I have to remind myself of that regularly. And when I say grow up, I mean, mature into responsible adults. And I'm glad that my teachers remembered that about me.
I'm so glad my chemistry teacher didn't remind me twenty years later that she had overheard me whisper a comparison about the size of her small feet and the size of her boobs-- that I wasn't sure how she was able to keep her balance. I'm still not convinced she heard me, since the person I was whispering that rude comment to couldn't even hear me. But she made me think that she could, and I was mortified about it for years. We went to the same church, though, and as adults we became friends.
We all do such stupid things at times as kids. And I'm so grateful that most teachers remember that fact and demonstrate grace towards us. It was such an epiphany for me when I eventually learned that teachers were real people, too. It makes me smile to recall the looks on some of my students' faces when they'd see me at the grocery store or church. Like I'd escaped from school, somehow-- you know, the place where I lived. Sometimes they didn't even recognize me when they ran into me out of my natural habitat-- the library.
I was always in awe of my English teachers in high school. English was my favorite subject, and a big reason was because I had some wonderful instructors-- Mrs. Franklin, Mrs. Macomber, and Mrs. Allen. The first two moved away years ago, but I still see Mrs. Allen when I go home to visit. She was one of the hostesses for my wedding shower thirty-five years ago, and three months ago she was in charge of the kitchen at the church where they fed everyone after my mother's funeral. Kind lady, and I love her for it.
And like most teachers, I've seen my share of immature behavior from kids, too. It devastated me to see one of my favorite students steal a pen from my office. I've also caught students stealing at the book fair and they still lied to my face about it. A student cussed at me in Spanish in front of a class of thirty students, and when I met with his parents about it, they believed their son over me. I took a boy to the office for beating up on another boy in one of my classes, and his mother pulled him out of school to keep us from disciplining him. Last I heard, he was on trial for rape, so he didn't grow up well. Some students rolled their eyes or back-talked me when I expected them to do their work. And there are more examples, but I try not to dwell on the bad behavior.
Those incidents were the exception, though, and not the rule, and it's gratifying to see so many students grow up to be hard-working, responsible adults. And even some of the worst-behaved students in school turned out to be amazing adults.
We educators wipe the slate clean each day and each year with the knowledge and hope that most of these kids grow up eventually.
Because we did.
Saturday, October 5, 2013
Sunday, September 22, 2013
Sometimes Education is just Hard Work
If we've trained our children to learn only in the most colorful, entertaining, and sensory-tickling environments, we've short-changed them in preparing them for life. Much of life's responsibilities are simply mundane. Cleaning the porcelain furniture, mowing the lawn, pulling weeds, taking out the garbage, changing diapers, washing the bird poop off the car, vacuuming--no, picking white dog hair out of a black carpet, dusting everything, washing dishes, mopping the floor, making the bed, etc., and that's just part of the responsibilities at home.
Most every career or paying job has its moments of mundane tasks, too. Everyone needs to work a few bad jobs just so they will be able to recognize a good job when it comes along. I used to mow lawns and babysit before I got my first withholding paycheck job at a Dairy Queen after school during my senior year in high school. For two summers during college, I worked watermelons-- the first year in the office, and the second outside as a straw boss on the conveyor line. I've done secretarial work, I've taught in public and private and home schools, and I've partnered in a retail store.
The best job I ever had was as a part-time library director during my children's middle and high school years. I didn't miss a thing, and still had something left at the end of the day to pursue other interests. One of the easiest jobs I ever had was as a college library assistant, but emotionally, it was one of the dreariest because I wasn't allowed to do anything but check out books and tell students where the bookstore and bathroom were. And that came after I had managed every aspect of a public library for nine years. But since I didn't have a master's degree in library science, I wasn't allowed to do real library work.
One of the most demanding jobs I ever had was working as a paraprofessional at a high school while I worked on my master's degree in the evenings so I could eventually do real library work in a public school. Two of the worst years I ever had was teaching in public school where there was very little support for newbies, and trying to work in spite of an impossible schedule and working situation under some people who never should've been around children or the educational system in the first place. But that experience helped me to recognize a better school environment later where the staff received a lot of support from each other and their administrators.
In every job situation I learned something, even if it was for no other reasons than surviving the job or garnering some good writing fodder.
