Today I got to attend my very first conference, the Fall meeting of the OCM BOCES School Library System. It was a really great day, and gave my overall motivation a bit of a boost. It also gave me some perspective on where I stand in my education.

Going into the day, I wished that I had my e-portfolio prepared. If I had it ready, I would have felt more confident about networking. My goal for the day was to talk to librarians and to make contact with an elementary librarian who might take me on as an intern. To that end, I created a few business cards with my basic information, just to give people something to remember me by.

I attended four sessions: Doug Johnson's keynote, a presentation on creating an e-portfolio lead by the Syracuse City School District's Ed Tech team, Anthony Rotolo's social media session, and Project Enable.

I was excited to hear (and meet!) Doug Johnson, as I discovered his writing while doing my first rapid response for 511 last year, and have followed his blog ever since. He had a lot of great points, but here's what I took away:

• The speed of change is our real challenge

• We must distinguish the act of reading from the medium of books

• Technology is moving more and more to a single device that does everything; we have to be concerned about what this means for choice, competition and freedom of information

• Young people trust their peers more than packaged marketing materials; user reviews are a kind of peer review; applies to all sorts of information

• The political leanings of parents might affect how their kids approach information

• "Doomed libraries are all alike; every successful library is successful in its own way."

• Be visible outside of the library

• Advocate for users

• DIVERSIFY; make your physical space compelling enough to draw in users

• No whining!

His speech was Lankes-esque, if more low-key.  It was great to spend some time listening to a guy who clearly understands the challenge and opportunity of this time.  We could lose libraries if we stick to what we have known and refuse to change, but if we're brave and passionate and focus on the right things, we could instead reinvent how kids in schools are educated. 

The session on e-portfolios was not what I expected, but very helpful.  I was thinking it would be more nuts and bolts on how to actually put one together, but what we got was a list of essential components and tools for developing them.  I had vaguely thought that I should have a mission statement in my portfolio, but now I know that I need my professional philosophy in there, with measurable goals, evidence of learning, and reflection. 

This session made me think hard about this blog.  I've long felt that I do want a blog to be a part of my e-portfolio, but would not have given out this one because so many of the entries over the past year have been written to express frustration, disillusionment, and exhaustion.  I have far more success than this blog conveys.  However, having read Alyssa Vincent's honest account of burnout and having felt immensely comforted by it, I think I would like to maintain this blog, weaknesses and all.  I will just strive to make more of an effort to reflect when I'm feeling positive as well. 

I also realized, when we talked about goals, that the reason my personal frustrations have crept into my professional blog is that my personal and professional goals are deeply intertwined.  Being braver, working harder and being better informed all come into play personally and professionally, and all are affected by my overall energy level and attitude.  I think that having measurable professional goals will help me to keep career stresses from feeling like my whole life is struggling.

After this session, we had a break for lunch.  I had asked Blythe Bennett for suggestions of good elementary librarians to approach, and found myself sitting next to one of them.  When we had both finished eating, I steeled myself and struck up a conversation, which ended up lasting about 20 minutes.  She was extremely cool - forward thinking and passionate, and it sounds like she has a great program.  I am hopeful that I will be able to do my second practicum with her.

I don't have a lot to say about Rotolo's session - it was a lot of fun, and gave me some context for the way technology and social media are changing the world and should be changing education.  Project Enable was eye-opening.  The presenters had us work through several simulations to force us to understand what students with disabilities are working with.  It emphasized the need for patience, and especially for librarians to be thoroughly informed about the students they are working with.  It was a valuable session, particularly given that I know very little about students with disabilities and am now much more aware of the areas in which I need to educate myself.

So, time to move forward.  I would like to retool this blog a bit to make it more attractive, and develop my e-portfolio.  I'm also debating whether to separate my personal and professional twitter presence.  Not so much because I say anything inappropriate as because I wouldn't want to follow a colleague who tweeted as much non-library stuff as I do. 

On Balance

I had a really stupid revelation today.

I frequently feel like I've used up my stores of energy, and all I want is permission to just stop, because living the rest of my life just sounds exhausting.

I've lived my life in cycles of intense motivation and total hibernation. I'm happier in the motivated periods, but they only last until I get ill and depressed, and have nothing left in the tank to heal myself.

It finally occurred to me, today, that if I exist in these cycles, it is possible for my health and energy levels to replenish themselves, but that I drive myself so far into the ground that it takes weeks/months to recover.

