Lost in translation

The other day, a group of African American students walked into the media center, and started scanning our rack of  digital audiobooks.  On looking more closely, one of them started laughing.  “Why do they got a book called BLACK BEAUTY?” he said, at which his friends all started laughing too.  It took a moment to realize the mistake they had made, but then the light-bulb went off in my head: even if they knew what the book really was about, why would a group of young, African American men from the North End of St. Paul want to read about some rich person’s talking horses?

In library school, the guiding principle of reader’s advisory was drilled into our minds again and again: the right book for the right child, at the right time.  There was always the possibility of the heady thrill that comes when you find that right book, the one that turns a kid into a lifelong reader.  It’s only now, when I’m suggesting reading materials for young people, that this has really come to life.  When I was thirteen, I lived in relative safety and security in a quiet neighborhood with both of my parents.  This meant I could enjoy books like Little House on the Prairie, Hitty: The First Hundred Years, and Miracles on Maple Hill.  My students, though,  are African, African American, Hmong, Lao, Karen,  Native American, Hispanic.  Many of them were born in refugee camps in Thailand, or in the rougher neighborhoods of St. Paul.  Those classics that I grew up with don’t mean anything to them, because they don’t see themselves reflected there.  It’s a challenge to divert them from books about gangs, to more positive books about people of color, from authors like Sharon Flake and Walter Dean Myers.  It’s challenging but necessary: for a youth librarian, books are our tools for change.  If we can help young people to see reflections of themselves in literature, we can ignite that spark that will keep them reading and learning for the rest of their lives.

 

Are you crafty?

I have a confession to make. Despite my desire to work with kids and my training as a Youth Services librarian, I am not crafty. My attempts at crochet have so far all ended up as lumpy, unfinished afghans and scarves. Thanks in part to learning disabilities, I’m not gifted at visual arts and I can’t draw. Those of you with experience in libraries will be able to see the problem here. Most of the youth librarians I know are artists of various kinds: knitters, card-makers and painters who use their skills to plan educational programs for children and teens. Recently, I led my first teen program at Minneapolis’ Roosevelt Public Library, where I volunteer on a weekly basis. Having regained my confidence somewhat, I worked with the librarian at Roosevelt to come up with a list of programs for spring 2009. Because other people’s online resources were vital to me in this project, I thought I would post my list here.

Sensory tables: http://www.childfun.com/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=147.  Most preschools have sensory tables that allow young children to touch, smell, hear and taste objects while they learn to count, pour, measure, etc.  The Roosevelt librarian and I were talking about sensory tables, and how we could adapt them for a very small branch library with no dedicated programming space.  The challenge is coming up with items that aren’t prohibitively messy.  My research revealed that sensory tables can use almost any kind of item, and Lisa is incorporating them into toddler storytimes now.

Lanterns for Chinese New Year: (January) http://www.enchantedlearning.com/crafts/chinesenewyear/.  I’m doing this one as part of a themed storytime in January.
Pinwheels/kites (March): I have no specific plans for this yet, but I’m hoping it will be pretty easy when the logistics are figured out

Origami (March): This is a teen event, aimed at using up the extra paper from the mini-journal workshop.
Altered book collages: http://www.creativity-portal.com/howto/artscrafts/altered.books.html (April): Also a teen event.  I’m hoping it will be a creative way to turn weeded/discarded books into a craft project.

 

