Final Reflections

I opened this blog on May 2, 2009 with the following lyrics from the Grateful Dead, "What a long, strange it's been". I began my educational journey into library science in 2000 courtesy of Central Carolina Community College's LTA program. It's hard to imagine finally reaching the end of my studies--for now. I fully understand that continuing education is a part of the job. But the formal part ends today. Papers have been signed, FAXs sent, a parting luncheon with my internship supervisors enjoyed. Maddie asked me a lunch was the next phase was. I didn't have a lunchtime chit chat reply.


I tentatively have a position in the new joint library that is emerging from the community college library where I currently work as an LTA and the local public library. But I continue to send out job applications, including to K12 settings, until the county commissioners give my new boss a budget and she knows for sure who she can hire and what she can pay. Where ever I end up, I hope the job will always be about education and trying to make a difference to the people I work with and serve.


I think the headline on the latest NCAE newletter, pictured above, says a lot about the tough times educators and librarians of all stripes face in this current economy, and probably always have faced to a degree. Maddie is a good organizer for NCAE and made sure I signed on before I left here. So I've been getting their newsletters and political action alerts for the past several weeks. And based on what I've seen, both at the community college and here at RMS, I've written a few legislators and congressmen, especially about the growing gap in college readiness we see as K12 educators come under increasing pressure from larger class sizes, resource (including media) cuts, and unreasonable testing demands.


Last summer, Maddie gave me her copy of the state IMPACT guidelines to study for my praxis exam. And we read about the IMPACT study results in my last two classes. Great stuff if we had the resources to do it. We know what our kids need, we just lack the will and the means to provide it for them to the degree we'd like. The president of the local community college--the one my son attends as an early college high school student--wrote an editorial in the local paper about how his college may not make their SACS accreditation because SACS wants them to hire more full time faculty and limit them to 15 hours a week of teaching. His response included that there was no way his college could afford to to that under the current state budget and thought it was highly unlikely they could afford it during better times. Another conflict between the ideal and the real.


In my "spare" time, I parent a couple of teenagers. They are themselves making that painful transition to adulthood where the dreams and ideals of childhood meet harsh responsibilities of survival as an adult. A young woman, a former apprentice, came by the house the other evening to share with me the pain of reconciling the dream of the man she'd fallen in love with against the man she'd discovered him to be. In a lot of ways, this transition away from this educational journey feels much the same. All that we've learned and studied about how to be our best versus what money, time, and circumstance will allow. Sort of like being kicked out of the ivory tower and onto the street.


So today, the long, strange trip takes another turn. Well here goes. I'm as prepared as I can be and a pretty stubborn idealist to boot. Thank you for the vision and for all your help. I'll be in touch . . .

AMTR

Apparently, this is the big Kahuna of reports. The state mandated AMTR--Annual Media and Technology Report. Maddie has been laboring over this for days. She showed me the final copy she's getting ready to enter online. Twelve pages of numbers and categories for those numbers. She says the report is fewer pages, but more sophisticated in its questions this year. Several scans of the internet and calls to county tech support to find out exactly which Pentium processors need to be reported where on the sheet. And emails to the warehouse to find out what's on the RMS shelves there. And this after she and Robin have scoured the building to account for all 300+ computers on site.

In reviewing the report I was surprised to find that she has 18 iPods. She can't circulate them to students, but they were purchased with the intent that staff would use them. She hasn't been able to generate interest. When I worked at CCL, we circulated iPods to staff members and couldn't keep them in the library. But we were able to purchase audiobooks related to our leadership/business collection. Staff members listened to them on their daily commute to work and also as they traveled on business. Maddie doesn't have mp3 audiobooks in her budget, tho NCLIVE has just made several hundred available. Maybe once the AMTR is done, we can look at the NCLIVE collection and brainstorm about how to promote them.

But the big point of discussion in our review of her AMTR was her suggestion to ECU faculty that they create a class that focused on the "daily details" of school media that includes record keeping with this type of reporting in mind. As I've listened to Maddie discuss her work over the past couple of years, items like weeding, catalog maintenance, stats, inventory and year end reports have always weighed heavily on my mind. If I do end up in a school setting, my internship has exposed me to them, but I could certainly have used a class detailing best practices for accomplishing them. This is an important gap in my education. As are classroom management and web page design and maintenance. I know ECU can't teach everything, but Maddie's suggestion is spot on. I'm taking an incomplete in this class until my internship is finished as ECU's semester has ended, but I'm so glad to be here at this time to actually see the year-end requirements. Maddie says she's going to tell Dr. Dotson not to graduate me until I come back in August to see how the school year starts. Don't listen to her, Dr. D! (even tho she's probably right . . . )

Water over the dam

Lots has happened since my last blog post. Lots of different things, tying up loose ends and "information gathering" for year-end reports. Robin has been tracking down details of the technology inventory, Maddie has been working on the collection and compiling information into report formats. I've tried to make myself useful where I could.

There has been more proctoring. There was another day of EOGs when I got back from NCLOR training. There has been makeup testing for the students that missed. There was a horrible glitch in the scoring software that left children in tears over low scores that really weren't. Students with low scores are currently in "remediation". Students with good scores are currently in "enrichment". Low scorers will be retested next week. Lots of substitutes in the building while teachers are pulled for remediation. Lots of boxed sets leaving the library and groups doing reports while teachers organize post-EOG enrichment activities. Maddie says when she was in the classroom, she lived for this post-EOG time when she was finally free to do the units she loved that didn't relate specifially to state testing. This year she says teachers have been so stressed with demands throughout the year (I'm presuming because of state shortfalls for materials and staff) that she doesn't see a lot of the "enrichment" she would wish for. Lots more videos scheduled than she'd prefer.

