Halfway There

Can you believe it? But the cash can doesn't lie and here we are, halfway to the goal!

Now that we're solidly into 2011, the SR book lists are done and we're heavy into the planning stages for Summer Reading 2011, my blog focus is going to be more practical in nature. I hope. I usually start out thinking nuts and bolts and end up writing library theory (along with the occasional rant).

And given how . . . wintry . . . this winter has been, isn't it kind of nice to start thinking about summer?

Cash in the Coffee Can: $250

Do We Sell Our Teens Short?

I was contacted by Queensborough Community College to be a partner/support organization on their application for The Big Read, a program of the National Endowment for the Arts. We've done Big Read programs before and we did it when I worked at BPL, so I was really excited to be part of QCC's project.

Then I read the text they had selected: The Shawl by Cynthia Ozick.

The Big Read is geared at middle and high school students with an aim "to broaden audience outreach and deepen participation, especially reaching lapsed and/or reluctant readers" so when I read Ozick's haunting literary novella about a Holocaust survivor, I will freely admit to thinking "This will NEVER work with our teens!"

I understand why QCC selected this text; they have a renowned Holocaust Archives and Resource Center they are planning to use to support the program, but I just got stuck on how hard a sell this book is going to be to reluctant readers.

But then I started thinking about my own prejudices and assumptions about what teens can handle. This came up a little bit in the In-Service on Tuesday, too. Early next week, I'm participating in a two-day training with People and Stories/Gente y Cuentos a reading and discussion program that introduces literary short stories to underserved adults and teens. The whole foundation of their amazing work is that even people without much formal education can interact with high quality literature in a way that incorporates their lived experiences as a valid means for understand the text.

So I've been reading Paulo Freire again and thinking about popular education and realized that I have been too willing to accept that our teens "can't handle" complex, moving works of literature in this "Jersey Shore" day and age. And maybe some of them can't, or won't, but that's no reason not to see what they CAN handle. And so I am preparing for the literary revolution!

Cash in the Coffee Can: $236.00

Part of The Post I've Been Struggling With

A couple of weeks ago, I walked through the Central YA room on my way out through the staff room at the end of the day and was struck by something so unusual I had to ask around later on to see if I had seen what I thought I had seen. There were teens, teen girls in particular, browsing the fiction stacks, talking about books and seeking reader's advisory from the librarians.

This doesn't seem like something that should have drawn my attention, right? After all, isn't this at least part of what a library should be? But until I walked through that day, I hadn't realized that I never saw teens browsing for books in that space before.

What changed? There are no computers in the YA room right now because of the construction, no tables either. And I had to ask myself if the teens who were now using the room, who clearly were taking ownership of the space, its collection and its staff, had been limited in their prior usage by the noise and crowds that had previously existed around the tables and computers. (BTW, when I asked the staff if they had noticed the same changes in usage, they said yes, that they had been remarking on it amongst themselves since the construction walls went up.)

But here's the thing, and the place where I keep getting stuck: is there a way for the teens that need the library as a space to use the computers and hang with friends to coexist with the teens that need the library as a space to find books, be creative and do homework? Of course, this assumes that these are two distinct groups ("readers" and "non-readers," perhaps) with divergent needs, which may not be the case.

Can libraries do both of the things I think we MUST do at the same time and well: connect people to the social and political resources they need AND connect people to the cultural and creative resources they need?

Cash in the Coffee Can: $222.00

The Post that Wasn't

I've been working on this post on and off for 2 days because I can't quite figure out what I want to say even though I kind of know what I want to say. I've given myself a headache, actually, which tells me that I need to throw in the towel. So here is what I will say:

For anyone who thinks we don't need libraries, I recommend the brilliant, if unsubtle, Mike Judge satire Idiocracy. Actually, I recommend it to everyone (with the understanding that the people who don't think we need libraries probably won't get the point).

To everyone else, I will add that I watched this movie the first time in 2007 after it was recommended by a library director speaking at the Urban Libraries Council Executive Leadership Institute. I watched it again this past November and was alarmed by how much closer we've come to the future world Judge depicts in just three short years.

