Librarian Without Walls

I have been putting off an essay about place that I need to write for remote 8th graders. I gave them the assignment and promised to do it, too - and to share the results. But instead of beginning my essay with an observation from the Lee Metcalf National Wildlife Refuge, I’m sitting at a round table in a corner of Kate Naughter’s 6th grade ELA class. writing the first draft of this in my favorite kind of notebook - Moleskine - using an inexpensive fountain pen I bought online a few years ago. Most of the students are writing, too, and Melford the turtle’s aquarium hums and whirs on the counter under the windows across the room. Two students near me can’t stop whispering, but others are writing, using pencils and paper. Every student has a school-issued chromebook and there is a constant push for the use of more digital tech. And I suppose that’s only appropriate, given our cultural moment, but I still crave the feel of a pen in my hand and the comfort of a good notebook. This is a war

 Ms. Naughter's sixth grade ELA students recently completed a New Year poem inspired by Naomi Shihab Nye's " Burning the Old Year ." We decided to show students how to use Adobe Spark to add images and music to their poem. I promised to write a poem based on the assignment and use it as an example for what students might do with their own poems. Check out the result: "New Year Resolution"

For a couple of years now, Kate Naughter and I have wanted to teach students how to do a podcast, or at least do one ourselves. We never found the time until last week, when we downloaded the Anchor Podcasting app and had a talk about books.  The title: "Tips for sticking with challenging books." Kate did a little editing and took a student suggestion for a podcast title. Check out the first episode of Get Booked .

Just about all of the questions for this week's post are science-related. That's only fitting, since just yesterday I watched my nephew defend his doctoral thesis during a Zoom presentation. His topic? "Lend me some sugar: how plysacharides and pleomorphism drive the dissemination of a fungal pathogen." I don't understand it, either. That fungal pathogen, by the way, is Cryptococcus neoformans. It will turn your brain into cottage cheese, basically, if you get it. The takeaway here is to beware of fungal pathogens. Just in case you were wondering. And thanks to Pam, my favorite sister, for helping me answer this week's questions so that I could go for a hike. The first question comes from "Unknown" in a reply to a recent blog post: "Do scientists like mutants?" Thanks for asking, "Unknown." You could have asked our nephew Steven; he's a real scientist.  (This question actually comes from my brother, who, contrary to what I use

The volume of Ask a Librarian questions has fallen in the last couple of weeks, but that's OK - we have some good ones this week! From the blog, an unknown reader asked, "What part of the human face is your favorite?"  It all depends on which face we're talking about. Consider the following famous faces: The "Mona Lisa," a painting by Leonardo da Vinci, has easily the most famous smile in art history: Granted, the smile involves pretty much the whole face. But I'm sticking with Mona as my favorite smile. We could certainly consider noses. For my favorite nose, I turn to Cyrano de Bergerac, the hero of a French play by the same name. Cyrano was a terrific guy: witty, generous, good with a sword and he spoke French fluently. The play about him even introduced the word "panache" into English, just to give us a word to describe extravagant confidence. But his confidence evaporated whenever he tried to talk to women, especially the beautiful Roxanne

Fifth graders are readin g My Side of the Mountain  now, as they do every spring. and Mrs. Bestor  invited some other teachers to read various c hapters out loud and to provide some links to other videos, web pages, and so on that would connect to the chapter that the teacher read. Mrs. Bestor suggested I film a bird walk in the Lee Metcalf National Wildlife Refuge, which I did. It was fun and easy: walk around a bit, videoing whatever caught my eye, and talking about it. We got to see an owlet and its mom. Easy as you please. Then Mrs. Bestor suggested, in an "It's-no-big-deal-it-won't-take-long" kind of way, that I do a video about Thoreau. Henry David Thoreau, who wrote a famous book about some time he spent in the woods. Thoreau, the name a lost English professor calls Sam. Thoreau's book, Walden , is famous and very much worth reading, but it is also a big, dense, sometimes slow moving book about nature, philosophy, and the nature of reality. Although Thoreau