NY Times Article

Yesterday on the front page of the NYT there was an article about the "new" school librarians.

The article was a good promotion of what we do and why we are important in a school, BUT it portrayed the media specialist they interviewed, Stephanie Rosalia, as an exception rather than the rule of what a media specialist does in schools these days. As teacher ninja said in his post about it " there is no bad publicity" and I do agree about that, I just wish they had interviewed more than one school media specialist so the readers would see that "we" as a profession are a valuable asset to schools and that media specialists like Ms. Rosalia can be found in many schools these days.

What really got me through, was the comments about the article on NYT.com. One that had me thinking all day long was from poster suenoir who claimed to be a school board director. Her comments include ramblings about how schools should use the public libraries. Here is a quote from the end of her comment:

"If teachers used the public libraries, imagine what could be done with the space now occupied by the library. What if it were a music room? An engineering lab? Students have access to a librarian at public libraries, they do not have access to so many other resources. We need to rethink how money is spent in the schools."

I was so mad after I read that, I think I had STEAM coming out of my ears. YES the public libraries are great and we would LOVE to partner with them anytime, but, many students do not have access to public libraries and what I do is more than provide books, I TEACH, which public librarians do not do on a regular basis to whole classes (public librarians, please don't take offense to that, yes I know you teach people everyday, just not to 26 kids at a time, usually).

I guess what surprised me the most about many of the comments was that many people, educated people, do not know what we (media specialists) do everyday. I would love to invite suenoir, whoever she is, to hang out in a school media center one day and see what life is really like in there. Another comment said that the school library should be the heart of a school and I tend to agree. At my school we are in the center of the school and most days, I DO feel like we are the heart of the school.

I invite any of those NYT commenters to come spend a day with me and see that we DO make a difference in educating our children.

Welcome to My World

I have been thinking about doing a blog for awhile, but two things were delaying my decision:

a. what to blog about. Did I want to jump into the world of Kidlit bloggers or get on the band wagon of the mommy bloggers?
b. what I wanted to name said blog - something fun, something wild, something sexy, something not so boring.

Well, as you can see by the title of the blog, I decided to start a blog in the kidlitosphere (thanks to Elizabeth Burns for that term from her article in School Library Journal this month) but as you can tell by the title of this blog, I did not achieve a something wild, something fun, something sexy title. Instead the title comes from a lesson I do every year with my 4th grade students about biographies titled Biography Stew (which is a very fun lesson, which involves food and me dressing up, but I digress...) So for now, that's the title of the blog. Maybe someday when inspiration hits me in the shower (where it always does!) I will change it to something more fun, more wild and not so boring.

One of the reasons I decided to join the ranks of the already crowded kiddie lit blogging field is that I noticed that many of the bloggers out there are public librarians and not so many school librarians (or as we like to be called, media specialists or as I prefer, media goddess). My blog will not be as much about book reviews, but what books I am buying, what books I am reading (myself and to my students) and also technology news, tools and websites that might help the school media specialist or anyone teaching or raising children. Of course I might have to include from time to time a snippet or two about my kids, the Boston Red Sox and Jon Bon Jovi because, well it's fun!

Thanks for joining me at my table, lets get cooking.