Great movie making? Maybe not (although it is pretty funny). Terrifying prediction of our likely future? Sadly, yes.

Cash in the Coffee Can: $208

Awards and Booklists and Teens (oh my!)

I became a YA librarian for the books. As a children's librarian, I had started working more and more with tweens so I was reading a lot of middle-grade fiction (what we called "young teen") for work and a lot of YA fiction for fun. My excitement over the fiction is what prompted me to make the switch to YA services when I applied to NYC libraries and the rest is history. Except that these days, I have to admit, my interests are less and less about the books. Which I am okay with most of the time, although I do feel guilty for not reading as much or as widely as I could.

But yesterday I participated in the Queens Library Mock Newbery meeting and I am now 100% committed to having a Mock Printz Award for books published in 2011.

I had never participated in a mock award meeting before (shocking, I know) so it was interesting to learn about the process and really exciting and inspiring to sit in a room with other professionals who are passionate about literature for young people and actually TALK ABOUT BOOKS! It was so much fun, especially to hear the wide range of opinions on each of the books.

But here's the thing--the ALA awards and lists are for us and other educators. I have never once had a kid or teen run in on a Monday afternoon in January and ask for the winning books, although I've had plenty of peers do so. That does not necessarily negate the value of awards (and to a certain extent any list of recommended reading we as professionals and adults prepare for teens and kids) but it should be a reminder that many of these books will never fly off our shelves.

On still the other hand, that does not mean that participating in a mock awards process is an exercise in futility. It is something nearly all large libraries and systems do because (I think) it is a way to remind us as professionals of our own expertise and to empower the vast majority of us who will never be on a "real" ALA selection committee. In looking at the lists of mock awards winners NYPL, BPL and we have chosen over the last few years, there are often stark differences between them and the "real" winners, which often reflect our unique point-of-view as librarians working with youth in an extremely diverse urban environment. This is useful! We should know what our peers consider the best of the best but we should also be critical and think of what is the best of the best in our corner of the library world. And if nothing else, it's a way for us to access quality books we might not have otherwise read which we can then bring to those teens who will appreciate them.

Cash in the Coffee Can: $194.00

Context and Comprehension

Recently, I did a craft program at one of our libraries that had a mix of kids, tweens and teens in the room. In order to ease the process, I had created a list of the materials each participant needed to complete their project, went over it before I had each table come up to get the materials, then stood at the table helping them pick out their supplies. Here is what they needed:

1 large wood bead

1 whole pipe cleaner

1 half pipe cleaner

28 pony beads

1 bell

felt

So I helped the kids get their materials and it wasn't working. It was like they were ignoring what I was saying. Okay, I'm used to this, but something was kind of poking me in the back of my brain and about half an hour into the program I realized that they weren't ignoring me--they just had no idea what I was talking about. They did not know what felt or a pipe cleaner was and they couldn't distinguish the round jingle bells I had brought from a bead. As a crafter from the time I was three years old, this freaked me out completely, but then I started thinking about the big picture and I REALLY freaked out.

Reading is more just than just being able to sound out or recognize words and say them aloud. It requires comprehension, probably the hardest thing to both learn and master. What comprehension requires (among other things, I'm sure) is enough contextual knowledge of the world to be able to grasp or figure out meaning.

So using the kids in my craft program (who were wonderful, btw; this isn't a dig at them by any means) as an example, if they were reading a paragraph and it said something about a pipe cleaner, they don't have the contextual knowledge to know what that is, so that image is a hole in their comprehension.

This happens a lot, especially in as diverse a world as we all live in. I was in one of my classes a few weeks ago and the professor and several of the students had an in-depth conversation about whether Lil' Kim or Nikki Minaj was the reigning queen of hip-hop and I was lost after the first thirty seconds because I don't have strong contextual knowledge of hip-hop. My husband and I went with my stepson (age 14) to see Hairspray at LaGuardia High School and my stepson didn't get half the jokes. Again, lack of knowledge.

Here's another example. I was reading a book this weekend to review for VOYA and came across a couple of sentences that really jumped out at me in the context of this post:

"The angle grinder was a small hand held tool with a diamond wheel like a miniature circular saw used for cutting anything from concrete to tile."