Somewhere along the line, children need to learn how to work hard in spite of difficult or mundane surroundings, because most will experience those very things in some jobs later on. A big part of preparing them for life is teaching them how to persevere, how to get back up after they're knocked down, and to not let a soul-consuming work environment destroy them.
Years ago my dad shared an old fable with me when I was going through a tough time. A king wanted an inscription put on a ring that would speak the truth in any situation-- to make him happy when he was sad, and to keep him humble when he was on top of the world. After much searching, his wise men brought him a ring with the inscription, This, too, shall pass. I can't tell you how many times I thought of that through the years.
Learning should be fun, fulfilling, mind-expanding, and at times just plain ol' mundane or hard work if we want to prepare children for life. To teach them that life and work is composed of both periods of ups and downs and how to navigate through it all is the truth.
Ups or downs, good or bad, happy or sad, hard or easy, more or less, healthy or sick, or any other dichotomy of life, this, too, shall pass.
Most every career or paying job has its moments of mundane tasks, too. Everyone needs to work a few bad jobs just so they will be able to recognize a good job when it comes along. I used to mow lawns and babysit before I got my first withholding paycheck job at a Dairy Queen after school during my senior year in high school. For two summers during college, I worked watermelons-- the first year in the office, and the second outside as a straw boss on the conveyor line. I've done secretarial work, I've taught in public and private and home schools, and I've partnered in a retail store.
The best job I ever had was as a part-time library director during my children's middle and high school years. I didn't miss a thing, and still had something left at the end of the day to pursue other interests. One of the easiest jobs I ever had was as a college library assistant, but emotionally, it was one of the dreariest because I wasn't allowed to do anything but check out books and tell students where the bookstore and bathroom were. And that came after I had managed every aspect of a public library for nine years. But since I didn't have a master's degree in library science, I wasn't allowed to do real library work.
One of the most demanding jobs I ever had was working as a paraprofessional at a high school while I worked on my master's degree in the evenings so I could eventually do real library work in a public school. Two of the worst years I ever had was teaching in public school where there was very little support for newbies, and trying to work in spite of an impossible schedule and working situation under some people who never should've been around children or the educational system in the first place. But that experience helped me to recognize a better school environment later where the staff received a lot of support from each other and their administrators.
In every job situation I learned something, even if it was for no other reasons than surviving the job or garnering some good writing fodder.
Somewhere along the line, children need to learn how to work hard in spite of difficult or mundane surroundings, because most will experience those very things in some jobs later on. A big part of preparing them for life is teaching them how to persevere, how to get back up after they're knocked down, and to not let a soul-consuming work environment destroy them.
Years ago my dad shared an old fable with me when I was going through a tough time. A king wanted an inscription put on a ring that would speak the truth in any situation-- to make him happy when he was sad, and to keep him humble when he was on top of the world. After much searching, his wise men brought him a ring with the inscription, This, too, shall pass. I can't tell you how many times I thought of that through the years.
Learning should be fun, fulfilling, mind-expanding, and at times just plain ol' mundane or hard work if we want to prepare children for life. To teach them that life and work is composed of both periods of ups and downs and how to navigate through it all is the truth.
Ups or downs, good or bad, happy or sad, hard or easy, more or less, healthy or sick, or any other dichotomy of life, this, too, shall pass.
Wednesday, September 4, 2013
Education Overkill
overkill - noun 2. : an excess of something (as a quantity or an action) beyond what is required or suitable for a particular purpose. [Merriam-Webster Online]
I hope you will please read this post with an open mind and understanding that my intent is to improve the public education system. A less dramatic title that would be just as fitting is Less is More.
I don't envy the task of the classroom teachers. The few years I taught just about did me in, and I thought I'd never set foot on a campus again. So I write this knowing that teachers have one of the toughest jobs out there. And I've worked with so many hard-working teachers who loved the students they taught and wanted only the best for them.
When a system fails to prepare kids for life, which these days is mistakenly and nearsightedly linked with less than stellar and especially failing standardized test scores, the knee-jerk reaction of the powers that be-- within education and without-- is to conjure up more accountability and tests and methods and paperwork and more micro-managing and pressure on top of the already over-burdened shoulders of teacher. Teachers are carrying a disproportionate amount of the responsibility. Parents and students should bear their fair share, too.
