We're Getting There!

 It's amazing the difference about two weeks can make!

This week has been very exciting to prepare for. First, our story time in the Early Years Garden has resumed, with Thai and English stories being read on Mondays to our youngest students. This is the first time we have had to really start to meet our EY1 students! What fun we had on Monday, and we will continue to have every Monday as we visit them in their new garden space.

Today we are welcoming our parents back to the library before and after school! This is fabulous to see once again. Younger brothers and sisters, not yet in school, accompany them as well. We have a full house this afternoon which is the best type of situation in a library!

And then tomorrow starts after-school story time in the library! I have had the books selected for this since mid-summer. (Talk about planning ahead!) After months of online story time videos, I have been looking forward to sharing stories once again with parents and children. 

What else is happening? Our Y3-6 students are now vying for copies of the Bangkok Book Award nominees in order to read them all before voting during term 2. Y1-2 are enjoying hearing each picture book nominee during their classes, and we have started the Eyes of a Reader competition...having taken a lot of the pictures myself, I cannot recognize most of the teachers! Oh, my!

This Is NOT the New Normal

 Despite the common catch-phrase "The New Normal," I refuse to accept any truth behind that name! This is not normal, although it may be new, and I have faith we will one day be fully normal again.

I have been very fortunate to start the new term at school, in-person, with all students. So what does this new year look like?

1. We have our students in Years 1 and 2 coming every week for library lessons. So far, they have learned the library rules (after all, it has been 7 months!), learned how to use a shelf marker, and been able to check out books. Next week they begin hearing the Bangkok Book Award nominees.
2. Years 3-6 come to the library once every fortnight. These students refreshed their memories on all things library related, learned about the genre stickers in Junior Fiction (completed while they were online learning), and are having book talks for the Bangkok Book Award nominees. These students are already excited for 28 September, when the books will be displayed and available for checkout!
3. Upstairs in Senior Library, the Years 7-9 English classes have started having their library class time. Year 7 students have undergone an orientation to the Senior Library and are receiving their Overdrive usernames and passwords.
4. We have 3 You-Time activities. You-Time is a student-selected after-school activity. On Mondays, we have our Battle of the Books teams (4 teams based on school houses who will compete for house points soon!) Wednesdays is Breakout Boxes, and Thursday is Stop-Motion Animation.

Wait a minute, you might be thinking. If that is what is happening, isn't that completely back to normal?

Well, unfortunately, no.

Here are the changes we hope don't last too much longer:

1. We have had to reduce the number of students allowed in the library during break and lunch. This sometimes results in a line of students waiting outside for another student to leave. With staggered lunches, the line does usually clear quickly upstairs. I always feel terrible to see students who want to come inside but can't!
2. We have had to close the Rabbit Hole reading area, mark "No Sitting" to ensure social distancing, and remove chairs to spread students apart.
3. NO STORY TIME! This is the MOST difficult one for me. Unfortunately, I cannot visit the Early Years garden for story time during the day, and I cannot have children in the library for after school story time yet. I miss my story time! (Online story time was not the same because I couldn't talk to the children as I read the book!)
4. No parents in the library. This is the SECOND most difficult change. It has always been wonderful to see parents and children sitting together before and after school reading a book. I love walking around, helping them find books, and just observing. Since parents cannot come to the library, they are once again selecting books online and picking them up outside the building. At least I know they can read together at home!
5. Masks and social distancing...all day! We do what we must to stay healthy, but it will be nice to only wear my mask when the air quality is not so good.

Summer Time!

I did it! I managed to go an ENTIRE SCHOOL YEAR without missing a day of work! (I do not count the school librarian conference I went to in November since it was work-related and I was co-presenting at it. That counts as work!)

It's not that I usually miss much work, but when the children were little, I often had to miss work for their illnesses and doctor's appointments. There was that foot surgery (and subsequent surgical site infection) one year, and the year of the Swine Flu where the child infected me on the first day (and TOLD me she was contagious with it as she talked to me). This year, knowing I would not have allergy season, winter icy/rainy weather, and so forth, I set a goal: I will not get sick with ANYTHING this year.

Little did I know there would be a pandemic.

However, not even COVID stopped me from meeting my goal. Even when working online, I was working all day from home, no breaks.

