It’s almost that time again. Time for all of us school librarians and teachers to pack away the short-shorts, scrape off the beach sand, and start going to bed at a reasonable hour once more. Time for lesson plans, and inventory orders, and new September signage. It’s time for school, ladies and gentlemen, and the start of the next year of academic awesomeness.
Are you ready? Is your bag packed and stocked with notebooks, clean writing pens, and fresh, sharp crayons wrapped in perfect paper? New cardigans folded and washed? Back to school as a grown up can be a huge undertaking; supplies can get expensive, and the gear shift from summer to school can leave you feeling dizzy and suddenly stressed out.
If I had but two mottos in life to cling to, they would be:
- Don’t sweat the small stuff.
- Paying retail is for suckers.
So here are a few back to school necessities that won’t break your budget (or your brain), while still being fabulous.
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Discounts Are Your Friend
They really, really are. And many stores offer teacher discounts to educators all year long (click for a handy dandy list.) Your ID can earn you a discount on everything from clothing to supplies to technology to magazines. My favorites include the Container Store (they also give a mean birthday discount) and Aerosoles. Awesome supplies AND comfortable shoes! What’s better than that?
Think Outside Your Box Store
Some of the best bulletin board and art supplies I’ve gotten have been snagged at the dollar store, and most of them aren’t paper. Anything from a shower curtain to a shoe tree can be made useful and awesome with a little imagination and some time.
No dollar stores near you? Try a closeout store like Lot Less or Big Lots for everything from a new backpack to cheap iPad/micro-USB chargers to folders. Even the clearance section of a TJ Maxx has some cool stuff to use/repurpose, if you don’t mind poking through.
Refresh Your Curriculum
Maybe you’re looking for a new way to teach a lesson, or use your iPad, or work with a smartboard. There are hundreds of online resources for educators seeking new ideas. Looking for an app to shine with? YALSA blog has you covered. Need a bit of inspiration for your bulletin board space? Pinterest makes it possible. Walk to talk to other educators from other schools to hear about best practices, classroom methods, research needs, or the best brand of binders to use? Reddit to the rescue.
Do Your Homework
Remember that anime series your kids were raving about all of last year? Or that game they couldn’t stop playing? Or that tv show they all watched? Yeah. Give it a try. Sit down and watch a few episodes of Attack on Titan, or play Minecraft for an afternoon. Your advisory or reading group will love that you gave it a shot, and even if you have no interest in continuing, just trying will count for a lot.
Establish a Goal
Your students and their parents are coming in this year with goals and hopes of their own, whether it’s to do better in math or to find someone to sit with at lunch. Make a goal of your own. Maybe it’s professional (“I want to improve my understanding of ___ in order to_____ so that I can _____ my library/teaching.”) Maybe it’s social (“I’m going to go out with people after work, and talk to that teacher in the foreign language department.”) Maybe it’s personal (“I’m not going to get crazy over _____.”) Pick something that you want out of this year, and try and remind yourself of it as you go.
“Idina” That Noise: Let It Go
Last year is last year. Whatever drama, angst, worries, nerves, tension, anger, frustration, or ennui that you felt as last year wound down, leave them there. This is a new year and a new day, and you can start as fresh as you want to. And just like fresh, clean sheets are always the best, be it bedding or loose-leaf, so is a new school year. Like my students tell me: “Just Idina that stuff. Let It Gooooooooooo!”
Rage, Rage Against the Dying of the Light
Adulthood is childhood with no curfew. Until the school year starts up, and then you absolutely have a curfew if you don’t want to fall asleep at your desk. The summer exists for you to refresh yourself, rejuvenate your mind and body, and go back with a positive attitude and satisfyingly sunkissed. Plan something over your last few days of freedom and enjoy yourself while doing it. This is your summer, too, and you’ll be much happier come the slush and cold of February if you squeeze the last bit of August out of the tube now.
Veteran school librarians and newbies, alike: what are some of your favorite/absolute-musts for starting back with your right foot forward after a summer break?
Heading into my final year of high school, I realize I have much to look forward to. I’ll be (hopefully) passing my driver’s test in a week and, in addition, have my own car for the year. I’ll be taking many anticipated, higher-level courses that I’ve been thinking about since I was a freshman. I’ll be a leader in many of the clubs and activities I’ve been in for the last three years. Yet, despite all these grand new beginnings to kick off my new year, I know that there is also one grand ending: summer reading.
