in it,

taking books off the shelves

and staying up late

reading them."

Or:

"Never trust anyone

who has not brought

a book with them."

Enjoy!

Critical Thinking Sunday: How to Teach

Notice I didn't name this post "How to teach math."  Dan Myer has a great blog that makes math fun.  This is how we should teach everything.  I've been trying to "be less helpful" to my own daughter's questions and it's amazing to see what she can figure out on her own with just some simple questions and prompts.  I gotta take these ideas and somehow leverage them into getting kids (and teachers) exited about reading...

Teacherninja Is Three

Three years, 840 posts, and a whole heckuva lot of wonderful comments from thoughtful readers like yourselves.

It's morphed from a focus on teacher productivity, to random rants, then to more of a settling down to a focus on two of my favorite things: reading and critical thinking.

I don't know what's in store as I embark on my new librarianship.  There will be book reviews, sure, and notes on the progress of my library as I attempt to take the reins.  And there is always more room for Stormtroopers with monkeys because that's just funny.

Thanks!

(image: http://www.flickr.com/photos/st3f4n/ / CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

Reading With Pictures

Wanna know what's awesome?  Comics are awesome!  Loading up on comics (or "graphic novels" if you must) is one of my plans for the school library. I even did a project in grad school on comics.  From a posting on LM_Net I just heard about a great non-profit project to help spread the awesomeness of comics.  Check out the fun video and more at Reading With Pictures.

Oh, and the host of the video?  Josh Elder, creator of the comic Mail Order Ninja.  My kinda guy!

Swindle

I love a heist!  This is like the full chapter book treatment of The Dunderheads.  This book, Swindle by Gordon Korman, takes a smart kid who is indignant at being cheated by a collector who swindles him out of an extremely valuable Babe Ruth baseball card.  He soon finds he'll need help stealing back "what's rightfully mine!"  He has to convince some classmates who all happen to have to have the perfect skill set to do the job.  There's a girl who dog whispers her way past the pictured Doberman.  There's a computer hacker.  There's an aspiring actor.  There's a climbing buff.  And so on.

Like his other books, it goes down smooth with a great pace and plenty of humor.  The ending ties up everything in a too neat, but very fun conclusion much like Sachar's Holes.


This will be part of next year's Reader's Rally, our district's reading quiz bowl.  I'll be running my school's team and what they do is read all the books on the list and compete in a game-show style competition in the spring.  I need to read all the books and make up practice questions.  I attended the event this past spring and the questions are pretty low-level concrete stuff, but it seems to be a fun experience for the kids and hey, it's an excuse to buy and read a great bunch of books for the library.  We've decided to buy all the books in sets of six.  It's expensive, but they're all great books and then can go into our book rooms for future guided reading groups.

If you can think of any questions off the top of your heads for any of the books I mention are for the Reader's Rally, have at it.  So far I've only read this and Gooney Bird Greene.  Well, I've actually read more, but not recently enough to be able to make up quiz practice questions, so I'l be re-reading those over the summer as well.

If your kids like Swindle, they might be happy to know there's a sequel called Zoobreak.

Info Ninjas, Fish Farts, Redwoods, and Wonder

A friend sent this image to me (I can't link to his site because I'm at school and the district filters consider everything from tumblr to be pornography.  Nice).  I need to make some fun  nametags like this when I start working the library!

I've been working on a post for the GLMA blog, and it should be...yes, here it is, just now up.  It's on juggling full-time teaching, a family and grad school for those contemplating what I've been doing for the last two years.  Whatever it takes to be a ninja, right?

Here's a great little essay In Honor of Children's Book Week.  I am excited to have a good reason to delve more deeply into children's lit, but I know I'll never be like Ms.Yingling or Jen Robinson.  I still like reading my Elmore Leonard, Dan Simmons, science fiction, and popular science books too much to only read children's books.

I have been getting to some great new children's non-fiction lately.  My family and I spent a lovely evening this week poring over Fiona Bayrock and Carolyn Conahan's delightful Bubble Homes and Fish Farts.  I knew some of these things, but there were many pages where I would drop my jaw, open my eyes wide and exclaim to my daughter, "I never knew that!"  This would paralyze her with giggles.

It's not only informative and clever, it's gorgeous:

We also just read Redwoods by Jason Chin.  A-maz-ing!  It's funny because I had gotten My Lovely Bride Richard Preston's The Wild Trees: A Story of Passion and Daring a while back, which I thought was a no-brainer for her.  She loves nature (spent a year doing environmental work for Americorps) and eats up nonfiction adventure books by the likes of Junger and Krakauer.  How could she resist "a story of passion and daring" about redwood trees?  Well, she liked it but didn't love it.  She found Preston's breathless descriptions of the "daring" parts a bit contrived.  She liked it enough to finish it and found much of interest, but it didn't blow her away.  Chin's book was inspired by Preston's and he nails it.  It's written like a typical nonfiction title about the trees but the illustrations have the boy imagining he's doing all the things Preston's character's did.  As he becomes engrossed in the story of the redwoods, he imagines himself shooting arrows attached to ropes and climbing into the amazing canopies above.  Along the way we learn all the interesting facts, but aren't numbed by too much detail.  The pictures provide the awe and the words provide the context: a perfect mix.

I've been getting into this more and more because of a book called A Place for Wonder which is available as a free pdf right now at Stenhouse (but they know that letting me read it that way just makes me want to buy it that much more).  It's geared towards primary grades but the concepts are universal in sparking ideas for teaching in a more inquiry-driven way.  Highly recommended.

