March 30, 2014 by plemmonsa

How I Became a Librarian: #whylib

I’ve lived in Georgia all of my life. I spent the first 18 years growing up in the mountains of Blue Ridge, GA. Our family didn’t have a lot of financial wealth, but what we did have was a wealth of love, story, and education. My family made sure that my life was enriched with conversation, storytelling, and weekend car rides. I was also fortunate to have a weekly trip to the library to get an armload of books. My mom took me to the library often, so much so, that they knew me by name when I walked in the door. We spent lots of time curled up with great books.

I’ve always loved reading, and I think my dad always thought I would grow up to be a teacher. That’s not where I started though. First I wanted to be a doctor. Then, I started college as a music major, which turned out to be a horrible experience with a college professor who ridiculed me more than made me feel like a musician who could grow into a band director. I thank him though, because without his torture, I might not have taken the path that I did. After freshman year, I switched my major to early childhood education due to my love of learning, love of reading, and love of helping others discover their own passions.

During my student teaching at Colham Ferry Elementary in Watkinsville, GA, Martha Brodrick offered me a teaching position, which I accepted. I’m so thankful for her early support of my teaching career. For seven years, I taught 3rd grade. During this time, reading and writing were the subjects that I was most passionate about and my students were involved in many reading and writing projects that put their work into the world. For example, one year students wrote poetry about historic sites in the community and published a books that was put in waiting rooms around the county. Another year, students sent a bear traveling around the world through the mail and wrote his story using their imagination and the pictures and objects he collected along the way. During this time, I got my Masters in Children’s Literature and Language Arts.

You will probably notice that so far I haven’t mentioned a thing about technology. That’s because my classroom had a chalkboard for all 7 years that I was there. I had 3 clunky, unreliable computers that we rarely touched and the computer lab was in another building and hard to schedule. I certainly was not a technology leader in the classroom, but I loved being a classroom teacher and had many successes. It built my foundation in education and has made me such a better librarian today.

But how did I make my way to being a librarian? The media specialist (librarian) at Colham Ferry was wonderful. Kathy Graham was a master of weaving together multiple ways for students to experience a topic. It seemed that no matter what topic you gave her, she would bring boxes of stuff from her house, gather pictures and websites into slides, and create centers that allowed students to explore a topic in multiple ways. I had always loved libraries, enjoyed being in them, and started thinking that the library might be a place where I wanted to be in my career. I began exploring my options and talked to several people who went to the University of Georgia program.

I applied to the UGA specialist program. The letter came in the mail, and I was……..DENIED! It seems that a subset of my GRE scores were not quite high enough even though my portfolio of work and accomplishments showed much more than a number on a test. Sound familiar? But alas, the test score ruled and I wasn’t in the program. I was devastated and thought I would never be in the library. After a few days of pity party, I got mad and decided to do something about it. After exploring with UGA, I discovered that I could still get in the program in the same semester if I took the GRE again. I registered for the test and then spent hours studying vocabulary, taking practice tests, and learning strategies. I’m a terrible test taker, but I thought that surely I could boost my score by a few points. I took the test, got the points, and applied to the program again. This time the letter came in the mail, and…..I was in!

The UGA program and professor, Mary Ann Fitzgerald, were transformational for me. For the first time, I really started to understand what it meant to take control of my own learning, to develop my professional learning network, and to use multiple formats of information to explore and create. In those 2 years, I learned more about using technology than I had learned in all of my other college coursework.

Halfway through the program, a position opened up at Barrow Elementary. I knew that the media specialist was incredible and that many people would be competing for the job. For that reason, I decided not to apply. I’m good at second guessing myself and talking myself out of things. I figured that I was only halfway done with my program and that there was no way that they would hire someone who didn’t even have a library degree yet. One day driving to school, it was like someone smacked me in the head, and I asked myself, are you crazy? Why not give it a try? This might be an exact fit, and at least it’s good interview practice.

So…I applied, got the interview, interviewed, got the second interview, and that’s how I became the librarian at Barrow. I finished my EdS during that first year and was able to use my own library in my research and exploration. I can’t thank Mary Ann Fitzgerald enough for pushing my thinking, supporting my decisions, and opening my eyes to what it means to be a life long learner.

Once I became a librarian, other librarians and educators continued pushing me to stretch and grow as a librarian. Buffy Hamilton is one of those librarians. I can’t even begin to count the times that I saw something that Buffy was doing and it pushed me to rethink my own understanding of library. Buffy also shared my work in numerous ways from conversations to conference presentations and her support connected me with so many other libraries and librarians.

