Librarian Without Walls

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,

Sometime in the last year I heard a story about "slow TV," a video genre in which an event is filmed from beginning to end - most famously, a seven hour ride on an historic Norwegian train that runs across the southern part of the country. Apparently there were lots of interviews, and shots of the interior of the train as well as the scenery outside the windows. Just imagine: seven hours of video, all of it on one train ride. Hundreds of thousands of Norwegians watched. So many viewers that the NRK, the Norwegian public broadcasting network, filmed several more documentaries, including a ten-hour train ride in winter and the first 24 hours of the opening of fishing season. For an overview, follow the link Clearly, we live in a slow time, at least for the last several weeks and for an indefinite time to come. I believe that slowing down is good for us: slow food? Always tastier than fast food. Slow reading? My favorite way to revisit favorite books. Slow walking? Let'

It turns out that a lot of people liked my first video, which immediately made me feel some pressure to make the next entry a good one, too. The result? In just 24 hours, I went from a no-pressure exploration of a new (to me) process to performance anxiety. Instead of just walking around with my phone, recording a typical pandemic day, I tried to be more "educational." That lead to a really bad video about how to make a no-sew cloth face mask and a boring setup for a simple assignment. Finally, I began thinking of vlogging as being similar to writing an essay, in the sense that an "essay" is a try; to essay is to make an attempt, to explore ideas, to see where our minds take us. It is, for me, a pleasurable way to write. Te result is the second installment of Pandemic Library . Let me know what you think!

So the other day, Mr. Durgin, CMS's intrepid principal, suggested that I consider starting a library vlog as a way to remind students of library checkout times and weekly library challenges. My initial reaction was an immediate and emphatic "No!" And then I thought it through. The vlog would be primarily for middle school students, many of whom love making and watching videos. Maybe I could inspire them to be guest vloggers. My sister suggested wearing a different hat each time. I thought about playing a tune on the ukulele. Maybe, I thought, this could be fun. I decided to name the vlog "Pandemic Library." Kind of catchy, in a current events, dystopian way. It turns out that making a video is harder than I thought. Not that I thought it would be easy, but I had never made one before, and let's just say that there were technical challenges. More than that, there were creative issues. And speaking issues. And organization and editing issues. There w