Graduation: Words of Wisdom (like being a geek AND a nerd)

Yesterday was graduation but I couldn't afford the cost or the time for the drive.  It's ok, I walked for my high school diploma and my bachlor's degree in English and American Literature from New College of Florida and my Master's degree in Early Childhood Education from Georgia State University.  I think the University of Georgia will forgive me for missing out on my Specialist in Education in, well, I'm not sure what the degree is in.  They changed the name.  We call it School Library Media but the piece of paper will either say Educational Psychology & Instructional Technology or it might say Learning, Design & Technology.

I don't really care.  I have a job as a librarian where I can commence to follow Dr. Kakalios' advice to become both a geek and a nerd!  Below are links to his convocation and some of the best graduation commencement speeches I've seen.  I know I've probably liked to them all individually as I've come across them, but it's nice to have them all in one place.  Dr. K's is short--less than 8 minutes.  The rest are longer: 15-20 or so.

So bookmark this page and check them out when you get time or need the inspiration.

Thanks!

James Kakalios, "You must be simultaneously a geek and a nerd," U. of Minn. Convocation, 2009

Robert Krulwich, "Tell Me A Story," California Institute of Technology, 2008

J. K. Rowling, "The Fringe Benefits of Failure, and the Importance of Imagination," Harvard, 2008

Margaret Edson at Smith College, 2008

Steve Jobs at Stanford, 2005

(image cc flickr)

Details

Kathy Martin asks, "How many students and what grades will you be working with?  Fixed or flexible schedule?  Just media or technology too?  Details, please."

Ah, fellow librarians.  We love us some details.  I gave a few when I first mentioned the new job, but here they are again more in depth for those that care:

I currently work in Gwinnnett County, GA at an elementary school with about 1500 elementary students.  It's about a half hour drive for me.

The new elementary school is also in Gwinnett and it's current enrollment is around 800.  But they've just built a new school in the area and it's taking away a big chunk of the students and staff so next year's enrollment is projected to be less than 500.  Yes, less than 500.  Oh, and it's only about a fifteen minute drive for me.

The schedule is mixed.  It has added "Library" to the Specials in the past year rotation but that's just two classes a day with the rest open for sign-up.  Right now it's on a six day rotation of specials with three ten-week rotations of grade levels.  I don't know if it'll still be six days next year, but I think the ten-week thing will stay.  I know that right now they have the 4th and 5th grades in the last ten week rotation but want to change them to the middle ten to get them ready for spring testing season.

I'm imagining that even tough the enrollment is going down, the class sizes might go up.  Right now I have 24 student computer stations but I'll have to keep in mind that some of the upper grades might have more students than that.

All Gwinnett County schools have at least one librarian and two tech people.  I'll have a clerk, but next year she'll sadly be only half-time library and half-time office help.

Having two tech peolple is not to say I won't be engaging in technology, of course.  I'll be running the morning broadcast with our funky little studio as well as using the computers for lessons, updating the library web site, and various projectors, interactive white boards and what not.

There won't  be much money for new books and I can see that I'll be doing a lot of weeding and replacing of older titles my first year.

But the school is nice, the people are friendly and for some reason they're letting me run their library which is kinda like letting your kids run your candy store.

I think I'll be having me some fun.

Trust me, there will be plenty of more details later.

(image cc flickr)

My New Library!

Haven't been blogging much because I'm in the middle of shifting a lot of gears.  Being finished with grad school has been a strange experience.  I thrived on it and while I'm extremely pleased to be finished, I'm already missing it in some ways.

But I've enjoyed the last week with these two people I've been told are my family.  Nice to get to know them again!

I think the transition from my grad school self to my librarian self is best summed up by My Lovely Bride who has changed my nickname.  While in grad school I mentioned how I seemed to always have my hand up and have something to say in class, so she called me Hermione.

Now it's Marion, Madam Librarian.

Nice.  (I guess it's just as well she hasn't seen this clip!)

The video above is a brief glimpse at the library I'm inheriting.  I could go on at length about what I see here, but I won't (for now).  Feel free to add any comments or suggestions!

I do, however, want to go on at a bit of length at the wonderfulness of my predecessor.  Leanette Spencer graduated from the same program at UGA I am graduating from and has worked incredibly hard to make some vast improvements in access and teaching in this little library.  She's moving on to open up a beautiful new facility in the same district and I'm so happy to have her as a colleague and new friend.  She is doing amazing things to ensure a smooth transition and I know not everyone is as lucky as I am to have someone like this making such a great effort.  She's even offered to meet me over the summer in the library to help me in any way I may need!  Our principals gave us permission to spend the day together yesterday and it was, to this nerd, much like when Picard got to hang out with Kirk.  Two captains of the Enterprise geeking out over the opportunities and unique challenges afforded only to them.  It's been a pleasure getting to know her and will be an honor following her example.

Dealing with the Haters

Those hateful crazies at the Wesboro Baptist "Church" are going to be protesting around Atlanta the next couple of days.  Our own Maureen Downy suggests ignoring them: "We should step over them like vomit on the street."  I understand that response.  But it hasn't worked in the past.

There are other, maybe better ways.  Jason Connell used a visit at his college to raise money for charities.

And the students at Gunn High school in the Bay Area turned it into a moving tribute of love and humanity.

Good luck Atlanta.  Here's to love.

My Moment In Time

Harper reading Wonder Woman at 11:00am 2 May 2010

This is the photo I took for the NYT project. Anyone else participate?

Take a Photo at 11am EST

A Timely Global Mosaic, Created by All of Us