Shh! Don’t tell my mom but

I am knitting her a scarf for her birthday (August 15th). Here’s how it’s gone so far:

~Decided a few days into vacation in northern Michigan that I’d better get started on the project. Get out the yarn that Linda TOLD me in the knitting store that I should get wound, only I decided not to. I like winding yarn, I told her. It’s kind of soothing.

~Five days of untangling yarn follow. FIVE, people. On the bright side, it has some of the same qualities as doing a jigsaw puzzle. By the fifth day, my husband has decided to help, and his solution involves long long strands of yarn draped throughout the cabin while he works on knots. Son Alexander amuses himself by figuring out what would be funnier, closing the door draped in yarn or just sending the dog in the middle? The dog makes that decision for herself, and it is kind of funny.

~Day one of trying to cast on stitches, only I don’t like the knitting needles I’m using (circular) so I decide to switch and suddenly can’t remember at ALL how to cast on stitches. Consult the Internet. Try again. Consult a different Internet site. Try again. Consult a third Internet site. Throw ball of yarn across cabin in frustration. Alexander suggests that perhaps I will be more patient in the morning and should try then.

~In the morning, try to recall what I learned from a children’s knitting book and do that. It works! Stitches cast on successfully.

~Try to follow the pattern of the scarf on the row of stitches. Discover that trying to knit with the yarn I bought is like trying to knit with embroidery floss, especially the way it splits. Pull out, try again.  Pull out, try again. Pull out, get a couple of rows done, looks awful, pull out. Finally, success!

~Try to knit another row during a break from a game we’re playing (Settlers of Cataan–way fun, if you’re smarter than me) and wreck the whole thing. Pull it out and go to bed.

~Today, finally get a couple of inches knit! Woohoo! Can’t wait till my mom finally gets it and wears it and all of her friends ask her if a child knit her a scarf because it is pretty … irregular. Fortunately, it is supposed to be a “lacy” scarf so the holes just make it look extra fancy.

Anyway, my point is, we ask kids to learn new stuff all the time. And yes they have better eyes, more nimble fingers, and perhaps sometimes better instincts, but I’m sure a lot of the time what we are asking them to do is HARD! I think we might not remember that often enough.

Forgetfulness

In the past few days I have not just looked at but done something with 3 email accounts, two PBWorks wikis, three blogs (this one, the library’s, and my Youth Services dept’s), the Museum Adventure Pass database, ALA, Midwest Tapes, Ingram, Sirsi Director’s Station, Travelocity, Library Thing, Good Reads, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google Groups, the library’s catalog (of course) and SurveyMonkey.  I don’t even know at this point how many usernames and account numbers I am trying to keep track of but it’s ridiculous.

I also find lately that if anyone interrupts me for any reason as I am crossing the room to do something, by the time I have finished talking to them I have completely lost track of what I was crossing the room for.

Could there be a connection? Is all of my available brain space being occupied by moving between these different electronic resources? And is it maybe time for vacation?

Practice what you preach

So, I broke my own rule, again.  I’m doing my bedtime storyhour, using the funny new book Pete the Cat: I Love My White Shoes to do a color-themed program. I decide to use the storytime big book copy of Mouse Paint along with it. You know the one–three white mice who jump into jars of what they think is “mouse paint”.

Meanwhile, a colleague who has asked to sit in on my storytime slips into the room and sits at the back. Okay, fine–it makes me a little nervous but I HAVE BEEN DOING STORYTIME FOR 25+ YEARS! IT WILL BE FINE! Except for I broke my rule about checking the particular copy of the book I am using before reading it. And this time, the two middle pages are completely pulled out. Of course this is also the night I have decided to do without the big book stand because I don’t like the way it gets between me and the kids, so I am physically grappling with this giant copy of a book that is losing its pages.

But I am a pro, so I carry on valiantly reading and hoping that the book hasn’t lost any pages altogether. The kids are into it. In fact, little Yasmeen is chanting “purple, purple, purple, purple” as I read. So I read along as the little yellow mouse steps into the puddle of blue paint, and I turn the page expecting to see the purple puddle of paint that Yasmeen has been talking about…only the puddle isn’t purple, it’s green. Oh no! Has the book lost a couple of pages? Go back, check again…ah, it was the yellow mouse and the blue paint, duh. Yasmeen was just cheering on her favorite color, apparently, or else the color-mixing book was an excellent choice for her.

But I wouldn’t have been thrown off if the book hadn’t fallen apart, and if I had followed my own rule and checked it first, the book wouldn’t have fallen apart. And then the storytime ran short, because color books are invariably very short, so there we are…not the best storytime for the new librarian to observe, except in a cautionary tale sort of way.

This week’s storytime is going to be GREAT. The books will be in perfect condition, nothing will fluster me, and it will all time out exactly right.  You’ll see.