So...if I just make a point of taking care of myself all along...will I recharge as I go?

This seems like a really obvious, simple concept, but I've always been an all or nothing person. If I'm not working my ass off, I feel like a failure.

I'm trying something new. At this point, I'm so tired and worn down that I'm not even excited about school or my future career anymore. This is not okay. So I have no choice but to change, and I think the answer is to actually prioritize my Self. Instead of sacrificing myself to do everything I think I should, and everything everyone else thinks I should (even though it doesn't feel like enough) I need to make sure I have time for the basics: sleeping, eating real food, switching my brain off for a book or a puzzle occasionally, and exercising. This requires significantly more free time than I've had, but my hope is that once my life is more in balance, the time I do spend working will be more efficient.

I hope that this will not lower my level of achievement. But even if it does, if it allows me to be sustainably happy and to enjoy my life's work (which is the point of putting myself through this in the first place, to have work that I will love) then I will learn to be okay with it.

Doubts 'n stuff

When I arrived at SU I was the most hardcore school librarian type you could find. Even among my school media classmates I was among the most committed to actually working in a school. I wasn't cynical about it, I just wanted to do a good job. I'm well into my fourth semester of grad school and am sort of wondering how I got here.

I still think school libraries are important and may be the only hope there is for modern education, but I'm infuriated at the number of ridiculous requirements intended to boost teacher performance that in reality result in kids getting cheated out of real learning - discovery, critical thought, and freedom to pursue interests.

I also don't think there's enough time or room in the curriculum to let kids struggle. Part of really learning something inside and out is wrestling with it, and that isn't happening any more. Teachers do things for students rather than forcing them to figure it out, because there's just not time. Students ask me for help in the library, for things that they could easily figure out if they actually looked at the shelf or explored a few drop down menus on the computer. That was how I learned best. I had a task to complete, so I figured it out. Even now- I'm writing an HTML website for my practicum...I don't know HTML. I don't know a damn thing. Iwas lucky enough to have a tech savvy friend give me a crash course over about 2 hours, and I've been flying solo. I don't think students now realize that A. The answers are out there if you think about how to look and B. That they are 100% competent to figure things out on their own.

I keep looking at how things are done and imagining a different model for education. It's scary enough that I can imagine why people homeschool, although I don't think that's a great option either. It seems to me that schools are a leftover from a time when work was far more routine and required less creativity. Schools are buildings crammed with kids, staffed with authority figures charged with keeping them disciplined enough that learning is not disrupted. It's not an atmosphere that encouraged individuality, rebellion, learning for its own sake, thinking outside the box etc., yet that's what the "real world" values. Of course that's not universal, but it's becoming more and more true.

I'm sure I'll continue to ruminate on the state and future of education, but in short, I'm trying to understand whether my frustrations are an obstacle or an opportunity. Will I be hopelessly frustrated and unhappy as a school librarian, or will I attack it and bring passion to it? I remind myself that when that time comes, it will have my full attention, not the crazy 5 way split my life has been in for years.

The other wild card is that my public library job has been increasingly complex, interesting and rewarding of late. I guess it's good to know that there is a happy place for me in one or the other of these worlds.

What does technology bring to the table?

One of my pet peeves as a kid was having to do lessons with poorly integrated technology.  It seemed to me to be akin to being forced to use a certain formula to solve a math problem, even when you could get to the answer in other ways.  At the time, I didn't really grasp that gaining technology proficiency was one of the goals - all I saw was technology getting in the way of tasks that I could easily complete on my own.

Technology has come a long way, but that doesn't mean that it isn't a waste of time if used incorrectly.  I now know the value of requiring students to acquire technology skills as a part of their work, but I'm still leery of frustrating them, and of being that librarian that sticks technology into situations where it doesn't quite fit.

I had to really look at what I was doing today.  As one of my major practicum projects, I'm developing a new, self guided library orientation.  The plan was for students to use the library's Ipods to scan QR codes which would launch webpages describing challenges at different stations throughout the library.  At each station, they would either submit an answer through an HTML form, take a photo to prove they completed their task, or scan a QR code that wouldn't be given to them until they finished the challenge.