One month at Washington

I’ve been a teaching assistant in the Media Center of Washington Technology Magnet Middle School for just over a month, and I’m developing a new level of sensitivity to the problems that face the poor.  When I was a teenager, I volunteered at a preschool for kids with developmentally delays whose families were struggling with abuse, neglect, poverty, and substance abuse.  They were stressed, and they acted out in inappropriate ways because they couldn’t express their feelings.  It was easy to calm them down by holding them, or rocking in the rocking chair.  My students, seventh and eighth graders at a St. Paul junior high, are bigger than I am, and they’re still struggling to express their emotions about abuse, addiction, extreme poverty.  School is one of the only constants in their lives, here they can get away from problems at home, and they don’t have to worry about where their lunch and breakfast will come from.  A student was arrested in the library’s computer lab the day before Thanksgiving vacation.  The holidays are hard on poor kids, and the tension level has been rising every day as winter break approaches.
Despite this, they’re still kids.  The less defiant ones still melt into adorable piles of goo when anyone smiles at them.  My eighth grade school service helpers, specially selected to spend their electives working in the library, are bright and funny and responsible.  Sometimes I struggle to find the line between being their manager and being their friend.  Bubbles wants to talk to me about her friends, and
This is a wonderful school.  The staff is dedicated to their well-being, and the teachers keep their expectations high.  At the rural high school where I mentored History Day students, my bright but underachieving protégées were all but ignored.  Here, everyone is expected to read like crazy, and are required to stay after school if they get behind in their homework.
I’m getting better at reader’s advisory.  I expect that by the end of the year, I’ll be able to recommend a book to someone based on almost any criteria.  Recently, a student asked me for a book “like Into Thin Air” that would be somewhat easier, so I found him another book about an Everest expedition.  He seemed indifferent, so I asked if he likes real life adventure stories or fantasy.  He mentioned fantasy, so I suggested Golden Compass, which he said was too hard.  I ended up recommending Eoin Colfer’s Artemis Fowl. Only in a junior high school library could it be logical to go from Mount Everest to a twelve-year-old criminal mastermind in less than five minutes.

 

Ireland

A year or so ago, I ran into a undergraduate friend who had recently spent a summer studying at Trinity College in Dublin.

“I cried the whole way home,” she said, and then told me that she had decided she was moving back permanently. The terrifying part is that I understood exactly what she meant. After I finished a semester abroad in Cork, in the southwest of Ireland, I felt lonely and homesick. I couldn’t really explain my feelings to friends, who saw my four months abroad as an anomaly, or at most an incredible vacation. I exchanged emails and instant messages with my American study abroad friends about our homesickness for the hilly, colorful city that had been home for a few months. I I savored what I could, with Irish American pubs, Irish music, endless reruns of Father Ted. It was a kind of Jerusalem syndrome, but instead of religious mania, I missed the green fields and dark city lanes of Ireland. My heart hurt.

I’ve ever been alone in this. Ireland is full of Americans who, like me, are looking for themselves in the country that their ancestors left behind. As Ireland returns to its pre-famine population, it is a country in flux. Immigrants are creating new identities as Irish-Poles and Filipino-Irish. Yet, everywhere, tourist shops sell family coats of arms, Irish trinkets, and refrigerator magnets with Irish family names printed on them. Ireland is a country that is profiting from its past at the same time that it debates its future.

Despite my cynicism about being an American in Ireland, I made the journey back in June. I will admit that I felt euphorically gleeful when I got on my Aer Lingus flight and was surrounded by Irish accents, and again when I went shopping for brown bread and Cadbury’s chocolate upon my arrival. I’ll always feel a magnetic pull toward this place, where I was an adult for the first time. It was good to be back.

 

China 1988-1989

When I returned to China in 2001 with my high school class, there were moments that brought back my memories with startling clarity: drinking tang and eating mahua, and the unmistakable smell of Chinese streets, an unmistakable amalgamation of night soil, pollution, public bathrooms and street food. When my parents secured teaching jobs at a university in northern China in 1988, the country had only been open to foreigners for a decade or so. Thus, we headed off into the unknown. Although we were in China during the democracy movement that culminated in the Tiananmen Square massacre, my memories are mainly that of a happy five year old: my house, my kindergarten, and my friends.

When we arrived, I remember looking out at the lights of Hong Kong as our plane touched down, and thinking that they looked like a postcard. We’d passed through numerous time zones and in my memory it seems like we were traveling for weeks. I don’t remember my first trip to the Great Wall, but I do remember being terrified of the Ming Tombs.

