When I was a young adult, I was extremely organized. My husband teases me that I was one of the “smart kids” and I admit I was. I was in the top 20 of my graduating class. Not 20%, 20 people. I could keep track of things and information well. I understood how to use a filing drawer, organize an outline for notes in class, keep items for different purposes neat and tidy. I could navigate my world. Back then, the list of stuff I needed to keep organized was short and focused. The internet was barely gestating in the minds of computer geniuses. Looking up information often involved phone-books, indexes, card catalogs, and interpersonal communication skills – that means actually talking to the librarian. The HOW behind systems of information organization was integrated into my education from a very young age.

Even foundational everyday life experiences were different. An experience that stands out was my mother taking my sister and me shopping at the grocery store with her. When we were old enough – I think we were six and eight, she taught us to read the labels down the side of the grocery store aisles. Soon she used us as “go-fors” as she went up and down the aisles of the store, sending us to the far end so by the time she got to the middle we had covered the whole store.

When was the last time you saw a pair of kids under ten years old walking alone through the aisles of the local store carrying the carton of milk like they are on a mission?

This simple act of physically walking to where the desired item is and retrieving that item based on the use of written information, and completing the mission has been stripped from so many experiences in the lives of today’s children in the name of keeping them safe. Children three times bigger than the cart’s child seat is designed for are riding inside the parent’s grocery cart, often on a mobile device ignoring the actual live activity going on around them. This is training them to be oblivious to the omnipresent information provided all over in everyday life.

I am a teacher. I have worked with over a thousand students between the ages of 5 and 15 at this point. I still would not call myself an expert, but I have some experience.

As I was saying, I have worked with a few kids now and then.  I have observed that if you ask them where to go find information, they all usually only have two answers – the helpful adult in their life, or the internet.  This frustrates me fundamentally because I have assisted with and observed these students have well-facilitated lessons on information systems and information-use in their library classes. However, they often list Google as the source of information they are using. There is a huge disconnect. I am very aware there is a disconnect because even I realize I am fighting to fill a gap sometimes. I lose track of the source of some information I am functioning off of. I might have a need to act on information and can not find it, and then I am back on the internet. Things that used to be simple are both easier to access, and harder to navigate because of the internet. 

In my youth, I went to that card catalog with a search term in mind – the one that sticks out in my memory was when I searched in the high school library for “dying hair” – but then I had to physically walk to the stacks and use the Dewey Decimal system to locate that book and physically take it to the check out counter to borrow it. I remember the librarian smiling knowingly at me and trying to convince me not to check out the book. I was a freshman.  This memory now makes me laugh, but do you see that extra guiding hand in the acquisition of information for the young? Today, Google or Bing or YahooSearch or whatever search engine that is in use is the card catalog, it is NOT the book that holds the desired information. The internet is the equivalent of the library. But the information available to search is endless. There is no librarian asking questions about how you plan to use that information and gently ensuring you know what it is you are actually getting into. Not unless you are actively monitoring your child’s internet use. Even then, stuff slips in. Children need to know how to recognize good from bad on the internet.

I grew up information privileged. With a librarian for a father, I learned organically just because of our family life how to determine good information from poor or incomplete information. I learned primary sources and live experts are the best. I learned to question and get second opinions. I could not have verbalized this knowledge at 16, but I knew it – like a 5-year-old knows to look both ways when crossing the street – because I was taught to.

Why is this comprehension disconnect an issue I am concerned enough about it inspired an entire page of writing?

I have been pondering over the High School Juniors – not the Seniors who are getting all the attention. Yes, they had a huge struggle this year graduating amidst the various forms of quarantine 2020 brought upon us. The Juniors meanwhile are not on the minds of most unless you are the parent of one. The summer between Junior and Senior year is when high school students ideally are supposed to visit college campuses they have been contemplating and to narrow down their college options.  If that option is already straight and narrow, based on personal dreams or family traditions, incoming Seniors are often searching for those important details of information about that desired college: what extracurricular activity will push your application to the top, what exactly are the GPA requirements, health information, dorm life information, transportation information. All these answers are available on the ubiquitous internet. They are there for the taking. But to physically go preview the landscape is a whole different experience.  So many locations are still closed and options are limited. With this in mind, my question is, will the child who never went off on their own to retrieve the milk be able to go off on their own to retrieve that college education, then be able to walk their way through the proverbial aisles back to the home-base of the parent’s metaphorical grocery cart?

Parents of upcoming seniors, now is the time. If you have not already done so, send them to buy the milk.

