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Something Different Every Day

April 24, 2008

No Child Left Behind @ your library?

I am back on my early literacy soapbox, thanks to the checklist someone passed to me of how library staff in one library system are being rated on their storytimes. The checklist is entirely based on Every Child Ready to Read standards. It includes things like: "Presenter makes connections between letters in children's names and in alphabet book or book title".

Reading is important. Building reading skills is important. Getting young children ready to read using the six skills of early literacy is important. But the most important thing is story.

Schools have to implement No Child Left Behind styles of teaching reading to get funded. But I think many of us in Youth Services would agree that focusing too much on the mechanics of reading is a huge mistake. Are we falling into that same trap in libraries?

It's the stories that count the most. Story is fundamental iin humankind--it's why we pass them along for hundreds of years. It's why we tell them to our children over and over. Stories help children become loving, connected, ethical human beings by what they tell about how people relate to each other. (Often the "people" are animals in picture books, but it means the same thing.) Stories are also how children can broaden their experience out of their own family into the whole big world out there of the past and the present and the potential future.

I love building early literacy elements into the library space. And any good storytime provider is going to work the six early literacy skills into their story programs naturally, because books are made out of words and words are made out of letters and leading children into talking about the stories and predicting what's going to happen are just the sorts of things you do while reading with children.

But you have to start with good stories. In my Storytime for Big Kids program this week (ages 4-K) these kids, like so many others I have worked with over the years, were amazed and delighted by Keiko Kasza's The Wolf's Chicken Stew. I could have spent a lot of time talking about how the wolf was making 100 of each food to feed the chicken to fatten her up; we could have speculated on whether the foods were nutritious or discussed if one of the children in the room had a name that began with W, same as Wolf....but all of that would have sidetracked the surprise that makes children burst out laughing, when the Chicken introduces "Uncle Wolf" to the 100 chicks he's been inadvertently feeding.

It's the story that counts. It's the story that provides the foundation, and the phonological awareness, letter knowledge, print motivation and so on get swept in with that great belly laugh and the longing to read the story again and again. So please, put "Did the presenter use some great stories" on your storytime checklists. Otherwise, all we are providing is No Child Left Behind @ Your Library.

Posted by susan at 12:58 PM | Comments (5)

March 21, 2008

Library books are too scary!

Last weekend, a mother asked me to help her find some books for her preschool daughter that might persuade her that all library books are not scary. She explained that for her daughter, any book where someone expressed fear, or there were surprises, or someone got angry, were all very stressful. Even beloved Mister Rogers was scary to this little girl on the days when he covered subjects like "What do you do with the mad that's inside you?

I tackled the subject enthusiastically, but a few shelves of books later I realized just how challenging the problem was for her. Almost all picture books have an arc to them, and most of the time, the peak of the book would be stressful to a very sensitive child. Think of how many books you've read where baby duck wanders away from mama duck, or where the curious dog goes out exploring and gets into trouble! For most children, it's a good, healthy way to have a little tension that then gets resolved at the end.

For this child, though, the stress of the library books became too much for her, and she began to refuse to read anything that came from the library. She was okay with her own books at home, because she knew them already. She knew they would come out happily, so she could bear the stressful middles. But library books are unknown. Beneath all those beautiful covers lurk lost, scared, worried, or angry characters!

Adult readers, I think, sometimes worry too much about kids finding a book scary. But some of us go the other direction and worry too little about it. I realized in looking for safe, sweet books that most of the books I love to use in storytime would send this child screaming from the room--anything by William Steig, say, or Lilly spending time in the Uncooperative Chair once again. So this gave me something to ponder, and also a good idea for a new bibliography.

Here are a couple I gave to the mom, if you ever need some happy, safe reading for yourself or for a child:

It sure isn't easy, being a kid!

Posted by susan at 11:41 AM | Comments (0)

March 7, 2008

Desk blogs

I know it's kind of annoyingly navel-gazing to blog about blogging, but I've been wrestling with our department's blog so it's on my mind.

I'd read before about the benefits of having a departmental desk blog, but it wasn't until Kate Hall at Park Ridge generously opened hers up to the YLA Managers to see that I realized just how useful it could be. With a staff of eleven, we generate a fair amount of email traffic, and at Summer Reading time the volume becomes unbearable. Just one program can generate 5 emails as details get straightened out. You must make a decision with each email of Do I save it? Do I file it? Do I print it out? Do I delete it? Lots of times you don't feel like making that decision at the moment, so the email stacks up and eventually you get the polite but threatening email from Computer Services that your emailing privileges may be cut off if you don't whittle your mailbox down to a manageable size.

With the blog, it's all kept, but it's all searchable. You can give things categories and tags so you can turn up everything on a particular subject. You can add comments to the original post rather than writing a whole new one. And you can have a sidebar with all those pesky wiki URLs and the other info that becomes so hard to track.

The hardest part is going to be getting everyone to check it routinely. An aggregator is only helpful if people remember to check THAT. So if anyone has a brilliant idea for how to build that into everyone's memory, I'd love to hear it, and I'd love to hear about how you are using your desk blog!

