Is nothing mine?

As I witness the variety of assignments that the children have as JesusHigh, I am struck by how much collaboration is stressed. Of course, the world is becoming more and more collaborative and group-think-driven, but I am not sure that these groups are being handled well. For instance, the study hall kids were in here legitimately working on a group project. The standard complaints ensued: “They are not doing any work,” “I don’t understand the point of working in groups,” and “I wish I was doing this by myself so that I didn’t have to worry about other people’s work”. One of the girls astutely commented on how the groups were broken-up “Why is there a group of all boys? That is just stupid.” The boys in the group of all boys made the observation that “All the smart kids are divided into different groups, so we’re just carrying each of our individual groups. She should have put the smart people together so that we could actually learn from each other”. Interesting concept. I can see the teacher’s attempt at making the groups “even”, but as a smart kid, I can definitely appreciate the pressure of performing work for not only the self, but two or three others in order to make the grade. At this point, one of the girls (they were sophomores) asked “Does this ever get better?” No. Short answer is no. Your only chance is in Honors courses and even then a divide between smart and super smart is still present. Jillian Russo, anyone?



Is nothing independent? I know that we want these kids to share and be open to others’ ideas and needs and other stuff, but why must it always be at the expense of the learning of the outliers, both top and bottom?



As a bonus fact, I was chatting with a child development specialist at a birthday party a week or so ago. She and I—we had never met before—were really hitting it off because we quickly recognized that we were leaps and bounds more intelligent than everyone else at the soiree. I usually do not jump to this conclusion. It was simply a self-evident fact of the evening. Anyway—bonus fact! She was talking about how annoyed she becomes when people use a turn of phrase amounting to “we learned how to share in kindergarten”. Why is this annoying? Children are not developmentally capable of sharing until such an age when they are capable of empathy. Children in kindergarten who share merely doing as they are told; it is a trained response of which they are reminded constantly. Left to their own devices, they would not voluntarily share without a reminder. True sharing—that is, voluntary sharing—is not seen until about age 7 or 8. While it is possible that your kindergarten teacher attempted to teach you to share, no student learns this behavior until first or second grade.



In the spirit of sharing, here is a fun graphic on the current break-down of social media use. I love this break-up of the distribution into a Media Food-Pyramid. Also, note that gaming, which includes Wii fit and is in any manifestation the most physically active portion of media consumption, is in the place of “Fats” on the traditional food pyramid.

Bliss

I forgot how exhilarating it is to have a snow day! And then to have two...I cannot describe my pure elation! I did *nothing* productive. I even had time to make some delicious soup. I had some red potatoes and thought to myself: soup. And then I made it. I threw in some corn and some vegetable broth and some spices and it is delicious, Thank God, because I have leftovers. And we all know how I feel about wasting food--especially homemade food. Almost as strongly as I feel about wasting alcohol.

Of course, working at the public library we would close for weather, but it was always kind of stupid. Like...closing early at 6 instead of 8--we were already there, just let me get some work done and by 8 all of the idiots will be off of the road. The other annoyance was missing a snow day. Being hourly union people, we were still paid for closed times when we were scheduled, which was great, but if you weren't scheduled the snow day it just kind of sucked. Instead of being able to get your errands done that day, you were trapped in your home and would most likely have to go to work the next day! Lame.

Being salaried, however, makes snow days the most wonderful feeling of all--especially these past two where I've had the great fortune of knowing ahead of time. Fabulous!

So, I get two weekends this week, since I was just given a two-day break and work today (jeans day!) and have the regular weekend starting this afternoon. Shots all around!

I am guessing that we have all seen this, but I still find it delightfully entertaining:




Dear Fox News people: Egypt is the one on the left with the giant river. Yes, you do know the name of one country in Africa.

Inter-what?

The past few days have found me having a number of conversations about the interwebs. Mostly professional, but also personal.

Like, with MMMono, who now refuses to go to Egypt because she would not be able to blog there. The World Wide Web...apparently Egypt is not part of the world anymore...? I want to go to Egypt...on a nile cruise. And then I will discover the lost library of Alexandria. Aussie ftw!

I also found this bit of fun. It won't let me embed the video, but let me tell you...totally worth following the link.

P.S.~ Toi! I have been trying to break the habit of putting two spaces after a period. So far, slow going. Just so you know, I went back through this post and deleted all of the second periods. Now that's dedication!

Breather

Guys, we might have a problem.

Because exams were last week, we had no school yesterday. Hurray! Of course, this made going to work today really hard. Difficult to the point that I had a light bulb moment in the middle of the day that I do not fully enjoy my job.

Do we think this was a legit light bulb, or more of a winter-blahs generic blah that landed in the middle of my post-lunch slump?

