librarians are the world's coolest people

I'm not just trying to suck up, either!

I have a dear friend who is a library in British Columbia, Canada and she is one of the coolest, smartest and best people I know; she is the first person that shattered the stereotype for me of librarians as little old ladies who constantly whisper "hush". Librarians are keepers of knowledge, guardians of knowledge, guides to knowledge, lovers of new ideas and new technologies, etc.!

[as an aside, here is what I remember of my elementary school librarian, who was an old--at least to me--buy sturdy German lady with a really thick accent who taught us the Dewey Decimal System (John Dewey!). She was talking to my class one day about how hard it is to define some words, How, for instance, she asked in her strong German accent, would you define the word 'try'? Only because of her accent, I thought she said "tie," which I thought was quite easy to define!]

Anyway, I feel very grateful to have been given the opportunity to work in our group with J, who was amazing, ebullient, and an incredible font of knowledge. Her commitment to teachers and teaching was evident, and should I end up in a school with a librarian as committed as her (or the other librarians that we met), I would consider myself lucky.

What particularly struck me about our lesson: how a good librarian can really help you have a vision and keep focused on the learning. How important it is to teach kids about good resources, that there is more to the world that google. J helped us find some of those resources. (Incidentally, this is one of the point-counterpoint topics that interests me most--the one about finding good resources in the digital age, although truth be told I found all of the topics super interesting and would be perfectly happy with any of them). I was also intrigued by the possibilities that google docs provide as a way of democratizing learning and making group work more transparent to the teacher--and, importantly, facilitating collaboration between students. J. had some other suggestions for us as to how to further promote sharing of ideas and findings like a multi-class Skyping session. C. suggested Skyping with students in Japan, J and others in the group pointed out some of the logistical difficulties with this but I thought it was a good idea and at least a promising suggestion of some of the possibilities technology holds for connecting people.

[Another aside: when I was in 7th grade, our class had pen pals in Japan. I adored receiving letters from Yoshi, which were always in translucent rice paper envelopes and contained stickers that were wacky photographs of her. Over the years, we eventually began emailing each other, but nothing beat the thrill of those little letters from her in her careful little handwriting!]

My final takeaway from the class, which I mentioned in our debriefing, was how many really rich possibilities there are for working cross-curricularly, and the incredible benefit that offers to students by making their learning more relevant and connections between ideas more apparent, but also to teachers as a way of collaborating and thinking about the big picture of what we think education should be for our students. The implications there are, I think, amazing. And it kind of connects with my earlier thoughts about my own content area, and how much more broadly I think of what my job is than just to teach grammar and vocabulary.

The great strength of the MAC program, as I have experienced it so far, is exactly this kind of communication across classes and subjects. I am amazed at how connected everything is; I am (*we* are, I think) constantly connecting some we read or talked about to something else in another class. So my own learning is making me think about teaching...