Aisles of Life’s grocery store you may not have thought to walk down yet:

Legal documents every college student needs

Critical legal documents every parent of a college student should get in place now

3 planning documents every college student needs

More choose-your-favorite type aisle’s to explore:

60 questions to ask on your campus tour

College search tips

My name is not Dorothy.  I do not have an Auntie Em.  I can not see across vast flat fields from my front porch. I do not even have a pet dog.  However, the other day I did get a lesson in how unsafe it is to prescribe to stereotypes and live in the mindset of, “It won’t happen to me. It won’t happen here.” 

Tornado touch-down. Estimated 100 MPH winds. It was close.  Close enough I was honestly scared. My respect has soared for residents in areas that deal with this as part of everyday life. 

Our experience was mild. It started with a text from an acquaintance that works in emergency services and had his scanner on while working.  Tornado Warning.  I raised the alarm to my family. Social media posts, as well as the wind, started whipping around.

My son is a member of Scouts BSA, and I was very proud he did not skip a beat. Admittedly, my husband does have him well trained to hustle when ordered to.  He grabbed the emergency stash he had helped create and got to work on the space to shelter.

Those two had our personal “Room of Requirement” – the closet underneath the stairs that holds ALL those odd supplies you might need – ready in under five minutes. The three of us settled in with quilts, pillows, books, and devices to occupy us while we waited.

We inventoried our supplies. The emergency stash (previously discussed and arranged by my scout and my husband)  included things I had not thought of – like a hatchet, candle, and lighter.  Not for light.  But to dig our way out. The hatchet has an obvious purpose for cutting and prying. The candle smoke would show us the best air draft which would be the easiest route to free air.  When THIS is the conversation you are having with the ones you love the most, something inside you changes. This is suburban south Texas! This is Hill Country, not tornado alley!

 Oh wait… yes, Americans face natural disasters.

 Frequently.

I have been so blessed to have had very few experiences in my life that removed my American suburban luxuries. But those I have experienced are memorable. I thank my parents for turning the damaging weather event that was Hurricane Gloria in the 1980s into an adventure.  No electricity for 10 days or so.  But what I remember was the excessive barbecuing and getting to eat much more ice cream than normal. In 2011 when “Snowtober” hit Connecticut knocking out power for two weeks, my husband acted immediately using the snow that had just fallen as a freezer and moving food items around so they would not spoil.  The family benefitted from his military training and sensibility. In this recent experience, the three of us worked as a fairly cohesive team because we had shared previous experiences, training, and knowledge.  My son coincidentally is halfway through completing the BSA Emergency Preparedness Merit Badge. We all understood each other, the hypothetical needs, the actual situation, and it gelled seamlessly. However, we each had comments on how things could have gone even more smoothly.

When kids are little, they might wonder why they have to practice fire drills in brick and mortar schools. During this time of distance learning, these lessons on being prepared should not be forgotten.  I encourage you to have an emergency preparedness plan with your household. Practice fire drills. Quiz your kids on the “what to do when” scenarios for your specific region. Have a Shelter-In-Place area, within your current sheltering in place lifestyle – I know, it is redundant enough that it sounds almost funny.  Not funny was realizing that we were prepared, but we could have been even more so.  Practice makes improvement.  Re-evaluate. Re-assess. Re-establish.

  Do not stop being diligent. Be prepared.

“Be Prepared means you are always in a state of readiness in mind and body to do your duty.” -Baden Powell

 

Tonight, in my routine evening visit to my experimental quarantine garden, I had a few completely normal and average interactions. I left the spider with its masterfully constructed web on the far side of the tomatoes alone so she could catch the flying things. I saw a rarely seen shiny insect just minding his own business. Upon closer inspection, I confirmed it was indeed a young cockroach, and I squashed it a bit mercilessly. I flicked the pill bugs off the cucumber leaves and back into the dirt to do their decomposer jobs. I pondered over what has been eating holes through my basil leaves, as I have not seen any caterpillars and  I can never catch the culprit. I picked up several snails and relocated them to the open-air compost pile where they could eat last night’s leftovers and help break down the compost at the same time.  Win-win for everyone. Well, except the cockroach. Sorry bub, your species and mine have a long rivalry. 

While contemplating if I should sprinkle some diatomaceous earth around the basil since I can’t figure out what is attacking it, I was struck with just how appropriate the whole garden was to an analogy of life, and “the world”, and I thought it was so natural to turn the whole concept into a children’s book series to teach life lessons. While the stray cat who adopted us as her humans stared at me, I laughed out loud, and it probably looked like for no reason.

