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Thoughtful Thursday: Odds and Ends

September 14, 2007

I have had trouble getting back into a regular writing groove for this blog.  We are finishing the second week of school. 

In my head there have been several blog postings written.  Unfortunately (or perhaps, fortunately), my head is not connected to the Internet.  So today I want to tie up some loose ends, snippets of the postings I intended to write:

Madeleine L’Engle

I was saddened to hear the news of her passing last Friday.  I loved A Wrinkle in Time, remember reading it for children’s literature in college.   But what I really loved was her memoirs that I became acquainted with when she came to our district in the late 1980’s.  Two Part Invention is a book that anyone in a relationship should read. I have created a page with excerpts on love from the book.  This is one of my favorites:

“Our love has been anything but perfect and anything but static.Inevitably there have been times when one of us has outrun the other and has had to wait patiently for the other to catch up.  There have been times when we misunderstood each other, been insensitive to the other’s needs.  I do not believe there is any marriage where this does not happen.  The growth of love is not a straight line, but a series of hills and valleys.  I suspect that in every good marriage there are times when love seemed to be over.  Sometimes these desert lines are simply the only way to the next oasis, which is far more lush and beautiful after the desert crossing that it possibly could be without it”.

I will be re-reading her soon.

National Boards Update

For the National Boards in teaching, candidates must create a portfolio of our entries. One entry is on collaboration and student work, two entries require videotaping and written commentary, and one entry is on your accomplishments of the past five years.

I am working on Entry 4, Accomplishments.  This requires technical writing about what the accomplishment is, why it is significant, and how it impacts student learning. It must also demonstrate that you are a learner, a leader and work to build community-family partnerships.

While I can write about many things such as creating this blog to hopefully reach families, and community, the after school writers club and drama club, family library nights, etc. It is very difficult to toot your own horn.  My inner perfectionism is  coming out in spades.  It is amazing what can get done instead of writing.

But the biweekly meetings, a peer support group of candidates, is amazing.  We meet for two hours, facilitated by a teacher who has become nationally certified.  She provides strategies and ideas and we are a writing group of sorts as we listen to our written pieces for feedback.

I am glad to be doing this.  It has really made me think about more intentionally about my teaching practice.  I am looking at the library with a set of new eyes and thinking about how to get more kids reading.  I am learning to tame that inner perfectionist as well.

When the Going Gets Tough, the Tough Meet After-school

For the eighteen years I have been a librarian in my district, we have had monthly meetings.  There were times that going to these meetings seemed a big waste of time.  The nature of the meetings changed about ten years ago.  Our library group seemed to move from discussing things that could be put into a memo to a more collaborative approach.

Our group looked at the state standards for literacy in serch of what we could dovetail with the classroom teacher.  It seemed that the classroom teacher had a dessert sized plate with dinner sized portions on it to teach.  Our group looked at ways to collaborate with our teachers.  It was a great model.

Then last year, we were told that the meeting had to stop, we could only be out of the building for trainings.  So we were able to squeak in a few meetings when we either had early release or non-student days.

The message this year is to stay in our buildings to collaborate with our staff.  Which most of us do already.  Here is the rub, we provide planning time in which grade levels can meet to collaborate.  Our  collaboration would have to be on our own time, on the run, or through email or at lunch.

So our elementary library group is meeting after-school, once a month.  So we can collaborate with our peers.  So we can continue review our standards and help one another.  So we can share books and workshops we have attended (or are going to attend like the Kidlit Blogging Conference in three weeks).  It is going to be an exciting year.

Happy Reading.

MsMac

Entry Filed under: Kidlitosphere, School. .