Tales from a Loud Librarian

All the teachers at school received these before the holiday I am always working. Even at home I am constantly thinking about ways to improve library programming, and I usually have an electronic device - iPhone or iPad - at hand reading posts on twitter and seeing what is the latest and greatest in ed tech in the classroom. Sometimes we just need to stop, clear our minds and interact with family and friends without work on our minds.  No, I did not go cold turkey on electronic devices over the nine day break. I still checked my email and made a few Facebook posts for school and the library, but I didn't post here or to the library website or plan the lessons that I will be teaching next week. I just needed some time away. While away I read two and a half books in print and finished an audio book. You could say that those were work because I was reading books that my middle book group will be reading . I just find such great pleasure in reading well written literature that i...

I have spent the last 30 years working in public schools in Louisiana. I have to say, except when I taught in a classroom that was federally funded, that I never had the funding that I needed to run my program. When I became a librarian in 1991, I knew immediately that the budget from the district and the state would not be enough to maintain and improve the collection. There were some block grants and some school money that helped in the early years, but I knew from the first time that I stepped into a library that I would have to hold fundraisers if I wanted to provide my students with a vibrant program. You can't run a library on nothing though I wish that you could.  When I arrived at PFTSTA eight years ago, the district gave me a budget to match our student body of 175 students. I was starting a library from scratch at a new school. I needed funding. The principal, at the time, had received grant monies to outfit the school, and luckily, she was generous with the libr...

Two years ago, I took a group of about 9 members of Bookmarked to Baton Rouge for the annual book festival . We skipped last year, but there were so many young adult authors who were attending this year that I thought it was a good time to go again. Since the students had to get their own transportation to Baton Rouge which is about 90 minutes away, it cut down on who could attend. I had two members of Bookmarked join me as well as a sibling who attends a different school, and two members of BRiMS who spend every lunch period with me. The kids all had a blast. From 10:30 until 4, we attended three author sessions and three author signings, ate lunch, visited the exhibitors and authors hawking books at tables and climbed the steps of the state capitol.  Ruta Sepetys on the left and Chris Wiltz on the right The students with the authors, and I am standing on the right Our first stop was a 30 minute presentation by Ruta Sepetys, who I call my friend and who visited ...

Photo taken and shared on Flickr by SLJ I just had a very intense but wonderful weekend in St. Paul, MN with 200 other school librarians. Every year, for the last ten years, School Library Journal has sponsored a weekend where librarian leaders from across the US can convene and learn and talk and network and figure out how school librarians will save the world. We will you know, even if it is only one book or one kid at a time. It is called the SLJ Summit. The conference is free, and the many vendors help to provide meals and receptions where the librarians can spend time talking with their colleagues. It is very cool to be in a room with the many people that I follow on Twitter or through their blogs. It is impossible for me to process everything that I learned and talked about last weekend, but I thought that I would list some of the highlights here so that I can remember what the weekend meant to me. Slide from Dr. Mark Edwards' presentation The Summit opened...