Posted by susan at 3:13 PM | Comments (0)

February 13, 2008

The little things in life

As I overheard a mother talking to her toddler the other day, I was struck by something important. She was saying, "Are you ready to go say goodbye to the bunny?" The bunny is a puppet I bought on an expedition to Milwaukee some 20+ years ago. It's always been a particularly endearing puppet. Its home for the past 5 or so years has been in a hole in the tree at the entryway to the Youth Services Department. Kids love to come and see the bunny, and families have incorporated it into their library visits (and smart parents have learned to use it as a way to get their little ones back out of the library). It's just a bunny puppet in a pretend hole! But they love it.

They also love this:

It's the line that some wise person incorporated into the carpet that leads from the front of the department past the desk and toward the books. Often you can sit at the desk and watch as a small child walks in a relatively normal way into the department, and suddenly they take a sharp turn, and then another turn. When they do that, you know they are walking on the blue line. It seems to bring them a lot of joy.

And that's my point. We are spending lots of time and effort to prepare our Youth Services departments to welcome young visitors and their families, but we need to never forget that for little ones just as it is for us, it is the little things in life that make a difference. We may think they'll remember the giant summer reading club game or the amazing magician who came or the fantastic prize they got, but I suspect that for many kids, the memories they will carry from the library will be those little details that someone got right, whether on purpose or by a lucky accident.

Posted by susan at 5:27 PM | Comments (1)

January 17, 2008

I'm thrilled and I'm mad--this year's ALA awards

I couldn't be more thrilled by the Newbery Committee's picks, esp. giving the top honor to the wonderful Laura Amy Schlitz's unconventional book Good Masters, Sweet Ladies: Voices from a Medieval Village. I thought her book A Drowned Maiden's Tale was overlooked last year, but she sure wasn't overlooked this one! Bravo to the Newbery Committee and all of their choices.

I also loved all of the choices on the Caldecott Committee's list, but being the stick-in-the-mud that I am, I didn't agree that their top choice should have been on the list at all. It's not exactly the committee's fault. They just interpreted the criteria completely literally. There's nothing in the criteria that says a picture book has to be, well, a picture book. But since it's a literary award given out by the American Library Association, I think they need to interpret picture book more narrowly to include the criteria that a picture book is a book that is shelved in the picture book section. Nobody would call The Invention of Hugo Cabret a picture book, except someone using the Caldecott criteria.

Now the door has been opened for that award to be interpreted much more broadly. It has always been for up to age 14, and I have no quarrel with that. But it will bring in graphic novels of all kinds, and so very disparate forms will be vying for the same award. We need a new award to cover the newer forms, and let the Caldecott be for picture books as we interpret it in the real world as it has always been.

Did I mention that Hugo Cabret is one of my very favorite books of the year? Because it is!

Posted by susan at 1:24 PM | Comments (0)

December 17, 2007

Project for Awesome

As I've mentioned before, I'm a huge fan of YA author John Green's videoblogging project with his eco-geek brother Hank called Brotherhood 2.0. Today they launched the "top secret project" they've been talking about for the past couple of weeks, in which young adults and other Brotherhood 2.0 fans used Youtube to promote their favorite good causes. In Project for Awesome, literally thousands of people have uploaded videos like this one that my 20-year-old son did this morning. If you take a look, you'll see in the list of related videos the same "nerdfighter power" screen,
which each video maker placed in the exact middle of their video before uploading it. And if you click on the videos, you'll see an amazing array of causes dear to the hearts of individual young people. What a great idea, and what a fun way to carry it out!

I love the way young adult literature has moved beyond the early "problem novel" of the 1970s to a time when they combine powerful themes with humor, art, and technology. They still talk about serious issues, but as this project so clearly demonstrates, they also empower young people to work for positive change. Awesome.

Posted by susan at 3:27 PM | Comments (0)

December 7, 2007

Will Hugo Cabret lead to a new book award?

After a vigorous discussion of Brian Selznick's The Invention of Hugo Cabret at NSLS this morning, I came away with the strong feeling that we are on the verge of a change. As most of you know, Hugo Cabret is told both through Selznick's evocative pencil illustrations and through his text--without one of those, you don't have the whole story. One person brought along the audiobook version of Hugo, and explained that in place of the pictures, it uses sound effects--where a picture might show Hugo walking, the audio version uses the sound of feet walking along. So, while the beauty of the pictures isn't there, some of the information being conveyed is.

I think everyone at the table agreed that Hugo is a magnificent book, and fits the bill for the Newbery in being "distinguished". Here's the question: Does the book work well enough through the writing alone to merit the Newbery? And here's the other question: Are we living in a time when it will become necessary through all of the new ways of looking at the world and at literacy to revise the Newbery criteria to fit the whole package? And here's one more question: Would it be better to come up with an award that could encompass works that are both visual and verbal, and may also include other formats as well? And if so, who would sponsor that award? Would ALSC and YALSA each want their own version of it?