"Are the TEKS you're teaching today posted on your whiteboard for any administrator to see when they walk into your classroom today?" And my personal favorite-- coming up with new acronyms and buzz words for a new or improved or latest educational trends that will solve everyone's problems, which involves more training and more training and more training... often with the same results: that the system is failing to prepare kids for life. They have a transcript that says they passed what the State required them to pass, but somehow it doesn't segue into real life. And very few school systems are even looking at the students after they graduate.
My children were home-schooled their 3rd - 6th grades, and they could do in under two hours the equivalent of a day's work in public school. After they finished their book work, they played in the barn or worked with their 4-H show animals or video-taped mock news and weather reports or dozens of other activities they thought up on their own. The main thing they learned during their early school years was to take responsibility for their learning.
They had learned how to learn.
Without a complicated list of TEKS.
Without a full-time teacher working with them.
Most of their school work involved sitting down at the dining table, opening their books, reading the instructions themselves, and doing their work. When they couldn't figure something out for themselves, they came to me. I didn't stand over them watching everything they did. I didn't constantly have to goose or threaten them to finish. They weren't overwhelmed with tons of school work daily or homework in the evening. In homeschool, when you finished your book work, you were finished for the day. And even with as little time as they spent doing bookwork, they still learned the skills they needed to function successfully in life. They entered public school in the seventh grade and graduated high school #2 and #1 in their respective grades.
When I started homeschooling my children, it was almost unheard of, and definitely a radical idea. A lady stopped me at the post office one day and asked me, "Who gave you permission to do this?" like we must've been breaking the law or something. It shook up the status quo of how a child was supposed to be educated, which was not my intention. I even had to change my pre-conceived notions of what education entailed, and it became such a freeing thought to realize that learning could take place without a chalk board (this dates me) and a teacher's desk in front of my kids.
The most exciting thing about learning at home was that the classroom walls disappeared and my kids could learn anywhere-- at the post office, at the grocery store, at the local airport, at the cemetery, at the fast food or convenience store counter, etc.
Learning/education and life melded.
The thing that bothered my kids the most when they entered public school in the 7th grade was seeing how much time was wasted on things during the school day that had nothing to do with learning and getting their work done.
I asked some teachers how much time they thought they actually spent on teaching and facilitating learning, and the answers were from 1/4 to 1/2 of the entire school day. Shish. I saw a report that stated teachers only spend 25% of their school day actually teaching. The rest of their time is taken up with classroom/individual discipline, changing classes, calling roll, waiting for everyone to finish, documentation, parent/teacher communication, writing lesson plans, grading student work, developing relationships with the students, and those infinitely long days of Benchmark practice testing and studying the results and re-teaching those weak areas.
Our government has a way of turning good intentions for education into a monstrosity of inefficiency, redundancy, and innovation-killing bureaucracy. The most important decisions about what happens in the classroom are made by folks with little knowledge and experience in the classroom, or they've been out of the classroom for so long, they are out of touch. And on that note, here a few more thoughts for the powers that be:
I hope you will please read this post with an open mind and understanding that my intent is to improve the public education system. A less dramatic title that would be just as fitting is Less is More.
I don't envy the task of the classroom teachers. The few years I taught just about did me in, and I thought I'd never set foot on a campus again. So I write this knowing that teachers have one of the toughest jobs out there. And I've worked with so many hard-working teachers who loved the students they taught and wanted only the best for them.
When a system fails to prepare kids for life, which these days is mistakenly and nearsightedly linked with less than stellar and especially failing standardized test scores, the knee-jerk reaction of the powers that be-- within education and without-- is to conjure up more accountability and tests and methods and paperwork and more micro-managing and pressure on top of the already over-burdened shoulders of teacher. Teachers are carrying a disproportionate amount of the responsibility. Parents and students should bear their fair share, too.
"Are the TEKS you're teaching today posted on your whiteboard for any administrator to see when they walk into your classroom today?" And my personal favorite-- coming up with new acronyms and buzz words for a new or improved or latest educational trends that will solve everyone's problems, which involves more training and more training and more training... often with the same results: that the system is failing to prepare kids for life. They have a transcript that says they passed what the State required them to pass, but somehow it doesn't segue into real life. And very few school systems are even looking at the students after they graduate.