Part of what I have been able to help with is organizing in the collection. Lots of shelf reading and relocating materials. Maddie is moving biography to make room for a "popular" series collection on prime real estate near the library entrance. Lufkin Road, where I interned last, did much the same thing. It helped promote reading by encouraging the popular series books, and once it got readers hooked, helped keep students on track with where they were in the series. She also has a professional development section for teachers, in the back room near the copier. She'd never really had the time to organize it. So after I finished moving and cleaning up the biogrpahy section, this second picture is my version of how the professional development materials work best. The post-its indicate where topic labels need to be made. I do think it will help teachers locate materials for themselves easier. And we found a spare displace unit she's putting right next to the copier to display and promote different resources to pique teacher interest.

Then there was more fun with the bar code reader. I spent much of yesterday on the 6th grade hall during 6th grade prep time trying to locate library materials in empty classrooms--AV materials, library books, maps, and LOTS of dictionaries. Robin says the dictionary buying binge happened the summer her now 24 year old daughter took driver's ed. Someone wanted a hardbound dictionary for each student in the school. Robin spent that summer cataloging and barcoding them. And there's still a stash in each classroom, and several hundred still in the library. I inventoried what I could before planning period was over and students returned to their classrooms. Then the job was walking the halls with a cart asking teachers if their students had library books to return. Maddie says she loses about $2000 worth of library books a year. I felt bad interrupting class to ask for stray books, but only one very tired looking teacher seemed miffed by the request. And I got a lot of books back.

I asked Maddie if she felt I was accomplishing the intent of my internship. Her reply was, "You been immersed into the functioning of the school. This is it." This is it.

NCLOR

I only spent two hours at RMS today, escorting children to the bathroom during the morning test-taking. At 10A I was at Randolph Community College for a day of NCLOR training. My training was offered by my community college, but NCLOR is largely at K12 resource so I was tickled that my training opportunity was during my scheduled internship time--I would not have been able to get off work and attend otherwise.


NCLOR, like NCLIVE and NC-NET, is another wonderful state-sponsored resource for educators. LOR stands for "Learning Object Repository". It is an online archive of lesson plans and multimedia classroom supplements that can be used in the classroom or imported directly into Blackboard or Moodle. Guests may view content that has been created free of charge, but NC educators can (free to them) request a username and password and access purchased content as well. It is hoped that educators across the state will be inspired to add their own creations to share with their colleagues. To this end, there are collaborative functions within the software that will allow teachers in remote locations to co-create new lessons and aids.


The instructor was from the company that created the software, and while he'd worked with the folks in NC who were actually implementing this project, it was evident he was not familiar with NCLIVE and NC-NET. It appears that both these resources may end up linked to NCLOR as well. I hope so. As harried as our faculty seem these days, one stop-shopping could be a real help to them.


Most of us in attendance were community college faculty. I may have been the only librarian. My login sets me up to view most of the collection, with emphasis on community college resources, but I do have access to lots of K12 resources and could request a K12 login at some point in order to see all of them. There was also a lot of professional development stuff, including tutorials for a wide array of Web 2.0 technologies. Maddie wants to brush up on her Web 2.0 stuff over the summer. I've already introduced her to NC-NET. I think she needs this trick in her bag as well.


Last day of EOGs tomorrow. If she's not too pooped at the end of it, we'll sit down and have a look-see. http://www.explorethelor.org/

E O G

While most Protestant churches and some modern Catholics have abandoned the idea of Purgatory, apparently it is still alive and well in the public schools where it exists in under the name E O G. End of Grade testing. A purifying state of limbo one endures for three days in order to pass through the year end gates to summer. While Purgatory was traditionally thought of as not Hell, considerable prayer was still directed towards shortening its duration. This tradition continues during EOG. Particularly on the part of the test administrators and their proctors.

I returned to Randleman Middle School on Tuesday, May 11, just in time for the first day of EOG. I was given a run-through of proctor training and a booklet to read which further explained what I'd just been told. Then I was hustled down the hall to proctor for the 8th grade science teacher administering the 8th grade reading comprehension exam. Clearly she had done this many times before, and with precision and emphasis, delivered the materials and instructions to students and set them to their task. All classrooms had been stripped of their posters and decorations for the occasion and the television monitors in each room ominously reported the time in large numbers. The entire building was in a state of hushed concentration. For 140 minutes (146 counting the two 3 minute breaks), the world stood still while students tested and their testers and proctors tiptoed the aisles looking for misalignment or worse.

I found it nerve-wracking to be so still for so long with nothing to read and nothing to do but watch others concentrate. The test administrator appeared to find it wearing as well, as she looked for ways to stretch and move that were not distracting to the students. And as if this all weren't hard enough, at the end of the testing period, students who had not finished their exam were escorted to the library where they signed in, still in hushed silence, and continued to work under the watchful eyes of Maddie and Robin. Maddie was overwhelmed. In a school of about 850 students, Maddie had well over 50 of them wrapping up in the library. The exams started shortly after 8a. The time on the monitor indicates when the last student finally left.

While we were eating a late lunch in the workroom, the principal came down for a de-briefing. Everyone was surprised at the number of students needing extended time. He expressed the hope that it meant they were all taking the exams seriously and the end result would be better scores. Everyone agreed that accountability was important, but there was much discussion about better ways to achieve it at substantially lower cost (the savings directed towards hiring more staff and improving the education the tests were supposed to evaluate). Apparently, nobody likes the EOGs but the politicians that mandate them and the testing companies that get paid for the tests.

Despite all this, there are two more days to go. As with purgation, we'll hope there's a little redemption at the end.