I spent the first week of my practicum writing the questions, applying standards, and brainstorming how the stations would flow from one to the next.  I wrote to other librarians who've created similar programs, and wrote to a company that licenses an Ipod app for such scavenger hunts (no reply from them, btw).  Meanwhile, my host librarian attempted to track down the Ipods, which as it turned out, very few people were keeping tabs on.

The ipods were finally located.  The wireless router was finally configured.  Today was the day I actually sat down with a device, planning to begin writing HTML and testing pages on it.  Today was the day I learned: these are scaled down educational versions of the Ipod.  That is, where the camera should be, there is a piece of plastic.  No camera.  No QR reader.  Fudge.

Yeah.  Back to the drawing board.  My host librarian suggested (with a bit of well deserved bitterness; she is not happy with the functionality of these devices) that maybe instead of the Ipods, we could use the library's laptops, which do have webcams.  A little searching revealed that although it's a little unusual, some dude had indeed developed a QR reader for laptops.  Awesome.  Let's download it and test it!

Nope.  Turns out you need an administrative login to do that!  I typed up a description of exactly what we need to do, and my host librarian sent it off to the person she says is most likely to help.  So I was left considering what this tour would have to look like in order to work on either device.  On the Ipods, it would have to be entirely link based, with task completion assessed by a multiple choice question or form submission.  On the laptops, we could stick with our original ideas.  However, the excitement of the project dropped a notch as I pictured students lugging laptops around instead of the newer, sexier devices they would prefer to use.

I started wondering: what are we accomplishing that the old paper-based library orientation didn't?  I really had to think about it.  Thankfully, the more I think about it, the more I am realizing the potential benefits of using the laptops.  Instead of text prompts for all the challenges, I can use embedded video.  It will probably be easier to write the HTML or modify a template.  Students can actually complete the challenges that require them to use the OPAC and databases on their own computers.  Okay.  So if I do a good job, the technology is serving a purpose.

I will admit that today was a frustrating day.  The project is basically at a standstill, as anything I do for one device will be a wasted effort if we end up going with the other.  These are the nuances they don't teach you in library school...

What I've learned

It's funny to think about how quickly the past 4 years have gone by.  I've experienced a lot, but it doesn't really feel like it until I hit on something in a class or at work and realize that I understand it because of those experiences.  What brings this to mind is the fact that I'm sitting here reading a powerpoint about controlled vocabularies, and it talks about the fact that although they can be great for more effective and organized searching, they need supervision and can be slow to be updated.  My brain flashed back to my very first internship, where I spent a day with a technical services librarian, who showed me the thousands of printed pages of changes to LoC subject headings that she had to go through and update in the school's local catalog - manually.  Many of them were tweaks to make terms more specific, or more technically correct, and some occurred because terms acquired new social connotations (for example phasing out outdated means of referring to various ethnicities).

Having seen this process in action (albeit very slow action) and having talked about the ways in which Dewey is based around the ideas and values of the time in which it was created, I wonder if Dewey has ever undergone such revision?  Presumably subjects such as computing have been added in, but under what original topic?  I realize I'm mixing apples and oranges a bit, but I'm just realizing that I don't really know the answer, and I'm super curious to know more about how Dewey has evolved.

And isn't it just the way that I'm writing the rare blog post tonight, when I really should be doing my project?

:)

Tomorrow I start my internship at the high school where I graduated. I'm both excited and terrified. The school is only vaguely familiar, as it's been entirely renovated since I went there, and the majority of my teachers retired a year or two after I graduated. But it's still nice to be "keeping it in the family", as it was with my first fieldwork. Much as I hated school as a teen, I do feel an affinity for the district. I'm also excited to still be in the loop with the same group of librarians, because I've been admiring and interacting with their work for almost a year, and also because I think it's going to be valuable to see the library program as a whole across the district's schools.

I will admit to feeling wholly unprepared. I had intended to spend the summer teaching myself HTML, developing lesson plans, and researching the program we'll be using to create a library orientation for the Ipods. Instead I spent it frantically trying to keep up in my Information Policy class. That class really tipped the balance of the summer for me. I truly did accomplish a lot: I survived a July that included the work for the full-summer Information Policy class, an intensive one month youth services class with a one week, full time on campus residency, triathlon training, summer reading madness at work, and studying for a certification test. I came out of it with a 4.0 GPA, my first triathlon medal, and responsibility for several new projects at the library. Truly, I was very successful this summer, but unfortunately the intensity of that Information Policy class made it an absolutely miserable process, and left me exhausted. So regardless of how well my time was spent, I am disappointed in my level of preparedness going into my practicum.