Having taking honors/AP English for all four years, a part of my summer has always belonged to the written word. Though there are novels I willingly pick up on my own when the warm months roll in, I can’t attest to having always been enthralled by the books handpicked for me. When I first heard about summer reading from my twin sisters, who were just heading into ninth grade at the time, I was appalled. Isn’t summertime designed for children to relax? I argued. To take a break from books and education? Of course, I’d watched movies with characters that had summer reading and even, ironically, read books with this same act of atrocity. But I never thought that I, a measly eighth-grader, would have to suffer through it. It wasn’t even that I hated the idea of reading; as I stated before, I willingly pick up books, quite often in fact. It was more the idea that I would have to read a book that someone else wanted me to read. It was the idea that I couldn’t choose what I wanted to read.
So, in the summer bridging middle school to high school, I begrudgingly opened the letter declaring the books I would have to read that summer. A Separate Peace by John Knowles (which helped me properly learn how to spell separate) and Matched by Ally Condie. Imagine my surprise that Matched was a New York Times Bestselling novel for teenagers. I had been expecting Moby Dick (which would have been a repeat, considering I read sparknoted it in eighth grade) or The Scarlett Letter (that, actually, would come later). A Separate Peace fell into my more expected category of summer reading, but imagine my surprise again as I enjoyed that novel even more than Matched.
Matched—for those of you who haven’t read it—is about a girl living in a world where the government controls her every decision. It’s about choices, really. Choices we have, choices we don’t. It was a very fitting book at the time, looking back on it. Cassia, the main character, feels like she has no choice in her life, and I felt like I had no choice in what book to read. I now know that summer reading is put into place so that reading levels don’t sharply decline, but for those of us who do choose to read, I realize that, just because you have the freedom to make a choice doesn’t mean you will pick the right choice. That’s not to say that teachers and librarians always pick the perfect novels for us to read. Perhaps, however, giving in to reading a novel that we would never pick up ourselves but holds high acclaim for another person is a choice we should be willing to make. Even when it’s not for a classroom, where the books are often connected to a predetermined syllabus, we should be open to other book options from different people, even book critics.
With this new mindset, I approached my sophomore summer reading with open arms (well, okay, slightly less closed arms). Imagine my disgust when the book fell right into my literary summer reading stereotype—The Once and Future King, by T.H. White, was exactly the sort of novel I was afraid of reading. Long and tedious, often dwelling on the most mundane of things, not spending enough time on the most interesting things. I’ll admit, at first I was intrigued. The oldest fantasy of all, before Harry Potter and Twilight ever even had their first word. Merlin, Arthur, the Knights of the Round Table: every common fantasy element started with this very book. What failed me about this age-old story was that, when I finished the last word, there was nothing to take away—no message, no theme. Sparknotes puts up a good argument for chivalry, but is that a message I want a book to leave me with? Chivalry?
I know it’s a classic and I swear I’m not one of those teenagers who tears down classic novels for the sake of tearing down classic novels (I’ll only do that with other teenagers in my presence). And I have certainly read my share of novels that have no basis of a theme whatsoever. But I must admit that I found it rather odd that a book I had to read for education taught me nothing more than about crazy old wizards and unicorns. Perhaps on my own time, yet when I have to type twenty pages of notes (twenty-one, actually) I’d like to read a book with more substance. Even if it is deemed a classic by whomever the classic-deemers are, is it too much to ask for a novel that leaves a classic impression on my education?
The summer of my junior year (a summer I barely made after narrowly surviving Sophomore Lit), this very question was answered. And they say that there are no wrong answers, but my goodness was this question answered wrongly. The novel Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard won the 1975 Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction. That’s more accomplishment that I can say for myself, so who am I to tear down the novel? Well, before I do, let me first put it on a pedestal. I’m not lying when I say this novel did leave me with more substance than The Once and Future King allowed: there were observations Dillard wrote about in her book that were so spot on, so enlightening, I can’t help but to believe she must have been the only true competition for that 1975 Pulitzer Prize. What truly failed me about this book was that there were no characters and no story. I know it is nonfiction. I know that no nonfiction novel contains any sort of story or characters like the ones we fiction-lovers hold dear. But I didn’t even get a name. At least there’s Abraham Lincoln, Steve Jobs, even E. Coli (Biology textbook anyone?). Nonfiction novels may not have the same level of familiarity as fiction does, but at the very least I would like to know a name. When I read a book, I need some sort of connection. My physics textbook always feeds me words and definitions; Annie Dillard’s novel was a far cry from thermodynamics and nuclear physics. In fact, it did feel more fiction than anything. Could it have been so hard to have introduced herself to the audience?