My children were home-schooled their 3rd - 6th grades, and they could do in under two hours the equivalent of a day's work in public school. After they finished their book work, they played in the barn or worked with their 4-H show animals or video-taped mock news and weather reports or dozens of other activities they thought up on their own. The main thing they learned during their early school years was to take responsibility for their learning.
They had learned how to learn.
Without a complicated list of TEKS.
Without a full-time teacher working with them.
Most of their school work involved sitting down at the dining table, opening their books, reading the instructions themselves, and doing their work. When they couldn't figure something out for themselves, they came to me. I didn't stand over them watching everything they did. I didn't constantly have to goose or threaten them to finish. They weren't overwhelmed with tons of school work daily or homework in the evening. In homeschool, when you finished your book work, you were finished for the day. And even with as little time as they spent doing bookwork, they still learned the skills they needed to function successfully in life. They entered public school in the seventh grade and graduated high school #2 and #1 in their respective grades.
When I started homeschooling my children, it was almost unheard of, and definitely a radical idea. A lady stopped me at the post office one day and asked me, "Who gave you permission to do this?" like we must've been breaking the law or something. It shook up the status quo of how a child was supposed to be educated, which was not my intention. I even had to change my pre-conceived notions of what education entailed, and it became such a freeing thought to realize that learning could take place without a chalk board (this dates me) and a teacher's desk in front of my kids.
The most exciting thing about learning at home was that the classroom walls disappeared and my kids could learn anywhere-- at the post office, at the grocery store, at the local airport, at the cemetery, at the fast food or convenience store counter, etc.
Learning/education and life melded.
The thing that bothered my kids the most when they entered public school in the 7th grade was seeing how much time was wasted on things during the school day that had nothing to do with learning and getting their work done.
I asked some teachers how much time they thought they actually spent on teaching and facilitating learning, and the answers were from 1/4 to 1/2 of the entire school day. Shish. I saw a report that stated teachers only spend 25% of their school day actually teaching. The rest of their time is taken up with classroom/individual discipline, changing classes, calling roll, waiting for everyone to finish, documentation, parent/teacher communication, writing lesson plans, grading student work, developing relationships with the students, and those infinitely long days of Benchmark practice testing and studying the results and re-teaching those weak areas.
Our government has a way of turning good intentions for education into a monstrosity of inefficiency, redundancy, and innovation-killing bureaucracy. The most important decisions about what happens in the classroom are made by folks with little knowledge and experience in the classroom, or they've been out of the classroom for so long, they are out of touch. And on that note, here a few more thoughts for the powers that be:
- Let active teachers have more say in making decisions about public education and what goes on in the classroom.
- Instead of piling on more pressure for teachers to teach exorbitant amounts of information that most students will not retain unless it applies to them directly in life, teach less, and teach it well.
- Teach students to take responsibility for their learning.
- Simplify the TEKS; don't micro-manage every little thing a teacher does in the classroom.
- Take the shackles off the teachers and administrators to innovate; give schools the freedom to climb out of the box of preconceived notions about what every school and classroom should look and sound like.
- Bring real life learning and application to education. Give students challenges to solve world or state or community or school problems. Or economic or social or humanity problems.
- Let teachers slow down. Let them breathe.
- Defend and support your teachers.
- Defend and support and keep your librarians. They are information specialists who are extremely important when it comes to teaching students how to evaluate information in this information age. Just look at the media, and especially social media to see this skill is sorely needed.
- Pair new teachers with veteran teachers. Don't leave rookies stuck out on a limb to learn everything by trial and error.
- Unless teachers are newbies, let go of some of that eternal inservice training and give teachers more time to prepare their own classrooms and lessons that apply to their subject.
- Let students who grasp something quicker teach other students who need more time.
- The teacher learns more than the students, so let students help teach.
- Give students real responsibility and leadership in school, not just more busy work to keep them out of trouble.
- A fellow teacher from Great Britain told me her school gave students two recesses - morning and afternoon- even through high school. I think they're on to something there. Otherwise, students create their own time for socializing and resting their brains-- usually during classroom time.
- We have to have smaller student to teacher ratios for teachers to be able to truly know each student and accurately assess their knowledge and skills beyond the multiple choice mentality. Another fellow teacher educated outside of our country told me he saw his first multiple choice test in college.