Another cause for...well, I'm not sure celebration is the correct term...blog-worthiness(?) is that I finally wore my rainboots. Rain boots? What? Let me explain.

We moved to Bangkok in the rainy season. I brought my rain boots, but didn't seem to need them since it usually rained in the middle of the day, the evening, and/or overnight. Nonetheless, the one time I didn't carry them to work last fall (just in case), it stormed as school got out and we had to take a tuk-tuk home no less so I was soaked from head to toes. If I had my boots that day, I would have at least had dry feet! Flash forward to the start of the rainy season for 2020. I did not bring my boots at first. Then three days in a row...yep. Wet feet. Therefore I started bringing them every day again. It would rain BEFORE leaving for school, BEFORE leaving for home, or AFTER I was home. So by this point, I was thinking, "Why did I bring these rain boots? Why?" Finally, the next to last day of school...it rained. While it actually stopped just before I left the library, I wore those boots home!

 

Now that summer has started, is my work done? Mostly.

We are continuing our remote circulation program all summer since parents and students cannot come to the library on Wednesdays as they have always done in the past. Our Summer Click and Collect is already looking promising! We have loads of requests for books already, and the form just went out for next week's collection! Here's our commercial for the program:

 

Happy Summer, Everyone!

June Celebrations

STUDENTS ARE BACK!!!!!!

This is the best event of the school year, post-pandemic start. It took a lot of planning and work from members of our school's staff, but it is worth it. Finally I am seeing the faces of students again.

One thing about our start is that things are a bit different. Only half the students come each day, divided by year groups. We are wearing masks or face shields (I prefer the shields because smiles can be seen!). And, of course, the library is closed to students.

However, despite being closed to classes and students searching for books, we are "open" for business! Just before we were able to reopen the campus, we started a trial "Click and Collect" program with our Early Years, then our Years 1-2, students. Parents could watch a tutorial on how to search the catalog for books; they filled out a form with requests for books afterwards. We had collection times for the parents. Now that students are back, we altered that to include delivery to classrooms for the students who returned. Some students are still at home, online learning, so the parents can collect their books in front of the school with a "drive-thru" service. The most difficult part has been the screencastify tutorials for parents; not because it's that difficult, but because when filming with screencastify, the narrator has to start over if they mess up! (Let's just say that I didn't make double digits in the number of tries, but it was close! A few weren't my fault. I was interrupted by people needing my assistance.) We are going to modify but continue this program for summer check outs!!! (Of course, the library is now resembling last fall, with boxes of quarantined books awaiting check in and disinfecting!)

This has been great! In fact, as soon as we extended the service to all year levels, our library got a WHOLE lot busier as we collect the requests, check them out, and package them for delivery or pick up. This picture is just SOME of the requests for this week!

Because not everyone is back in school, we are still continuing some online storytelling, crafts, digital breakouts, and Family Fun Night games. I also am working with EPQ and EPQ-mini students. (EPQ is Extended Project Qualification, and it involves research and artifacts based on the dissertation being written. Examples include the effect of the pandemic on economies, genetic mutations of liver cancers, impact of different factors on the choice to be vegan, and more.) There are still budget concerns, working on building the collection in preparation for next term, and more!

Meanwhile, we have had the opportunity to create some promotional spots for different library collections. This started with us all home and using Zoom. Once back together, we have altered some of the ways we do this because the echoes and feedback from 8 devices (even spread through two floors of the library) was a bit of a problem. We have had fun advertising our alien/science fiction books with Librarians in Black, showing highlights from our Thai Collection, and being "classic" librarians. Our newest videos show off graphic novels, nonfiction, and picture books in fun ways. (We have "Where's Mr. Bank?" as a parody of "Where's Wally...known in the US as Waldo...)

Here is a sample of our videos:

Finally, being closed to students allowed us to finish one task that we had been wanting to do for months. We have semi-genrefied our Junior Fiction section. Semi-genrefied? Well, our Senior Fiction is organized by genres, like in a bookstore. Rather than try to recreate that, we have labeled all of the thousands of books with genre labels. This allows students to try different types of books to see which are their favorites. The books themselves are still in order by authors' last names.

We have slightly over a week before the end of this school year. Hopefully we will be able to be open and at least in some resemblance of normal in August.