Hachi! -- God Bless you.

I never thought, in a million years, that I would say this: The absolute best time to get sick is exam week. Seriously, though! As the school librarian, I get all of the half days, with none of the studying or extra work of grading. Awesome!


So, I got sick Monday afternoon, slept for 10 hours, went to school on Tuesday (Stop judging me right now, Mono! I used all of my personal days when I went to Europe, so barring the loss of a limb or the plague, Aussie goes to school. Besides, I am certain that one of the children gave it to me in the first place) got home at 11:15, ate some soup and napped from about noon until 6. Sweet nap, right? Then I watch Hachi, and then I proceeded to get seven hours of sleep before getting up for work. I feel much better.


Friends, I do not take medicine when I am sick...I am more of a sleep-it-off kind of a girl. You see, I detest taking pills in the best of times, so when I am exhausted, sleeping just makes the most sense.


Speaking of Hachi, have you seen it? You should! This dog is the definition of adorable. This story is the definition of heart-warming. I want one.

Carlton

Guys, are you not feeding him when you come to visit? When I opened my blog today, he was in the corner of his tank, crying. At least say "hi" to him before you exit the page.

Speaking of Carlton, it has come to my attention that I get a little too attached to non-existent things, provided that these things are adorable. For instance, Carlton. I legitimately was concerned that he was not being fed enough while I was gone for a week in Europe. I...almost asked my dad to feed him in addition to my real-life fishes.

Some of you may know that I am adicted to FarmVille on the Facebook. It is not so much that I am addicted as that I love my mini, virtual animals. I simply cannot bring myself to abandon them. In fact, my devotion to my farm served as a catalyst in my becomming vegan. No, I will never admit this outside of this blog. You see, friends, here I am playing FarmVille and I am so in love with my faux-farm animals that I cannot even refer to them as "fake" farm animals. Another friend, commenting on FarmVille, says "Why do pigs bring you truffles? Why can't they just be honest and call it bacon?" This horrified me. I would never, I mean NEVER, slaughter my imaginary pigs for imaginary bacon. I love them too much. I would not play FarmVille if pigs gave you bacon instead of truffles.

Naturally, the outrage at the thought of virtual animals dying for food made me reexamine my feelings on actual food. Then I made the fatal mistake of becoming informed. That is when meat-eater Aussie died--I could no longer ignore, for convenience nor social acceptance, the violent tug at my being to stop taking part in something that I could never truly stand behind. For me, it is "Go big or go home," so vegetarianism obviously means veganism for the likes of me.

This love of the adorable also makes itself manifest in my ridiculous gourde collection. Have you seen them? They are all itty bitty--and I name them. And when I eat things. I literally always choose the smallest, most adorable roll from the basket.

Is this really a problem? Have we reached that point, yet, where someone should be staging an intervention?

It's funny because you're stupid.

Do you do that thing where you leave emails that you need to answer later or reference again in the inbox? I do! Which is just silly, because I have Gmail. Archiving is magic! As of 3pm on Friday, my inbox had 294 emails in it. I went through this weekend and saved recipies on my laptop and saved pictures and bookmarked links that I wanted on my home computer. Now, I am down to 17 emails in my inbox. 17. Whoops--can't capitalize a number. SEVENTEEN. Epic.

I found this AWESOME error today on a website:

"Intern, many people tend to go sometime wearing the wrong size without noticing the discomfort."

I would like to analyze this quote further. We can surmise that interns, the modern form of socially acceptable slavery, are many. Much like in other forms of historical oppression, the oppressed often begin as a small group which in turn grows in numbers and can now be considered "many people". Of course, interns are unpaid, so it stands to reason that interns are poor. Monetarily speaking--they are a robust, spiritual people filled with hope for the future. It is clear that the lack of understanding that they are in discomfort due to this ill-fitting clothing is two-fold. First, the interns are unaware of properly fitting clothing, or if they were at one time aware, have come to terms with their lot in life, abandoning all hope. Second, interns are virtually incapable of noticing bodily discomfort from clothing, as they are mentally bullied, hazed, and overworked.

The word choice "sometime" has often confused me. "some time" and "sometime" are denotatively the same. Is there a distinction in how they can be used?

It's exams this week...which means 4 half days and next Monday off! Sweet!

For Realsies

I am stunned by the lack of drive, ingenuity, intellect and general understanding in this school. And this is a *good* school. People that graduate from here go to Ivy League colleges. People that graduate from here also go to Community, but hey. Most of all, I am stunned by the generational gap between myself and these students. While I may have a solid decade on the youngest freshmen, I only have 6 years on the seniors.