- We have to un-school kids' thinking about school-- that it's not this necessary evil we're forcing them to endure until they can really get out and live. School is preparing them for life, and knowledge, skills, and habits they learn or fail to learn in school will directly affect their quality of life later. Most of them don't get that.
- Grades don't mean a darn thing if students fail to retain the knowledge or skill.
I've written more than I should for most readers to get this far without giving up. And I don't mean to over-simplify a very complicated issue. But the system could use some simplifying during the over-hauling process. : )
Sunday, August 18, 2013
SEKS in the Classroom
It's so important for all of us to get someone to proofread our writing before putting it out there publicly, whether in print or online, and I have several nightmare scenarios to back that up. This is the most recent one.
I've always had an aversion to the infinite redundancy and constraints put on teachers by the education bureaucracies. Like a typical government agency, public education loves never-ending assessments, reports, paperwork, documentation, red tape, protocol, and of course, the overly complicated, educationese-worded TEKS (pronounced 'teeks'): Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills lists for each grade level in the State of Texas. I'm sure every state has its own version of the TEKS or common core standards.
One day I decided to pare down these lengthy lists to a single page, and came up with sixteen fairly broad essential elements for the secular schools, and twenty-three essential elements for a Christian education. Then I wrestled over what to call this list, and I leaned toward something that would put the responsibility for learning primarily on the student's shoulders. This list could be posted on a classroom wall or in a student's notebook, so I thought the title, YEKS: Your Essential Knowledge & Skills would be good. But the acronym sounded kind of yucky or terrifying when you actually say YEKS.
Grammatically, though, the TEKS acronym is erroneously pronounced 'teeks' when it should actually sound like 'tex,' but I had the 'teeks' enunciation branded into my brain when I finally came up with SEKS: A Student's Essential Knowledge & Skills as the title. I thought SEKS, pronounced 'seeks' made a great analogy of students seeking knowledge. I added the new title and immediately posted it in my Teachers Pay Teachers Store, trying to keep the ego in check since I had single-handedly simplified teaching expectations and curriculum requirements in a single day.
I've always had an aversion to the infinite redundancy and constraints put on teachers by the education bureaucracies. Like a typical government agency, public education loves never-ending assessments, reports, paperwork, documentation, red tape, protocol, and of course, the overly complicated, educationese-worded TEKS (pronounced 'teeks'): Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills lists for each grade level in the State of Texas. I'm sure every state has its own version of the TEKS or common core standards.
One day I decided to pare down these lengthy lists to a single page, and came up with sixteen fairly broad essential elements for the secular schools, and twenty-three essential elements for a Christian education. Then I wrestled over what to call this list, and I leaned toward something that would put the responsibility for learning primarily on the student's shoulders. This list could be posted on a classroom wall or in a student's notebook, so I thought the title, YEKS: Your Essential Knowledge & Skills would be good. But the acronym sounded kind of yucky or terrifying when you actually say YEKS.
Grammatically, though, the TEKS acronym is erroneously pronounced 'teeks' when it should actually sound like 'tex,' but I had the 'teeks' enunciation branded into my brain when I finally came up with SEKS: A Student's Essential Knowledge & Skills as the title. I thought SEKS, pronounced 'seeks' made a great analogy of students seeking knowledge. I added the new title and immediately posted it in my Teachers Pay Teachers Store, trying to keep the ego in check since I had single-handedly simplified teaching expectations and curriculum requirements in a single day.
NessaDeeArt.blogspot.com
Fortunately, my daughter came over to the house a couple of hours after that, and I showed her a copy of SEKS: A Student's Essential Knowledge & Skills, and sat up straight, ready for her to pat me on the back.
Instead, she looked up and smiled at me. I smiled back.
"Are you sure about that title?" she asked.
"Yes, I think SEKS (pronounced 'seeks') is a great acronym for what this list represents," I said proudly. "Students are seeking knowledge."
She grinned even wider. "Don't you think they might pronounce it differently than you do?"
I stared at the title for a while, and when it finally dawned on me what she was referring to, I was horrified. I literally ran across the house to my computer to take it off the Internet store. I had visions of this poster showing up on Jay Leno's Tonight Show's headline segment, but fortunately, no one had found it yet.
We're back to the YEKS title until I come up with something different.