And then there’s this summer. This final summer before my summer reading ends for good. The two books I am currently reading—The Help by Kathryn Stockett and And the Mountains Echoed by Khaled Hosseini—are exactly what I always hoped for. I would have picked them up by choice, the messages (notice the extra s there on the end) are profound and deep, the stories and characters are engaging and real. It’s no wonder they are both bestselling novels. Not every great novel is a bestseller though, and being a bestseller is hardly a measure of a great novel. Here I am easily ready to judge any book thrown my way, yet I have never had the daunting task of picking out a novel for an entire class to read, learn from, and enjoy. And simply because I am reading, learning from, and enjoying The Help doesn’t mean the student sitting next to me will. What is the formula for a perfect summer reading novel? Does it matter if the students enjoys it, so long as they read it and learn from it? Does it matter if they learn, so long as they are reading and enjoying? All three do make the perfect recipe, but it is rare for any novel, not simply a summer reading novel, to contain all the ingredients. I guess the only thing left to say is for any teacher or librarian or educator that chooses summer reading books—I commend you for being able to make such a tough choice every year.
Check out #bestseller, #summerreading, #summerreading2014
Many of you, like me, have made a shift from one job to another this summer. Kudos to each of you who still managed to get their posts in during September. Me, I’m just now getting to my desk to write this. (I just now have a desk in my apt!!) During this transition, a few earworms have made their way in. I imagine others have found certain songs rolling around their brains this last month too. With Teen Read Week‘s theme being Books with Beat this year, and our blogmaster giving her students a weekly playlist, I thought it only fitting to put down some of the beats that have been in my head lately.
Here’s my playlist:
- Welcome to the Jungle - Guns ‘n Roses (this is pretty self explanatory, right?)
- Lost in the supermarket – The Clash (while I feel totally lost at times in this new school, I imagine the students feel this way sometimes in the library as well)
- Los Angeles, I’m yours – The Decemberists (sometimes we just have to surrender and give our new location everything we’ve got)
- Swagga like us – Kanye West, Jay-Z, T.I., Lil Wayne, MIA (I’d like to believe that it’s always me with the swagga, but usually it’s the students)
- Maps – Yeah Yeah Yeahs (a healthy dose of narcissism when no one familiar is around to give it to you)
- Wannabe – Spice Girls (how many times do you ask “what you do really really want” only to get a strange/indecipherable answer?)
- Bad romance – Lady Gaga (currently the queen of the earworm if its not one Gaga song in my head, it’s another)
- Furr – Blitzen Trapper (this song is totally makes me want to read books with werewolves in them)
- So Whatcha Want? – Beastie Boys (“tell me where’d you get your information from hun,” –clearly these boys know how to evaluate their sources)
- L.E.S. Artistes – Santogold (I’m in a new state with a new job, and that brings anxiety. Santogold makes me feel a bit better about all this transition.)
- Ghost of corporate future – Regina Spektor (great advice when feeling overwhelmed)
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Throughout my library branch, we have our state’s truancy law posted which basically says that anyone age 15 and younger should be in school from 7a-2p or have appropriate documentation if they are at the library during these hours.
To be honest, when we posted the policy and started asking student visitors their age and/or documentation of a legitimate school absence (being homeschooled would be included as well), I thought it went beyond what we should do as a library. Particularly if they were using the library for its intended purpose; i.e. reading, Internet, checking out materials, etc. It almost felt too invasive to ask their age and documentation.
Fortunately it made sense to me over time, especially when truancy officers would come to the library or we’d come into a situation where a teen was skipping school to fulfill their online gaming addiction at the library.
When we get to know the teens and develop more of a relationship with them, to understand their situation, it also goes a long way toward helping enforce the policy. Oftentimes, we may be in a position to talk through making better choices, or just to let them know we’re there to help with library resources, if they need it.
Each library is different. What does your library do to enforce your state’s truancy policy?