I'm trying to be level-headed about it. I'm not great at knowing when to cut myself some slack. I know people who just secured practicum sites last week, so at least I've had the summer to mull my projects over. I think I'm just sad because I've fallen short of what I had hoped to accomplish, regardless of whether it was ever realistic.

In any case, I'm going in tomorrow with a list of objectives and an understanding of what information I need. I'm going to be cheerful, keep my eyes and ears open, and soak up as much as I can. I'm going to try to be the best I can be in the moment, and not let my feelings of failure hinder that.

Aside from these concerns, I'm happy with my fall semester. I like my Information Resources class a lot so far, and my work schedule has shifted somewhat. I have far fewer hours working on the circulation desk, and I'm making up some of those hours doing special projects, which I'm pretty excited to have been entrusted with. I'm on a project team that is re-designing our library's book sale fundraiser, which is a massive task. We're basically working from the ground up to streamline processing/retrieval, storage, volunteer assistance and sales. We have a beautiful new display that's generating excitement and grabbing patrons' attention. For me, it's a fantastic mix of grunt work (digging through donations and sorting things into different categories), supervisory experience (developing a workflow and delegating to volunteers), marketing, merchandising, and developing a database for tracking inventory. Aside from that, I'm also taking on a collection development project, evaluating my favorite collection - teen fiction.

I also have a vacation coming up. A real, actual, get out of town vacation - a trip to Richmond for a wedding. Given that I had 2 days off between the spring and summer semesters, and essentially 2 work weeks (of which I sort of crashed for 2 days) between the summer and fall semesters, I'm truly excited. I haven't taken a real vacation since Las Vegas, which was in 2009. Right now my brain is in hardcore to-do list efficiency mode, so I'm beyond looking forward to switching off for a week.

I hope everyone is having a good fall so far. I would like to blog more often, particularly throughout my practicum. Reflection is always a revealing process for me, and helps me cement what I've learned. Comments are always welcome!

I updated in June?  Really?  That recently?

Okay, well, then I guess I can feel slightly less guilty about this post.

Mike has recommended that I spend more time in reflection, primarily because my brain is wrapped in layers of "shoulds" and worries and bullshit, and half the time I don't even know my own thoughts.  By the time they become conscious they've already been filtered.  Good in the workplace, not so good in relationships and when talking to myself.

This blog isn't really the place to parse out why I've built up so many walls, but I do think that I need a space to continue thinking about this field outside of the context of classes.  I try to enjoy classes, but I end up resenting classes.  I think honest reflection might be a way to hang on to some of the passion that brought me into this career.

In a week or two.  I finished IST612, and even though it was a really good course, I didn't enjoy it much, which is a shame.  July was a packed, stressful month.  I do feel like I gained some skill in talking about literature and creating programs for a library, but I was just a ball of nerves the entire time.  Again, Mike asks me why, and I don't really know why.  That's just how it is?  He says that's not a good enough answer so...reflection.  Why do I get so attached to my tasks, and why do I feel like I'm going to die until they're finally done?  Why am I always convinced that I'm going to fail, when that has literally not ever happened?

Work is good at least.  I get stressed about that too, because I really do want to do a good job and make my coworkers happy.  Again, I have no realistic sense of whether I'm trying to do far too much or if I'm doing nothing at all.  The booksale is great because it looks pretty and I get a report at the end of every month - easy to assess.  The teen space terrifies me, because I don't feel qualified to be doing the work I'm doing on it.  I got to attend a webinar, which ended up being more useful than I initially thought.  I had to do a writeup of the content of the webinar and boil it down to key points, and although it seems ridiculous to come away from an hour and a half long webinar with 4 action items, they are things that will be useful to us. 

I have my internship lined up for the fall, and again, while I'm excited about it and I feel like it's going to be a fantastic experience, when I think about it I feel like I'm going to die.  I have to learn basic html over the next month, brainstorm lesson plans, and sketch out a library orientation scavenger hunt, among other things.  Again, excited, but terrified.

Anyway, I'm hoping to document my thoughts a little better as I go forward.  It's tough to find time (I'm also training for a triathlon, btw) but I think that in terms of getting organized, focusing my thoughts and getting realistic about how my schoolwork is not going to cause me to spontaneously drop dead, it's worth the time.