Thursday, July 18, 2013
The Information Dark Ages...Again
Years ago I asked my grandmother questions about her early life, and she put me off, saying her life wasn't interesting at all. But I kept asking, and she finally told me some stories that blew my socks off. I was shocked to learn that as a very young girl, she and her family came to Texas in two covered wagons. That was one of many stories she told me about her not so interesting life, but what astonished me the most was that during her short lifetime, man went from traveling in covered wagons to walking on the moon. How could that happen so fast?
The role of librarians and information-handling has made just as wide a leap in progression this past century-- from the manual organization and processing of books within the physical shelves and four walls of the library with the librarian as the gatekeeper of information... evolving to instant and virtual access to books and unfathomable amounts of information via the World Wide Web. The walls of the library have expanded to global proportions; books and information are no longer fenced in shelves and card catalogs and the knowledge of the librarian. It's free range information now.
Librarians have progressively changed with the times and are now trained as information specialists and information drivers' ed instructors, if you will, when it comes to teaching students how to navigate and evaluate copious amounts of information. But unfortunately, the perception of the role of librarians has not evolved with the actual skills of 21st Century librarians, and too many highly-skilled librarians are being labeled and discarded as 20th Century dinosaurs.
What is falling by the wayside with the elimination of librarians is the quality control of information and the teaching of information evaluation. Since librarians were replaced with paraprofessionals in the libraries of my previous school district, I'm not sure anyone is teaching the students this important skill now.
I see a dangerous correlation between the Dark Ages of ignorance with the information illiteracy of today when it comes to manipulating people's thoughts and actions. If students and people in general don't know how to evaluate information sources, they are liable to believe anything that comes down the pike-- via Internet or the media. The Asiana pilot names hoax is a prime example of this. How many hoax information emails and Facebook posts are still being circulated as truth? It's understandable, but not excusable, that many adults who came into the computer age after their formal school years missed learning how to evaluate an information source, but what is even more inexcusable is too many schools are still churning out information illiterates who are prone to making bad choices based on bad information. They will always be at risk of manipulation in any area of their lives if they don't know how to recognize the difference between misinformation and truth.
When librarians are removed from education, the quality of information and information literacy suffers. Our students have access to more information since the turn of this century than all of the combined information from recorded history up until then. But that doesn't mean they are knowledgeable and competent when it comes to information evaluation, and I'd have to say the same for too many parents and educators who think Google is the new librarian. Google is an enormous ocean of good, bad, truthful, biased, and downright dishonest information, and to say Google takes the place of libraries and librarians now is like intellectually living on the Titanic thinking all is well in the information world.
I'm sounding a distress signal here. Hope somebody picks it up before it's too late.
The role of librarians and information-handling has made just as wide a leap in progression this past century-- from the manual organization and processing of books within the physical shelves and four walls of the library with the librarian as the gatekeeper of information... evolving to instant and virtual access to books and unfathomable amounts of information via the World Wide Web. The walls of the library have expanded to global proportions; books and information are no longer fenced in shelves and card catalogs and the knowledge of the librarian. It's free range information now.
Librarians have progressively changed with the times and are now trained as information specialists and information drivers' ed instructors, if you will, when it comes to teaching students how to navigate and evaluate copious amounts of information. But unfortunately, the perception of the role of librarians has not evolved with the actual skills of 21st Century librarians, and too many highly-skilled librarians are being labeled and discarded as 20th Century dinosaurs.
What is falling by the wayside with the elimination of librarians is the quality control of information and the teaching of information evaluation. Since librarians were replaced with paraprofessionals in the libraries of my previous school district, I'm not sure anyone is teaching the students this important skill now.
I see a dangerous correlation between the Dark Ages of ignorance with the information illiteracy of today when it comes to manipulating people's thoughts and actions. If students and people in general don't know how to evaluate information sources, they are liable to believe anything that comes down the pike-- via Internet or the media. The Asiana pilot names hoax is a prime example of this. How many hoax information emails and Facebook posts are still being circulated as truth? It's understandable, but not excusable, that many adults who came into the computer age after their formal school years missed learning how to evaluate an information source, but what is even more inexcusable is too many schools are still churning out information illiterates who are prone to making bad choices based on bad information. They will always be at risk of manipulation in any area of their lives if they don't know how to recognize the difference between misinformation and truth.