I had just realized “Ms. Crow” was visiting Miss Spider’s Sunny Patch.

I am certainly not the first to think about turning a garden into a setting for a children’s book or bring that thought to fruition.  Maybe David Kirk, the author of the Miss Spider children’s books, could bring his Tea Party to my backyard! Of course, I would want to invite the Library Mouse to the party, and could only hope Daniel Kirk would agree to set the sibling rivalry aside and join in. I am sure Peter, Mopsy, and Flopsy Rabbit would join us since their mother was always serving tea. Worm would surely stop writing in his diary to come play with friends.  Maybe if we invited The Very Hungry Caterpillar he could tell his buddy to stop eating my basil. I realized I could create my own characters and introduce my kiddo to so many old friends, and they could all live in harmony in our imaginations. And while we learn legitimate standards-based education topics, these characters could help us discuss the world – all of it – like the happy in the glistening dew on the web, the sad like the attacked basil, and the tough to justify… like the squished cockroach. The possibilities to mix the outdoors, gardening, books, and enriching children’s lives are just about endless.

Featured resources:

 SA Library’s Online magazine collection –

Green Living and Sustainability Libguide from mysapl.org: https://guides.mysapl.org/green

Get further outside and venture into the forest, even if just on social media…https://twitter.com/DiscoverForest

Middle school students, at least in the United States these days, have a unique challenge facing them.  There are different types of Middle school students.  You have the “new to this middle school thing” as transitioning low-level 5th or 6th-grade middle school students. Then you have the right-in-the-center middle school student. These 7th graders probably do the most growing in one year.  Finally, there are the 8th graders. This is the group that is often playing the role of “big fish,” forgetting how small the pond is and that they are about to be dumped in the ocean of high school.  There are varying concerns and learning diversity that goes on in middle school.

 And yet all of these  55.1 million students, middle schoolers included, suddenly found themselves in the same situation where they had to learn how to shelter in place and live in confinement, and many had to learn to swim in the sea of distance learning or sink to their academic demise. I am both a distance learning teacher and a distance learning college student.  I feel like a pro at this distance learning thing.  However, there is a challenge in that it is not equitable and yet the U.S. Department of Education stated in recent guidance that it “does not want to stand in the way of good faith efforts to educate students online.” 

Social media has been flooded with heroic stories (and certainly some complaints, but mostly praise) of elementary school teachers providing adapted lessons and doing things like sending “Flat Teachers” designed after the Flat Stanley book series, ding-dong-delivering crayons and paper to students with limited resources at home, and designing entire classrooms of Bitmojis so each student is represented. Meanwhile, the middle school teachers are scrambling to support students who are still only steps above children as “adolescents” on the scale of human development, but they’ve suddenly found themselves as the main caretaker in charge of the house all day, which often involves those younger siblings in elementary school. The ones hit the hardest are those 8th graders some with pre-AP or high school credit classes, but now going through them without the full support of a whole building full of their teachers, plus the PE coaches and counselors and nurses and secretaries and librarians who all keep an extra eye on their well being.  YES, all those school professionals are still available and still distance teaching. However, small daily interactions are missing. Unless you work in a school, I believe you can’t truly understand the value of those brief conversations in passing in the hallway from the PE teacher off the field, a student’s ability to simply walk into a counselor’s office for an appointment without having to navigate through email or parents, and that extra encouragement to feed interests and dreams from the librarian as they supply research or resources. The nutrition staff, the custodians, the instructional assistants – all these people touch the lives of their students in innumerable positive ways.

The schools are a village in themselves and they also create an extended village in the community.  It takes a village to raise a child. Distance learning is a crutch. As close to the start of shelter-in-place shutdowns as March 2020, a Senior Fellow at the Brown Center on Education Policy expressed their research that distance learning is not an ideal situation for grade school. But let me rephrase: distance learning is not just a crutch, but more like a pair of leg braces. Leg braces are not graceful prosthetics to launch you into the Special Olympics. Leg braces just do their best to hold together what is already there. With these leg braces on, we can continue to walk with broken limbs.  We can walk around the socially distanced village and interact in a stringent “Yes, look at me, see, I have braces on, so be careful” kind of way.  It is helping us walk through this educational struggle.  We will all be stronger in the end.

But as the person with the braces on, you still have to decide to stand up and walk.

