Currin's Library Blog

  Words are Powerful, Grammar is Sexy, and Literature is Revolution  Inquiry Blog Post 4: A Case for Libraries in Places Where Rights and Food is Scarce ( Books; That is exactly how they work – Bilingual Librarian ) When I was twenty-five I volunteered in a community centre in a small village outside of Cusco, Peru.  Mostly, I followed toddlers and caught their colds, but on one rare occasion I was invited to join the village in an ancient tradition where we ran or hiked up steep hills to find ancient Incan ruins.  Once discovered, our rag tag group would join hands and dance around the rubble in what I imagined was an ancient fertility dance.  We would then drink Chicha (potato liquor) from reclaimed gas cans.  This was the most authentically Peruvian experience I had while volunteering.  Most of the time, however, I stayed in a beautiful European style mansion, foraying into the local village daily to childmind.  While there, I watched the aid o...

  Inquiry Blog Post 3 Librarians to the Rescue (When You’re Classroom Becomes a Bar Fight): A Guide to Teaching Teachers and Leading From the Library https://www.familyminded.com/s/funny-teacher-memes-21477c5b214f4574 “Okay children, please put away your lunches, put on your inside shoes, and WALK to the carpet,”  I said with authority. Naturally, Jimmy threw his backpack to the floor and ran, and so did Suzie.  They tripped on one another. There was blood. Meanwhile, the rest of the class made it to the carpet, but were now in full brawl mode. Having begun teaching when there were no jobs, I have taught almost every grade, and I can say with certainty that teaching grade one is tough.  Teaching grade 6/7 is tough.  Teaching grades 10-12 is tough.  Teaching is tough.  Some days your class devolves into a bar fight, and you’re stuck refereeing in a portable without a phone. And the thing is, you do not go home when the bell rings.  Instead, you ope...

    A Baseball Bat, Flames, and a Stack of Books: Inquiry Post 2 "I am on a curiosity voyage, and I need my paddles to travel.  These books...these books are my paddles." -Stranger Things, Season 2       Books were sacred at Seaview Elementary circa 1993, and Mrs. Cripps ruled over the dewy decimal system with such authority that when our school's gym burned down, the talk in our single file escape line was not about lost P.E. equipment. Instead, we joked about Mrs. Cripps standing at the library door, warding off the flames with a baseball bat.  This speaks to the efficacy of her library program; the school burned down, and books ranked highest on our eight year old worry hierarchy.      Certainly, school libraries have changed since 1993.  They have transitioned from analogue to digital, and although some librarians are still looked at as book collectors, they are simultaneously at the forefront of information technologies....

Inquiry Post 1: Fostering a Reading Culture With the influx of student teachers and the return to the staff room after Covid, the conversation at lunch has shifted to reading.  More importantly, it has become a conversation about how to effectively teach reading, and how student teachers feel unprepared to teach this most important of skills.  To be fair, I did not feel entirely prepared to teach reading when I graduated from the education program at my university, and creating fully literate citizens continues to be a focus in my teaching.  It is the area in which I am the least confident, perhaps because it is the area I feel the most pressure to excel.   I know that simply providing kids with a lot of opportunities to read is not enough.  In the article, “For Students Who Are Not Yet Fluent, Silent Reading Is Not the Best Use of Classroom Time” Jan Hasbrouck states that, “ ‘The National Reading Panel* (NRP) concluded there is insufficient support from em...

Libraries for the Future, Part Two  In my last blog post I identified four issues and areas of interest for my future as a teacher librarian: data based literacy instruction, differentiated instruction for diverse learners, healthy technology use, and authentic content creation. In this blog post I will share resources that I have found, which will deepen my understanding of these issues. Data based literacy instruction: This interest centers around a student’s ability to read text in any format, from print books to news websites because “[e] vidence shows that students who do not learn to read on level by 3rd grade are much more likely to develop low self-esteem, drop out of school, and engage in antisocial and aggressive behavior” (The Balanced Literacy Diet).  Certainly, the library is beautifully situated to advance reading and literacy in the school, and as such, the librarian should be at the forefront of reading instruction.  The following is a list of resources to...