Sadness at the State of the US, the World, and Librarianship

First, there's no update to the stress of online librarianship. (Other than have an issue with the access to a series of journals needed by students...and dealing with the emails through time zones with all the delays that ensued. Problem finally solved!) Life online is sad because I do not get to see the faces of the students, more onerous due to the need to create, edit, and publish the videos AFTER creating the activity, and lonely.

Now on to the topic for this blog.

Today I made a difficult decision to leave a professional group I have been part of for awhile. I did this because the tone of the group has changed from helpful ideas, support, and answering questions to politics, name-calling, and labeling people based on a one sentence comment to a post. (No one should ever be labeled sexist, racist, homophobic, anti-religion, or anti-ANYTHING based on a sentence. Don't we teach children that you cannot infer tone or meaning from online comments? Unless the person has said "All __(fill-in-the-blank with a group or class of people)___ deserve to die/don't deserve to live/should all be removed from the face of the Earth/etc.," you cannot know what is in their heart and mind.

Whatever happened to giving someone the benefit of the doubt? Or asking politely for clarification to the meaning of their words? We all know what we mean by things we say, but sometimes there is (to paraphrase Dr. Adolph Brown) disconnect between our brains and our mouths (or our fingertips as online speaking dictates). They might not realize they worded their comment poorly and the implications that could arise from it. Give them a chance to clarify and edit!

So what happened?

First, George Floyd was murdered. Pure and simple as that. Was is racially motivated? We don't know because we don't know what was going through that #$%@*& 's mind when he murdered Mr. Floyd.

What do we know?

• The officer and Mr. Floyd worked at the same nightclub. They had overlapping shifts. They may or may not have interacted. (The owner of the club first reported they worked together and knew each other. She later said they may have known each other, but she is not sure.)
• Mr. Floyd was being restrained until EMS arrived.
• The restraint technique used by the officer (for some ABSOLUTELY INSANE REASON) is TAUGHT and APPROVED by that police department as an appropriate technique. WHY? WHO APPROVED THAT? It's insane and wrong in ANY situation.

Now, with regards to the riots, when someone can explain to me how burning a business that had NOTHING to do with the murder gets Mr. Floyd justice, then I can understand the reason behind them. At what point does breaking into a store and stealing big screen TVs get him justice? Oh, wait. THAT DOESN'T GET HIM JUSTICE. It's unlawful. Being angry does not allow you to go on a  rampage, burn, loot, and destroy. For this I blame our culture that allows this type of behavior for many different things, including sports victories! It's so harmful! (Then when people are recognizing some of the rioters pictures, it is coming out that many of them were BUSED into the city to encourage rioting. Does this have anything to do with the recently leaked Friends of Democracy papers that were the cause of the Baltimore riots? Time will tell.)

Now how does this lead to my resignation from a professional librarian's group?

In that group, someone posted videos of the riots and commented how it was justified behavior. The tone inferred by some members was that the original poster was saying, as one rioter told a reporter, that all whites should be afraid because it was coming to them next. Is that what the original poster meant? I hope not! However, when people took offense, rather than asking for clarification and a civilized discourse, the original poster labeled all of them racist. Politics and profanity then became part of the discussion. The post was removed, but the subsequent posts by the original poster in which she continues to label anyone who disagrees with the rioters as racist have been left up.

At this point, I have realized there is nothing left for me to learn from this group. We, as librarians, should know about bias, inferences, stating opinions, and working with different viewpoints. We should allow all to comment in a risk-free environment in which clarification can be sought if something seems "off" in the way it is worded. No one should be attacked for having a difference of opinion.

Rather than argue, at the detriment of my name and my reputation, I simply and quietly left.

What I Have Learned So Far With Distance Librarianship

As schools are closed and everyone is figuring out this "online" thing, I have learned a few things that do not shock, but, rather, sadden me. I have also learned a few positives.