Mostly, I am bamboozled by how lazy they are. They are lazy. Also, how do you make it to your senior year of high school and not possess the knowledge necessary for using an index? I am astonished. I am growing further under the impression that these students are not becoming information literate because their teachers assume that they are. The teachers, though information literate, are not technologically savvy, and few educators understand the difference, so the difference is seldom imparted to students. This misinformation on the nature and use of information and information literacy creates a dynamic of assumed competency. And then teachers wonder why student papers are lacking a certain something (though some don’t put their fingers on it, that “something” is good resources). While students are intellectually capable, technologically enabled and generally desirous of becoming information literate, the false assertion that they are at this level of scholarship because of their ready access to technology does not actually make this a reality.

Today, for instance, I had a class come in to use the library to work on a research project. For them, “use the library” is translated into “use the computers to use Google”. They were vocally complaining to their teacher using the now standard line “Everything is on the internet.” No, no it is not. And, just for your information, you cannot access approximately 95% of the internet. At least. We actually do not know how big the interwebs are, so that is a generous estimate. The most conservative estimates find that 0.002% is accessible to the common person. That is the definition of daunting. And these students think that everything that they need will always pop-up on the Top 10 of a Google search.

But, I digress.

They are complaining quite vocally to their teacher because their paper requires 3 book sources. Three! They each have to open at least 3 books out of five total sources for their paper. And they have to cite each resource at least once in their paper. “That,” as one student sagely pointed-out to the teacher, “means we have to use more books than websites.”

Image the stunned silence of the students when I informed them that I had not pulled any books off of the shelves for them like I normally would to make their lives easier because there were too many for me to justify pulling them. Because their papers are on World War II, only the most written about topic in the world. That, and Shakespeare.

I had pulled materials that were not from the 940s, but outside of that, I just pointed down the right aisle and told them to share. They. Freaked. Out. I spent the next 10 minutes explaining how to use the title to help, as well as reading through the table of contents and looking in the index for your topic. Things a 5th grader can handle.

Last library-heavy post for a while. Promise. Fluffy posts devoid of substance to come. . .

Wit's End

I am at that point in my job where I have too much to do and too little time to do it, so I work really hard in the morning and then I do nothing all afternoon. Of course, this is fine, the afternoons here are fairly short…plus that is when the study hall kids come down.

As an aside, can I just say how much I hate the concept of study hall. Complete bullshit. Just take another class. If you need something easy, take Art or Band or Choir or Weight lifting. Do something productive with your day. I know that there are 7 hours in the day at Catholic school, but deal.

So, here I am, brain-fried, but I still need to do ** something ** with my day. One of my side projects that everyone continually tells me is an “Over the Summer Project” is creating a library website for the two schools. I am having the issue that, coming out of a union job, I am now morally opposed to doing work outside of the work day. Sometimes I don’t do it during the work day. Hee.

Creating a school library website is really not that bad, except that I have sooooooo much else to do, like weed the collection, write detentions, give lectures on information literacy and why Wikipedia is not a reputable resource for academic research, yell at students to tuck-in their shirts, pull books for student use on a paper, trouble-shoot OpenOffice Writer (EVIL!), catalog materials, figure out how best to reconfigure the library so that it is actually a library, and all of this while being continuously interrupted by teachers to unjam the copy machine (glad I got that Masters Degree) and listen to them bitch about the good old days when they had a fulltime librarian.

So, brain-fried, website building… My first step is to write-up the content so that I can figure out how I want to manipulate it into a user-friendly site. The aspect that I am working on right now is a subject guide or a pathfinder. Why reinvent the wheel? I started looking through the Internet Public Library’s website and other reputed, esteemed Pathfinders.

They all suck. Hard core suckage. Worst. Resource. Ever! The IPL pathfinder has so many broken links that I about wanted to cry. They pay people to maintain this! Please hire me. I would gladly troll the internet looking for cool, useful sites and then check that the links worked once a month or so. It simply cannot be that over 50 links stopped working over the weekend, kids. Get your shit together.

To make matters worse, the links that are working are not even what I would call resources. They are products or just plain useless. If I had time and expertise, I would love to write an Aussie-approved internet. I could have my own domain so that people would know that their search was producing quality results. No teacher would ever question a works-cited entry again.

Then again, maybe I just need to revisit this when I am not 15 minutes away from the end of the school day. And it is snowing!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!1

Epic

I informed MMMono as I left work today that my blog entry tonight would be epic. I am **certain** that it would be if I could only recall what it was that I was going to impart on you all.

At least it snowed today.

Chamber Choir started up again tonight, so that's good.

Ooo! And I had dinner with ...do you have a secret blog name? at Marie Catrib's. Delicious as always. I finally tried one of their vegan cookies. Molasses. Bigger than my face. Best. Cookie. EVER!

I am thinking about taking up Yoga.