I would maintain that according to the Newbery criteria as they currently stand, Hugo relies too much on the illustration to fit the bill. Too much of what I know about Hugo himself, about the setting, and too much of the pacing come through those pictures for the award for writing to go to that book. It fits the Caldecott even less, because as far as I'm concerned, any book that would not be shelved in the picture book section should not win the Caldecott medal.

So that means that one of the year's best books winds up slipping through the cracks completely for the major ALA awards. Too young for the Printz, too many pictures for the Newbery, not a picture book for the Caldecott. I guess I'm in favor of revising the criteria of both the Newbery and Caldecott to better encompass the books of the future. Otherwise, the Newbery medal may come to be associated not just with books that don't especially appeal to kids (a longstanding issue) but also with books that are old-fashioned. We don't need a new award--we need a new way of looking at the Newbery.

Posted by susan at 4:32 PM | Comments (1)

December 3, 2007

What I believe part 2: You have to read!

Here's my first entry on some of the things I am coming to realize that I believe in as a children's librarian/supervisor.

I think it's an absolute necessity for children's librarians to read. Five years ago, it would never have crossed my mind to articulate that thought, but now we all have so many things competing for our time and attention that I suspect we all are reading a bit less than we were. A lot more of our work time is spent on programming at many libraries, and many of us have experienced the big bump you get in activity when your library finishes a building or remodeling project. There just isn't the time on the desk that there used to be for reading.

I'll take it a step further: I believe you have to do some of the reading at home. As a supervisor, I can't tell my staff they have to do that. They're being paid for 37.5 hours of their time, and how they spend their time when they aren't at work however they like. And yet, I don't believe you can be an excellent youth services librarian without reading when you're away from work. I feel like even with my reviewing work and trying to keep on top of the books that are getting a lot of attention, I still barely scrape the surface of the great children's books out there. That's putting aside books written for adults almost completely!

But everything in youth services goes back to the books, and if it doesn't, you aren't doing it right. People doing storytimes need to be constantly refreshing their books so they read them enthusiastically; people out in the schools can't just booktalk what they read in library school; librarians out on the desk may be asked their opinions of the award winners as they come out, and people will think the less of them if they haven't even heard of the books, as we found out last year when the Newbery Committee picked books we had never heard of. You need to be able to offer Readers' Advisory based on more than lexile numbers, and you need to sometimes be able to say to a child as you're off to get the book they've asked for, "I've read that--it's a great book!"

So that's the second thing I believe about being a Children's Librarian: You have to read children's books.

Posted by susan at 1:32 PM | Comments (0)

November 19, 2007

The snowflake bidding begins!

Did your favorite picture book artist create a snowflake to buy this year? The first auction begins today, so come spend a few pleasant minutes browsing through the creative work of these artists, and find one to bid on!

Posted by susan at 7:41 AM | Comments (0)

November 15, 2007

Supervisors supervise

My subject line comes from Esme Raji Codell's novel Sahara Special about the very wonderful teacher Miss Pointy. When a talented writer in her class neglects her journal, Miss Pointy merely comments, "Writers write".

Supervisors supervise. It sounds obvious, but not all supervisors do it. Over the course of the past eight years of being a Youth Services Supervisor, I've come to realize that it's a lot more work than I initially thought! I mostly think of it as heading up a group of very talented, smart, dedicated staff and working together with them on behalf of our patrons. Mostly, that is how it works.

But along the way, I've learned from an excellent supervisor (my own) that being a good supervisor takes more. It requires doing a lot of thinking about what direction you want your department to head, and communicating that to your staff. You have to listen to their concerns and their ideas and be willing to let your vision be reshaped. You have to respond to billions of emails. You have to keep track of money and time and manage schedules--ugh.

The hard part, and the one that's really easy to neglect, is offering thoughtful feedback. It's where the supervision comes in. Checking things off on a performance review isn't enough. You need to tell each staff member what they're doing that's great, and take the chance to compliment their qualities that you especially appreciate. But you also have to work with them to set goals, because setting and fulfilling goals is a big part of what makes work satisfying. In this more collaborative, democratic work environment, actively supervising can feel a little authoritarian, but it's a necessary part of the process.

The worst thing you can do as a supervisor is refuse to supervise. It makes staff feel adrift, like no one knows what they're doing or cares. If they have a strong work ethic and a strong sense of self, they'll continue along okay, but they won't rise to their potential. Worst, though, is when a supervisor neglects staff, and doesn't point out problems. Maybe you want to be nice, and you don't like offering criticism. Maybe you know you should say something but you don't feel up to it today. Maybe you hope it will get better if you give it time. Maybe you just live in oblivious-land until the neglected employee finally does something you notice, and then, watch out! Suddenly the neglectful supervisor overreacts and nobody comes out happy.

Hiring a great staff and ignoring them is like planting a garden and refusing to water it. Supervisors supervise.

Posted by susan at 3:38 PM | Comments (0)