So to fully comprehend that sentence, the reader needs to know what a circular saw is, and that a diamond wheel is a special kind of saw blade that has diamond on it to cut through hard-to-cut materials. As a teen, I would have understood this because I watched a lot of "This Old House" and spent a good deal of time in home improvement stores with my brother; but would the average teen girl for whom this book is written know this?

Here's another example in the same vein:

"We'll need . . . Some heavy-duty extension cords, a decent socket set, what else?"

See what I mean? How many teen girls know what a socket set is?

And when the texts young people are most expected to comprehend show clear bias toward the experiences of the dominant social group, those outside of that group are not only at a disadvantage when it comes to comprehension, they are getting the not-so-subtle message that their own context is not as important.

So again, I am making my pitch that one of the most important things we can do as librarians is to broaden the knowledge of the teens we work with so that they have a better understanding of the context in which they live and read. You don't necessarily have to bring in a socket set (although I am suddenly struck with the need to do wood craft programs--another initiative for 2011 to balance out the sewing programs--sweet!! Details TBA.) but think broadly about what you're doing for and with teens.

Examples: there have been so many really cool science discoveries in the news (my favorite is the one about the arsenic-metabolizing bacteria discovered in a lake in California) that could easily be made into a display, an impromptu trivia game or an online scavenger hunt.

Or what about the project ABC News is doing about simple, personal things we can all do to "save a life"? (I admit I didn't watch the special but I did see a clip about how Stanford University students developed warming suits for premature babies born in villages without electricity which is pretty cool.) The premise is to take a problem, focus on it and come up with solutions. We could do lots of things like this in the library, local problems, world problems, social problems, health problems. You get the idea.

Bottom line: if you want to help your teens be better readers, open up the world to them!

Cash in the Coffee Can: $180

A Christmasy (ish) Thought

I am not a religious person. I don't belong to any particular spiritual tradition or practice and I have ongoing internal debates about all of the big issues surrounding religion. But ever since I was a kid, my favorite part of doing the Christmas decorations was setting up our Nativity.

It wasn't a fancy one, but the manger had a loft and at some point my mother had bought a little bag of straw, so I was very excited to pad the manger floor with it. I don't know what happened to the original Wise Men but they were replaced at some point before my memory with three plastic Wise Men in a slightly smaller scale the Family. This freaked me out (even as a child, I had the librarian's need for precision and order) so I always set them far enough away from the Family so that their diminutive stature was not so noticeable.

Even now, far removed from those days, I still love Nativities. There is a church on Staten Island a block or so away from the Staten Island Zoo that does a live Nativity the first three weekend in December and driving by is one of my favorite holiday traditions (especially last year when they had an alpaca in the little petting zoo with the sheep and donkey! While it's factual inaccuracy irked me [librarian!], I figure it was acting as a substitute for a camel and let it go since I was just so excited to see an alpaca.). And as if I needed another reason for "Raising Hope" to be my favorite show on TV, they did a (twisted) live Nativity episode a few weeks ago that made me spit coffee out my nose. So you get the idea.

I took me a long time to figure out WHY I love Nativities so much. I was already working as a children's librarian at the time when it hit me.

To me (and this is my own sense of it, not at all grounded in any theology and I mean no offense) the Nativity represents the love and promise into which every child should be born. All children should be viewed as such a precious gift to the world.

Years ago, I was processing library card applications for the girls' detention center I was working with and I noticed one of the girls was named Precious. And I had to stop and think for a moment about the series of events that had to happen for a baby to be born, given the name Precious and fifteen years later, for the girl that baby became to be in jail. Without even knowing the real story, the idea of it broke my heart.

So I write all of this as a reminder (as much to myself as anyone else) that children (teens included, and adults, too--we were all children once!) are precious. And as much as they drive us crazy, they are each a gift of hope to the world.

This holiday season, be thankful for your own precious gifts and the gifts of those around you. May they bring our world peace in the coming year.

:)

Cash in the Coffee Can: $166