March 11--A visit with Maddie

No, this is not Maddie. Maddie is on the right. Maddie rescued this former art project from a trip to the dumpster. She is now the library mascot. Maddie will have to tell the rest of that story.

My MLS has been earned completely online so there hasn't been much opportunity to make friends--with the exceptions of Maddie and Sonja--two school librarians who came to ECU for their MLS and who are now mentoring me through my education classes. I think they figured out early on I needed the mentoring.

Maddie presides over the Randleman Middle School Library, a cheery and spacious place. On March 11, I spent the day with Maddie to complete as much of my internship checklist as possible, the details of which I will try to paste into the following post. I had a great time with Maddie and her student assistants and was given the grand tour of the school by a retired teacher who now volunteers there, knows everybody, and clearly loves and is loved by students and faculty. It was great to have her energy shepherding me around while Maddie held down the fort.

And it was equally great seeing Maddie in action. Maddie is a teacher with many years of classroom experience before pursuing her MLS. We've taken a number of classes together, and ultimately, most of our classes have been the same. So our library conversation was all very familiar--the technology, the policies, the nuts and bolts details of running the shop. But the real gap in my education is in classroom management. I've spent 25 years teaching adults, and I do that well, but children are another species all together. Parent that I am, they are still not my natural environment. Maddie, on the other hand, is in her element teaching children. And she has a gift for it. The highlight of my day was watching Maddie guide four wiggly 6th grade English classes through the aspects of a novel. I've since been reading some on classroom management, specifically Shouting Won't Grow Dendrites. Not only has my reading been enhanced by what I saw, but so has my appreciation of all that Maddie did. Just as natural as walking, she incorporated a variety of learning strategies--auditory, visual, and kinesthetic. She related her material to familiar experiences, she promoted the books in her library, and she kept it fun while keeping it to the point.

I learned a lot about middle school that day, about the collegiality among staff members, about the way time flows, and about the sense of caring that was all around the place. And I heard some about the frustrations that can be found in any workplace. But most of all, I learned that I have a lot to learn. I hope Maddie doesn't mind another student.