Librarian Without Walls

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

Some questions fell through the digital cracks and I am just now getting around to answering them. Sorry, folks - too much screen time for this librarian! Let's begin with James, who asked, " What is the weirdest place you've ever been? If you could would you go back?" For the longest time I thought that Columbus, Ohio was the strangest place I had ever been. No mountains, no Great Plains, and so much humidity that some summers I never felt completely dry. People there crazy about a football team, Ohio State, whose mascot is a buckeye, which is the name of a poisonous nut from the buckeye tree. On football Saturdays, many of the crazies in attendance wore necklaces made of buckeye candy, a lethal combination of milk chocolate and peanut butter that left people well on their way to a sugar crash. Now that I think of it, the whole Midwest is just weird. Consider the Big 10 Conference, which has 14 schools. Really. Universities  that apparently can't count. And the m

The "Ask a Librarian" questions were certainly fun for me to answer, and I will continue to respond to those questions from time to time. However, while working on a recent blog post ( Pandemic Librarian Gets Back to Nature ), it occurred to me that I could fill a need that all hikers have at some point. I am, of course, referring to how convenient it would be to have a botanist with me whenever I'm hiking. That way, I could ask him or her about the plants along the trail. I do have a couple of botanist friends, but they don't always answer right away when I send them texts with photos of some plant or another. I won't answer your questions right away, either - but like "Ask a Librarian," the answers to your questions to the natural world will not be ones you can find with any kind of Google search, or any other reputable database, for that matter. So, without further ado, here are the first questions. The first question comes from Eowyn, who ask

After my last blog post (Pandemic Librarian Gets Back to Nature), Ms. Bestor asked me to make a bird lesson video for 5th grade. I agreed, since at this point I am saying "yes" even to things I haven't done before. The resulting video is more of a tour of the Lee Metcalf National Wildlife Refuge than it is any sort of lesson. But Ms. Bestor said that would be OK, and that I could do a lesson on a specific bird. That Ms. Bestor is a sneaky one; she knows how to get two videos for the price of one. Of course, the videos are all free, so all of you can get as many videos as you want for the price of one. Here is my latest video; I hope you like it. Pandemic Library, Episode 7: Refuge .

A couple of years ago, I took a week-long Master Naturalist's class at the Montana Natural History Center in Missoula. We immersed ourselves in the plants, birds, insects, fungi, mammals, and geology of western Montana. It was too much information, but I did learn about a couple of free apps that make it much easier to identify plants, butterflies, and pretty much anything else in the natural world that will sit still long enough to for me to take a photo. My favorite app is "Seek." It's produced by the California Academy of Sciences and National Geographic. The app is free and it's amazing. You can use it like a camera to focus on a flower or other plant and watch it work to identify it. Success is not guaranteed, of course - sometimes the app can figure out just the order or family. But with even what look to me like fuzzy photos, Seek provides a quick ID, as with this California Tortoiseshell butterfly: "Seek" works best with things that do

I am beginning to wonder if I will get all the questions answered. But I will push on, headed now mostly into the more personal questions I received. I begin with Arden, who has, so far, asked two questions. The second question was, "Are you going to answer our questions?" Her first question was, "How could you, as the school librarian, connect what you do in the library to today's student and their achievement and the Common Core standards?" To answer the second question first: Yes. First answer to the first question: Huh? Second answer to the first question: Almost everything I do in the library, from the books to the STEM labs to Battle of the Books practice to letting y'all come in during lunch and recess (when I feel like it) connect's to today's students. After all, yesterday's students have moved on and tomorrow's students are not here yet. Of course, today's students aren't here at the moment, either. And about the C

In an "Ask A Librarian" question, Ivan asked, "What is your favorite place (BESIDES MONTANA)? Montana is certainly my favorite place, as Ivan must have figured out. Besides Montana, my favorite places are mostly in Colorado, where I grew up. It was hard to pick just one spot. Rocky Mountain National Park would be an obvious choice, as would the mountains and valleys in and around Gunnison, Crested Butte, the Collegiate Peaks, the Sangre de Cristo Range, the Poudre River Canyon, and so forth. So much spectacular scenery to choose from. . . But I kept coming back to the mountains of home, west of Denver, in the Evergreen area. It isn't the Colorado high country, and our little valley won't make it on picture postcards in tourist towns. Even so, it is the place in which I grew up. And where we grow up, as the writer Scott Russell Sanders writes, shapes us in deep and profound ways, for better or worse. We moved to Evergreen in early January of 1972, when I was