The librarian community is inspiring. There are so many educators within our profession doing amazing work. Each year, I add layers onto my own role as librarian and new layers onto our library program because of these great people. Each year I understand more about using technology to consume and create and how digital literacy weaves together with so many other kinds of literacy. There’s no way I could name them all, but just to start, I give so much thanks to librarians like Shannon Miller, Jennifer LaGarde, Matthew Winner, Sherry Gick, Shawna Ford, Jennifer Reed, Cathy Potter, Jenny Lussier, Okle Miller, Edie Crook, Shawn Hinger, Shannon Thompson, Tanya Hudson….the list goes on and on. Each day, I connect with someone new and my understanding of library grows.

I invite you to tell your journey to becoming a librarian. Share it with #whylib If you decide to do a blog post, please add it to our Padlet. http://padlet.com/wall/whylib

March 23, 2014 by plemmonsa

2014 Student Book Budgets: Real-World Math Lessons from Capstone Press

Each year, I dedicate a portion of library funding for students to control. Since the library is for all of our school community, I feel strongly that students should have a voice in what goes into the collection. Here’s what has happened so far:

Students developed a Google form survey and surveyed most of the school on their reading interests
Students analyzed the results and developed a list of goals to focus on which included sports, graphic novels, humor, scary, world records, and action/adventure.
Students met with Jim Boon from Capstone Press and Gret Hechenbleikner from Gumdrop books to look at book samples and catalogs.

Since the visit with the vendors, the student book budget group has been coming into the library on Mondays and Wednesdays during their recess to continue looking at catalogs. Much of what they wanted was in Capstone’s catalog, so their first step was to finalize what they wanted to order from Gumdrop. They decided on a Ripley’s Believe It or Not series, a how to draw graphic novel series, a graphic mythical heroes series, and a history’s most haunted series.

When that was done, I hooked up the scanner to my computer and gave all of the students a Capstone catalog. Capstone has a great feature where there is a barcode next to each set of books in the catalog. You can scan the set straight into your cart, or you can scan the set and select the books that you want. As students found books that matched our goals, they scanned the barcode and told me which books to add. At that point, we didn’t worry about cost. We wanted to add all of the books that we were interested in and then start narrowing. This adding process was so smooth thanks to this scanning feature. In the past, students have circled items in catalogs, written on pieces of paper, etc. and it took a lot of time to compile everything. I loved that we were all adding to the same list as we worked.

Right now, Capstone is offering an incentive like they often do. If you spend at least $1750, you get 30% back in Capstone Rewards. If you spend less that $1750, you only get 10%. This was a great math discussion. Our original budget was $1500 for all of the book budgets. However, if we spend just $250 more with Capstone, then we get $525 in free books. I’ve really pushed the group to think about budget, but this was a great real-world example where you sometimes have to spend beyond your budget if it helps you in the long run. The students unanimously agreed that we needed to spend the $1750 since we already had well beyond that amount in our wish list cart. I pulled out all of the numbers that I had to think about in order to make this happen. We looked at the remaining dollar amount in our district budget which was about $375. Then, we looked at the remaining balance in our local account, which holds profits from our book fairs along with any donations we receive. I told them about remaining expenses that I knew about for the year such as battle of the books. We agreed that there was enough money to purchase our list from Gum Drop and extend our Capstone Budget to $1750.

The final task, which we are still working on, is to narrow our cart. We started with a cart totaling almost $3000. We knew that we needed to reduce the cart to about $2200 in order to spend $1750 in cash and use $525 in rewards dollars. By the time we stopped talking about the math, students were all commenting on how hard this is. One of them said, “You mean this is just a small part of what you do?” I love that they keep bringing this up. I love buying new materials, but I’ve been very honest with them about what a small fraction of my time this actually is. As always, it was interesting to hear them wrestle with decisions about which books to cut from the list:

We have 3 books about drawing horses. Let’s pick the one with the most horses that people are probably interested in.
Three of our war books cost $27. Let’s pick something that doesn’t cost that much.
That book looks like it would only be for 5th graders. It might scare other kids. Let’s take it off the list.
We can’t buy every Jake Maddox book this time. Let’s choose a few of them.

Every struggle they were having is the same struggles that I go through alone. I loved being able to share this frustration with them, and they had a much better understanding of how I use math and decision making in my job. My only wish is that more students could walk through this process with me. Each year, I find new ways to involve different groups of students, but I would love to have larger groups of students involved in the math aspect.

Once we get our carts narrowed down, we will place our order and wait for the books to arrive. Since I have extra Capstone Rewards dollars, I’ll also be able to add in some historical perspective books that I’ve been wanting to get for our many social studies projects. While we wait, students will think about how to advertise the books to the school.