The Sad:
1. Despite participating daily in several librarian Facebook groups, there are a lot of librarians who JUST DON'T READ. They don't read posts of questions that have been asked and answered ad nauseam. Whether it's "How do I video a story-time without breaking copyright?" or "Have you heard of the National Emergency Library Archive?" or even "I don't know what to do to reach my students?" librarians are not doing what we always recommend to our students and staff: READ and you shall find the answer!
     (Answers to these questions:
     1. All Australian publishers are allowing read alouds so long as it is password protected and    
        deleted by the end of the school  year. Every American publishing house that has given
        permission for public performances of their picture books -almost all- has the same basic
       guidelines: give credit with title, author, and publisher at beginning of video, delete within 30
       days or by end of school year, use password protected sites. 
     2. The NELA is an archive of illegally copied books so it should not be used in any way, shape, or
       form. Basically they digitally photocopied books. We all know that's wrong so STOP ASKING
       ABOUT IT!
     3. Use Google Classroom if a Google school; create a Seesaw account; use the platform teachers
       are using or ask teachers to assist in posting. Lastly, DON'T WORRY if students are more
       worried about online math assignments than library activities. Post optional things for those who
       want something different to do! Unless, of course, you must give grades. Then do easy things,
       like have students draw a picture of their favorite scene in a book. Don't expect full-blown
       research projects like they would have done at school in the library!)

2. Some librarians are not as helpful as our profession calls for. They ridicule librarians who ask "How do we sanitize the books when we reopen?" "How will we get the books back if we don't restart school until the fall?" Literally ridiculing. This is extremely depressing to read online. Everyone's situation is different and administrators have different expectations regarding the caretaking of the library collection. If a librarian doesn't have a constructive answer, then they should not respond with "I'm just glad the students have books, even if they keep them forever." "You shouldn't be worried about that. Good librarians wouldn't care?" -and yes, I have seen that type of response accusing worried librarians about being less than "good" because they are wondering about the collection in our custodianship.

3. The head of one department responded to my email regarding being available with assisting them in online learning, including suggestions to ways I could help, with "I think the library should only be about reading books." This will take addressing when we are all back together to explain why libraries are about research, writing, exploring, and discovering, as well as reading.

The Positives:
1. A different team is wanting to work with the library on some different activities once our spring break ends.

2. We have a lot of children enjoying our online activities and stories through a variety of platforms. Some have even sent video answers to questions I ask at the end of storytimes. We have also received numerous thank yous and some questions back.

3. My library team (I saved the best for last) have stepped up marvelously to online platforms. I already knew they were hard-workers with a lot of skills and creativity. This unusual situation has given the opportunity to shine even more with all they are doing. What are they doing, you might wonder? Well, we have multiple platforms in use to reach all levels of the school. We also have our regular social media outlets. Through all of these, one English and one Thai storytime have been posted daily. A video on a fun, creative craft is posted daily. We have weekly breakout boxes as well. This is in addition to the online activities I have created with Screencastify and poetry (for Poetry Month) and a GooseChase for the older students.

So, what will we do when our "break" from online teaching ends and we are back at distance learning? We will continue working hard. I can only hope that the librarians around the world who are working online will remember to be more positive towards one another.

COVID-19

It's what everyone is talking about, right?

And the question now is, what do we do?

Next week is Fully Booked Week. We are busy decorating the story tent. We have our posters displayed. We are talking about our guest story tellers. We are getting everyone excited.

And we are also preparing ourselves for the disappointment in case school is closed.

Yes. We know that is the rumor, and we shouldn't worry about rumors, but this is a rumor that might become reality. So we have two preparations underway. The final countdown towards our biggest event of the year (with three modifications: the book fair vendor has been cancelled, the Thai publishing company is not coming, and the book swap books will be sprayed with a disinfecting mist) is in full swing! And we have had several library team meetings regarding our plans for ways to have online activities for students in the event we are closed.

Oh, just video some stories, you might think. It's not so simple! International copyright law is involved with the public performance/filming of stories. Everyone does it on You-Tube, you might say. Well, many publishing companies also send cease-and-desist letters and can take you to court for copyright violations. Since I am a role model on properly using sources of information, I do not think just posting a few stories is the responsible way to do things. We have other plans.

(Don't worry, there will be some ways we tell some stories. The library team is QUITE inventive and enthusiastic.)

We also will have activities for all our students. We have three different e-book platforms, weekly library lessons to be posted, and we are working with some year levels to collaborate on the projects they plan to assign students. All this involves timing, posting, filming, editing, and praying we are allowed on campus to make it all a bit easier.

Of course, the easiest course of action will be if school continues as normal.

I am, of course, an optimist.

Stay healthy. Wear a mask if it makes you feel better (just don't touch it). And keep washing your hands.