My new hero: Dr. Patricia Kuhl

I’m back from ALA, and it was a wonderful conference. Everything I went to that was sponsored by ALSC was beautifully organized and thoughtfully designed. I loved it all.

My very favorite thing was at 8 am the morning after the late-night Newbery Caldecott Banquet, and it was so worth getting up for. The Charlamae Rollins Lecturer this year was Dr. Patricia Kuhl, whose work on language development and the brain in babies is fascinating and really, really important. Here, with apologies for anything I am oversimplifying or am not quoting correctly, are some of the key points she made:

*Babies are all about social interaction and soaking up sounds of languages, but the window for laying down the neural pathways for perceiving sounds that aren’t used in their own language is very small–by 12 months, babies that previously could pick out sounds from another language stop being able to do that if it wasn’t kept up.

*Adults around the world, male and female,  talk to babies in that sing-songy voice.

*According to the tests they’ve done, babies appear to be very engaged in watching baby-oriented DVDs, but no learning is happening–the brains aren’t soaking it up even though they LOOK like they are.

*Every hour of DVD watching for a baby equates to five fewer words learned.

*Parents in lower socio-econonomic groups tend to speak in a very blunt, directive way to their children: Do this. Don’t do that. That’s why it’s important to get books in the hands of those parents to use with their babies, so they’re being exposed to the rich language they need to be learning.

The thing she mentioned that set the whole room buzzing was this: Most babies prefer people to talk to them. They like the sound of people using words. One group prefers the same frequency as speech but without the speech sounds–autistic babies. They can predict from six months the likelihood of a child being autistic from this. Obviously this has huge implications for early intervention.

Here’s a link with a little more info about her work, which I am not beginning to do justice: http://www.king5.com/on-tv/KING-5–94930854.html

The questions people ask us

Recently, I posted about the questions we ask ourselves. Today, I’m sharing some of the questions patrons ask us. A Library Board member asked recently why we hire librarians instead of lower-paid staff to cover our desks. I ended up writing down a list of some of the questions we’ve gotten at our desk in the last couple of weeks:

*What time does the library close?

*Can I have some trains?

*I am tutoring an autistic boy and the school says he needs C level books—what are those?

*I read Alabama Moon and The Million Dollar Shot and I want books like those—do you have any?

*I’m doing a report on earthworm regeneration. What do you have on that?

*Can I have a guest pass for the computer?

*Do you have any programs that would be good for my child going into first grade?

*My daughter needs help with 7^th grade math.

*That little girl over there seems to be looking for her mother.

*My son brought money to the library and those kids over there stole it.

*Do you have the 4^th book in the 39 Clues?

*My friend was reading this book and I think it was called The Ghost or something like that. Do you have it?

*I’m teaching a unit on triangles—do you have any stories? I don’t want nonfiction.

*Can I have the slider game? (Sorry)

*I’m supposed to read books between 340 and 490. Do you have some?

*I’m trying to print my report and it says I only have two minutes left on the computer—what do I do?

*Do you have any lullabies in Polish?

*I’m doing a report on railroads in Chicago during the 1800s. Where’s your section on that?

*Do you have book 3 in <unintelligible name of a Japanese graphic novel series>?

*I want to teach my child how to read. Where are the books for that?

*Do you have any books where the paper is all folded? (turned out to be pop-ups, not origami)

No sooner had I finished my list than I got exactly the type of question that illustrates why we need librarians. A 20-something woman came to the desk and said she was looking for a series of books she used to read as a kid, and the title of each one of the books began with the word “the”.  The answer turned out to be R.L. Stine’s Fear Street series, but when I tried to figure out later how I had gotten there, it was kind of elusive. That’s because when you’ve been doing this awhile, the path to take becomes much less something that could be diagrammed neatly and much more something very intuitive.  It took into account the patron’s age and demeanor, the fact that she’d also asked for Sweet Valley High, and that in further questioning it reminded her of Goosebumps and that she’d been a little older when she read them. Voila!

That’s the thing about being at the desk, and all of us out in the field know it even if some Board members don’t.  One patron will want the most mundane of information. The next patron’s question will require knowing your resources and your child development so well that you can match the question to the source and come up with the information. And then sometimes you’re going to hit that question that’s going to force you to really engage your brain and think back on the reading you’ve done and the kids you’ve known and something that you can’t quite put a finger on but you can get it.  We call it library science, but we could just as easily call it the art of being a librarian.

A hopeful time of year

This is the hopeful time of year. It’s when Summer Reading is just beginning. Parents and kids appear at the desk excited and eager to sign up for your Summer Reading club. You give them their logs and most of them are practically bouncing for joy. (Of course, you also have the sullen “My mom is making me do this” kids but hey, at least they’re signing up!)

Then you walk by the line at Circulation and you notice the kids who are practically staggering under the stack of books they have picked out–eight or ten potential treasures! Or a child asks you to help them pick out a book, and you get to wander the stacks looking for possibilities and making suggestions. I had a girl on Monday who came up to the desk and said, “I’ve read Alabama Moon and The Million Dollar Shot and I really liked them. What else do you have?” “What did you like about them?” I asked. “They were weird,” she answered. So I got to go around looking for “weird” books, by which I guess she meant exciting and adventurous.