When librarians are removed from education, the quality of information and information literacy suffers. Our students have access to more information since the turn of this century than all of the combined information from recorded history up until then. But that doesn't mean they are knowledgeable and competent when it comes to information evaluation, and I'd have to say the same for too many parents and educators who think Google is the new librarian. Google is an enormous ocean of good, bad, truthful, biased, and downright dishonest information, and to say Google takes the place of libraries and librarians now is like intellectually living on the Titanic thinking all is well in the information world.
To say Google takes the place of libraries and librarians is like intellectually traveling on the Titanic thinking all is well in the information world.
I'm sounding a distress signal here. Hope somebody picks it up before it's too late.
Thursday, June 20, 2013
Library Services from Long, Long Ago
Long, long ago would be more than a life time from most students' perspective, but for some of us old dinosaurs it wasn't that long ago when libraries used check out cards to keep track of whoever checked out what book. That might be a fun mini-lesson one day in the library-- to show how books were checked out pre-Internet and automation-- before computers and online catalogs.
I remember when the library had one piece of equipment to use to process new books: a typewriter. And we had a cadillac: the beautiful IBM Selectric typewriter. But now it's so old my spell check doesn't even recognize it.
I remember when the library had one piece of equipment to use to process new books: a typewriter. And we had a cadillac: the beautiful IBM Selectric typewriter. But now it's so old my spell check doesn't even recognize it.
axsoris.com
I thought I was very high tech when I added two more 'type elements' or 'typeballs' which gave me two more different fonts, for a total of three fonts! Now we have dozens, if not hundreds of fonts to choose from at the click of a mouse. It's hard to believe how technology in the library has changed in such a short period of time.
officemuseum.com
We used the typewriter to type out the check-out cards and all the cards for the card catalog. For you young librarians, the card catalog looked like this:
wisegeek.org
The card catalog was a cabinet of multiple long, narrow drawers containing thousands of index-size cards for each book author, title, and subject cards primarily for nonfiction books. The cabinet itself was usually built of oak or some other beautiful wood. Each drawer was labeled and organized alphabetically. Tell your students that this is how library patrons found the books or information they were seeking. Manually. Tediously. Slow.
It took a LOT of typing to prepare those cards, and we were so relieved when computers came on the scene, along with software that printed out the catalog cards for us after we typed in the necessary information. But filing them in the card catalog was still done manually, tediously. Slow.
etsy.com
Part of the old check-out process involved patrons pulling out a card from a pocket inside the front or back cover or flyleaf page and writing their name or library number on it. The librarian would stamp the due date on the pocket or due date sheet so the patron would know when the book was due. The card would also get stamped and filed. When the book was returned, the card was inserted in the pocket and then shelved.
brianjamestheauthor.blogspot.com
When privacy became an issue, we were told that we had to take a black marker and mark out all of the names on the check-out cards so no one would know who had checked out a book. It was heartbreaking for me to mark out the signatures of patrons who had passed or moved away; it felt like I was erasing history. I even saw the progression of the ages of my own children on those check-out cards-- from writing their first wobbly letters to neatly printing their names and later dates writing in cursive. After a while I put down the marker. If people wanted privacy, they could use their library numbers. But automation eventually solved the privacy issue.
Automating a library collection was tedious, but the results could be compared to switching from a horse and buggy to a jet airplane. And the most recent new trend in library services is checking out e-books from home or anyplace else using a mobile device. I love visiting the library, but sometimes it's more convenient to bring the library to me. I have fond memories of those old check-out cards, but I'm thrilled to be riding on that jet.
Sunday, June 9, 2013
Information Litterers
In this age of information most of us are living in, it's important to learn how to wisely navigate through it without falling prey to misinformation garbage.
- Chain letters. Remember those from the snail mail days? I probably received my first one in elementary school, and I didn't know what it was, other than the message scared me to death. And post Internet days, the contagious things mutated and infected the biggest information spreader of our day: email and Facebook accounts. We've all received email forwards that attempt to emotionally manipulate you to keep forwarding it or suffer the consequences of bad luck, financial ruin, sickness, or even death. On the flip-side are the emails that promise good luck or a windfall of money, or even evoke Jesus' name to make it sound more authentic. Chain emails or posts are rubbish and don't deserve a second look, and shame on whomever sits around creating these forms of psychological blackmail. Don't fall for them, and don't keep littering your friends' email and Facebook accounts with them.