In this third installment, I begin to tackle the more personal questions that students asked. Nothing inappropriate, as will be clear in the following. But first, a couple of especially deep questions. Louis asks, "Can you purposely make yourself dream by sleeping high?" I am going to assume that Louis means sleeping at high altitude, rather than under the influence of any narcotic. In my experience, sleeping at high altitude, as when, for example, I had the top bunk and my younger brother had the lower bunk, produced far better dreams than when I slept on the bottom bunk. But that might just be because he disturbed my sleep when his own bad dreams resulted in him falling out of the bed in the middle of the night and waking me up. Jocelyn came up with what may have been the most puzzling question: "Why is life?" If I were still a smart alec English teacher, I would ask Jocelyn to clarify her question, as in, "Why is life what , Jocelyn?"

Here is the second installment of the "Ask a Librarian" series, in which Corvallis Middle School students and staff ask a librarian to answer their questions, big and small. We start with a question from my sister, Pam, who lives in Greeley, Colorado. Pam D. asks, "Since you have been a librarian for awhile now, have you catalogued and shelved your books at home? And have you organized any of your other belongings like you would books?" As one might imagine, I have pretty much always shelved my books at home, since books like being on shelves. Well, on shelves and end tables. Come to think of it, on kitchen tables, counter tops, and even on the floor beside my desk. Shelving my books is like herding cats or getting a bunch of fifth graders to do the same thing at the same time. My books are, apparently, free range books. On the other hand, Toni shelves her books according to a complicated system that, near as I can tell, relies on shape, size, and color. She t

Last Friday, I invited students to ask me questions that went beyond simple yes and no answers. I promised that my answers would be more interesting than what they might find on Google. I hoped that I would get enough questions to get at least one blog post. As it turned out, there have been plenty of questions, many of which are of the "If you were a tree, what kind would you be?" variety. I'll answer the non-personal questions first. Ms. Bestor asks: "If I were to come upon a living thing of the genus 'Trachelophorus giraffa,' what would it be and where in the world would I have found it?" That's a tricky question, Ms. Bestor. My immediate thought was, "giraffe," which would put me in Africa. But clever librarians know to check, so I did. It turns out that we are dealing with a giraffe weevil , which is a beetle with long neck, hinged in the middle. It was discovered in 2008 in Madagascar, which is the only place you can find it in

CMS students who were here for fifth grade remember Nick Wethington from his inspired and inspiring journeys into making and tinkering. Nick works at spectrUM which, like pretty much everything else, has been shut down by the coronavirus pandemic. But he has stayed in touch and will be doing some virtual work with fifth graders soon. I miss his visits to CMS and I expect much of the school does as well. In the meantime, he has been watching the Pandemic Library vlog posts and has started a vlog of his own, or is at least making videos. He sent a box of hats and a 3-D printed duck to encourage me to keep vlogging. Nick is our first guest vlogger. Who knows? Nick and I could become a YouTube sensation, and you could see it all here at the beginning. Yes, we will keep our day jobs. I hope! By the way, I am still waiting for the first student guests to contribute a blog or join a podcast. Maybe someone out there would like to join the Bitterroot Book Talks and record a freewheeli

In these pandemic days, the middle school library - indeed, any library - is a sad place. Sure, I can check out books, to students who email ahead, but they pick up the books on the other side of a closed door. If I happen to look up when a student grabs his or her books, we wave briefly and I resist the urge to get up and let them in the door. I am aware of the irony. In what now feels like the good old days of just a month ago, I often chased students away when they knocked on the doors that open to the outside. We keep those doors locked as a security measure, and I am not interested in jumping up from my desk to let in every kid trying to get in. There used to be signs that clearly stated that those doors were not a student entrance. Who knew that we had more to worry about from a virus than a human intruder? These days, I would welcome a whole flock of fifth graders, even a gaggle of eighth graders, if we could hang out in the library and talk about books. Or about anything,