Here are some learning resources specifically chosen for middle school students with the idea in mind that they and their parental units (that might be you) can do just that: stand up and walk through some learning at home.  Just remember, learning is the important thing. Expanding the mind, growing in experience and comprehension, developing skills – especially life skills that will support the person wearing the proverbial distance-learning leg braces. These are not resources that will teach you the fastest way to complete a Google form survey, or how best to fill in your slides project. These are going to require you to stand on your metaphorical distance-learning supported legs and walk to “school” yourself. But don’t worry, there are cake and cookies and games in there, too. 

There is so much out there. Here is a tiny collection of resources for middle school students: 

Welcome.  I am glad you are here!  For those of you that do not know me yet, if I had to label myself I would say I am a professional educator and encourager of creation. A few weeks ago a fellow educator told me I should write a blog. This made me laugh, but I was also honored to have an English and Language Arts teacher compliment my writing voice. I have often thought about writing for the purpose of simultaneously indulging in personal expression while possibly bringing something amusing or useful into another’s life.  

Then I was directed to write 5 blog posts as part of a graduate school assignment…AND now this endeavor is a must.  

But where to begin?

I have been struggling with this task for days until last night the Sound of Music popped into my head and I heard Maria reminding me, “Let’s start at the very beginning, a very good place to start.”

So, here we are, at the very beginning of a brand new blog, and this first post is about just that: Where to Start?

Have you ever encountered a fairly normal life event only to realize you had absolutely no previous experience or intrinsic knowledge of how to DEAL with the said event? These encounters in the joyful struggle we call life could be small, like having the wooden gate pull free at the hinge from its post, or maybe you need to find a place to get rid of some specific stuff out of your garage. Perhaps you started quaran-gardening and you are being overrun by zucchini. Maybe you are ignoring the need to tackle a large project like replacing the household carpet, or bigger, like moving to a new state.

These obstacles can sometimes hang us up, especially large or new or complicated ones.  My husband has often calmed me off a panicky to-do list cliff by reminding me not to try to eat the whole pie; just eat one slice.  The other slices will be there later.

I feel fairly confident in saying that these days in the information age, many people’s first instinct is to hop on social media and ask a friend.  Facebook even offers a “question” option.  Maybe this works in some instances.  But what you are truly looking for in this case is someone who already has access to the answers and is willing to give them to you. (Guess what, that is what librarians do.)

In many cases, straight-from-the-internet answers come with a price.  These prices you pay could be actual money like a consulting fee or the quote on how much the hauling company will charge you to rent the dumpster to clean out the garage. In other instances, that price will be the result of bad advice or the often unhealthy decision to follow trends without researching them. For instance, the Tide Pods phenomenon, a classic example of information gone wrong.  Some fun acknowledgment of this fact from Brooklyn, NY.

I am writing today to suggest to you what I realize to be the answer to my own conundrum: “When in doubt, go to the library.”

Even though Ron Weasley said this of Hermione Granger very sarcastically in the second Harry Potter book, Chamber of Secrets, the essence should hold true for all of us.  Especially in America where we are so blessed with vast and varied library options.  Any I.D. bearing resident in the US has access to whatever city or county library system is geographically close by.  Any student attending a public school in America should have some type of access to some type of school library.  And most of these mentioned libraries have an internet presence where even individuals in different geographic locations can benefit from much of the provided information without being a resident.  With a library card, a vast and diverse world of PROVEN resources opens up – and this world is free of recommendations to eat Tide Pods. This world of library information is SO vast in fact, that an individual needs another piece of advice to handle getting started there.

That advice is simple: 3-5.

Three to five, you say? Yes, three to five is the generally recommended answer to any question involving the concept of “how many?” Let me show you what I mean:

“Hey, friends. Where do you want to eat? “

This inquiry will usually result in “I don’t know.”

Vs.

“Hey, friends. Should we go out for Italian, Mexican, or burgers?”

“Mexican.  It is Taco Tuesday anyway.”

By constricting the options you provide a straighter path to a possible answer.

So, what are you going to do with all that quarantine garden excess? 

Step 1.) Check out your local library and search for 3-5 resources offered that focus on your vegetable dilemma.

Step 2.) Review the resource list and decide if you are going to borrow that cookbook through your Overdrive account, or attend the Garden Club meeting via Zoom next Thursday.

Step 3.) Move forward.  You are no longer stuck wondering where to start.

It is that easy: When in doubt, go to the library. Collect 3-5 options. Begin your dive into what will soon be the next item on your list of conquered things.