- Hearsay. Much of the "news media" is a misnomer these days. When they all are locked in a ratings competition and have to satisfy their advertising sponsors, they tend to cover the most titillating and provocative stories to draw in the most viewers. No telling what important information we're missing because it's not sensational enough. And in the race to break a story first, too many news shows make it a habit of presenting hearsay as facts until someone eventually corrects them. Too few are involved in actual in-depth, investigative reporting, and the majority sound like minions repeating the same stories over and over.
- Bias. Too many news shows give a slanted presentation of news that fit their political or social beliefs, so viewers fail to get an objective report showing both sides of an issue. To remedy that, it's important for all of us to watch the news from different sources (liberal, conservative, Christian, etc.) to get all sides of a story or issue. And throw in a foreign news source, too, to see what's going on in the world and hear about issues from their point of view. In the past ten years, my son has traveled around the world and even lived and worked in Syria, Iraq, and the Sudan. He often gave us a different perspective about those countries than what we saw on the news. He watches Al Jazeera news regularly to see what's going on in the world.
- Slander. How many times have we forwarded an email rumor about someone without checking the facts? In a single click, we can trash someone's reputation, and an email slander tends to live in perpetuity. But if we all make the attempt to correctly dispose of these when we do get one by replying to all that it's a hoax or rumor, that will help clean up the misinformation on the virtual highway. Election years are the worst times to see those types of ads, emails, and news stories. No matter which side of the aisle we're on, it's helping no one, especially our communities and country, by perpetuating slander about anyone. Truth must be upheld and defended, without question. We cannot survive without it. The following are good sites to check out a rumor or hoax: Urban Legends and Snopes. And Snopes even had a hoax circulating that it couldn't be trusted because it was 'owned by a flaming liberal' and was 'in the tank for Obama,' so even the Websites trying to expose hoaxes aren't immune to misinformation and slander.
- Demands to Forward an Email or Share a Post. I don't know why some people refuse to let good information stand on its own. Someone may start a great piece on the information highway, but then someone else feels obligated to tack on a threat or attempt to shame us if we don't forward it on, citing our lack of love for Jesus or patriotism or compassion if we don't. If I choose to forward something, I remove that tacky part of the email because I think the information should speak for itself, and I for sure didn't send it on because someone psychologically forced me to. But most times I delete an email if it has that tagged-on message just because it aggravates the life out of me.
- Friendship Assurance. We should know who our friends are without having to ask them to repost something or send the same email back to show they're our friends. Maintaining a true friendship happens outside of FB or any other social networking site we're on, and if we're depending on one of those reposted messages to tell us, we need to revisit the definition of friendship.
- TMI Facebook Clutter. I know I'm stomping on some toes here, but think about why we're on Facebook. Everyone loves seeing updates and photos on friends and family and what they're up to, but when people use FB primarily to post ads selling things or political views, most of which don't change anyone's mind, then it's Facebook clutter. I like good information that makes me think and reflect or inspires me; keep those coming. And I've used so many good recipes I've copied off of FB shares. But do any of us call everyone in our contact list to tell them every little detail of our day? If not, why do we feel obligated to do that on FB? Anyone with 300+ friends knows how time-consuming it is to scroll through hundreds of posts every day to get to the ones we really value and want to see, so it's a good practice for us all to be discriminating about our posts.
- Hoaxes & Get-rich-quick Emails. If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is. Companies do not pay you to forward emails. Your friend probably isn't stranded penniless in Spain and needs you to wire money. And the email from the stranger in Africa who says he will split his bazillions of dollars with you if you'll send him money to get his money out of his country is such an obvious scam, but they keep sending them because some people actually fall for it. And NEVER give out any passwords or financial or personal information through the email. I received a hoax email saying it was from PayPal about a charge I didn't make, and it looked completely legit-- even the logo and address. But I looked it up and learned that there was one little clue that meant it wasn't from PayPal: they didn't use my whole name in the greeting. Use your search engine or the links under "Slander" to find out about these hoaxes.
The important thing is to be wise about information. Diversify your information sources so you know you are getting a more balanced view. Take information with a healthy dose of skepticism, knowing that Rumor, Bias, Slander, Hoax, and TMI are alive and well in the electronic and virtual worlds, and we need to learn to recognize and dispose of them properly every chance we get.
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