So as tired and crabby as we will eventually get, this is a really fun time of year! And if you’re in the Niles Public Library area, feel free to stop by and check out our game and sign up to “Make a Splash–Read!”

I have to brag a little

I got a really nice email recently from a picture book illustrator named Nicole Tadgell.  She read my review of her new book Lucky Beans in the latest issue of The Horn Book, and she commented that it was like coming full circle for her.  She says an article I wrote for Horn Book years ago inspired her to become an illustrator! In the article, “The Faces in the Picture Books,” I took a look at a large pool of picture books and found that they still were very heavily focused on white families and white children.  Nicole’s new book is a story about a middle class African American family during the Depression, exactly the type of story being overlooked previously.

Of course, I got a kick out of her email, but the larger point is that it’s so reassuring to hear during this stressful, post-NSLS /pre-Summer Reading period that the work we do really can make a difference.  I was lucky enough to have someone take the time to write!

Questions we all ask ourselves

I think it’s safe to say that most Youth Services librarians ask themselves two questions from time to time.  The first one is, “They pay me for this?” You ask yourself that on those days when the job is just so much fun–when you are doing the Laurie Berkner Goldfish song with a storytime group, or when you show a child to the book they requested and they snatch it up and hug it. Those days.

The other question we ask ourselves from time to time is: “What are they thinking?”  And most of the time, we are asking that about the parents. I have enough material on this subject to do a whole string of posts, and here’s the first. Let me hasten to say that I am a parent myself and not all parents are crazy. But the sane ones aren’t so fun to post about.

My first What is she thinking? story took place not in the library, but in Lincoln Square in Chicago. There is a pretty tiered fountain there, with plants surrounding it and a black iron fence surrounding the whole thing. One beautiful day I watched as an adoring mother picked her toddler up and put him inside the fence, like somehow that fence was intended for adults but kids were okay.  The lesson her child surely must get from that is Do whatever you want.  You don’t need to follow rules, and feel free to disregard authority if you feel like it. I will even help you disregard authority. I think the teachers out there are seeing a lot of this type of parenting nowadays.

We see a lot of this type of parenting in the library these days too. Most of the parents show lots of common sense and are doing an excellent job, but again, they aren’t amusing to write about. But we do have to keep these parents in mind when we’re planning things, because we can’t count on them all to be, like Mary Poppins, practically perfect in every way. And believe it or not, in some ways WE are the authority figures! Weird, huh?

My new/old blog

Frankly, I’m not sure how I ended up here. I’m still going, “What? Wait…what?” That’s how fast the North Suburban Library System went from thriving, vibrant organization to out of business, thanks to the state of Illinois.  A group of very fine, talented, and hard-working people are being put out of work because the money budgeted is being withheld to the point where the organization can’t continue. Despite the fact that working cooperatively saves money, and the state is going to end up spending more by losing the infrastructure to manage some of their programs, the library systems are being allowed to collapse. It’s stupid and I’m angry.

So, my blog goes from being one of the NSLS blogs to being my own, and the one good thing about that is that now I can speak my mind without representing NSLS. The focus for now will continue to be working as a Youth Services librarian and manager, and your comments are very welcome.

Customer Service at Ten Thousand Villages

I just made a very pleasant trip to Ten Thousand Villages, a fair trade store in Evanston, and came away smiling like I always do.  It occurs to me that any place that enjoyable to visit probably has something to teach me in serving customers at the library.

It looks pretty. It smells pretty. It’s carefully organized so the customer can find things.  We may not think so much about smelling pretty in the library world, but we certainly think about appearance and organization. However, the two best things about Ten Thousand Villages are: It has things I want, and it has really excellent staffing.

Since their staff is made up of volunteers for the most part, they are there to serve. If they aren’t actively helping a customer, they are perfecting the displays or bringing out new inventory. They will step right up if you look even mildly puzzled, and they’ll demonstrate how something is used and explain a little about where it comes from. Since they are volunteers, they feel a remarkable sense of responsibility for making the store a success, and because they believe in the store and what it’s doing, they will actively advocate for it with the customer. It doesn’t come of as pushy, though. It comes off as people who love what they’re doing and believe in it.

So I’m going to try to remember that tomorrow when I’m working. I’m going to stay alert for ways to be helpful, and I’m not going to have my head down trying to finish my always-growing pile of work. I’m going to try to make sure that people walk out of my children’s department knowing that we have wonderful material and that the staff really believes in the work they do.  I’m not going to wait for people to ask me for help–I’m going to walk around and see if it looks like someone could use a hand.

Today at Ten Thousand Villages, I got a great Mother’s Day present but I also got a really strong picture of how to serve customers with heart and energy.