When we arrived at our house in Chang Chun, someone from the Waiban (foreigner’s bureau) showed us around our house. Downstairs, we had a large living and dining room with a table, an ink stained desk, a black and white television and some chairs. It was here that I had my first lesson in privilege when my mother explained to me that most Chinese people lived in apartments the size of our living room. Upstairs, my brother and I had our own rooms for the first time. At the end of the hallway, my brother’s room had a high, wide window seat. With a little effort, he could climb up through the window and onto the little vestibule over the front door.
Before we had been in Chang Chun long, my brother and I started school. My kindergarten was a small building, low to the ground, that consisted of a long hallway. There were a few classrooms and Chinese squat-style bathroom where my classmates and I would line up a few times a day. Our classrooms were large and clean, with high windows and regulation Mao-era green paint. Each of us had our own crib and home made quilts for naptimes. On the first day my mother left me, I remember standing in the drab, cement hallway, crying as I watched her disappear through the door. Although my teachers didn’t speak English, they doted on me. Before much time had passed, I was speaking Chinese almost as well as my classmates.
I learned lessons about cultural differences at my youeryuan that stayed with me for the rest of my life. I remember drawing a yellow sun on my easel, only to have my teachers laugh at me and tell me that in China, the sun is red, not yellow. My teachers loved me: Fu Laoshi used to pretend to eat my little plastic pig, Ro Ro (meat meat), calling herself “the Ro Ro Hotel.”
When we weren’t at school, my brother and I learned to be as relentlessly inventive as the Chinese kids, who had a solution to everything. Window broke, and scattered glass all over the yard? Dig a canal! Found a treacherous patch of ice, but don’t have any skates? Attach pieces of scrap metal to your shoes! We played in the small park across from our house, which boasted a filthy cement pond, a pagoda and a forked tree. The tree was a huge draw for us until one day it became home to hundreds of caterpillars. Mostly, I remember playing with my best friend, Mei Chi, my brother, and a small boy who belonged to the gatekeeper. The latter child seems to have been memorable to me mainly because he peed in our yard on at least one occasion.
In his Coming Home Crazy, a memoir of time spent teaching in China, Bill Holm writes: “Almost every China survivor will tell you that everyone goes on missing the point, until you finally give up trying to make it and either go back to China or adjust in silence. This is what culture shock really means, either making your own peace or leaving. Nothing is ever the same after you have gone ”crazy.’” Indeed, when my family had returned from our year in China, nothing was ever quite the same. Even though our year was full of leaky roofs, disasters, rodent infestations, cultural misunderstandings and times when we actually feared for our health and safety, we have never stopped measuring time in terms of “before China” and “after China.

 

Won’t Somebody Please Think of the Children: flowers, rainbows, bunnies, and children’s librarianship

In a comment on my last entry, my dad remembered reading to my brother and I when we were little: “It also brings back my own memories of reading to you and your brother every night, wherever we were and reading with you when you were little, knowing that the stories we shared were part of both our lives.” When I was ten, we were still reading together every night. That last summer, we would sit on the back porch and take turns reading The Dark is Rising, with our puppy at our feet. Over the years, our reading material raged from Mr. Popper’s Penguins and Shel Silverstein to my dad’s poetry anthology from college. During our year in China, we made our way through the Little House books that my grandparents mailed to us on the slow boat.
My memories of reading with my parents recall some of the times in my life when I felt the most safe and comfortable, regardless of where we were. That might be the reason, when I first started library school, that I fell in love with children’s librarianship. As I rediscovered the books that I loved when I was a little girl (and some new favorites as well), I realized that not every kid is as lucky as I was. Reading is a birthright, and there are many families who simply can’t give that to their children. When I had to choose between Youth Services and historical archiving, I felt I had a chance to give children the gift of comfort, delight and discovery that happens when someone reads to them.
When I was still in college and I had decided to go to library school, one of my coworkers was surprised to hear that I was thinking about being a children’s librarian.

“Be an archivist,” he said. “I can’t see you reading to babies.” Being a children’s librarian is about so much more than that: it’s about literacy, outreach, and making sure all kids have equal access to books and information. Studies have shown that the single most important factor in a child’s developing literacy often is proximity to a library.

During my practicum, a father came in with his little girl, who must have been about eight years old. While he was being tutored in English, the girl came up to me and asked me for some books. She was extremely bright and articulate, and seemed happy with what we had found. As they were leaving, she came back to the reference desk, her eyes shining.

“Thank you,” she said. “I am SO anxious to read these when I get home.” She hadn’t been to our particular branch before, but now I knew she’d be back. As I had many times throughout the semester, I knew I was where I was meant to be.

 

My reading biography; or, how I stopped worrying and learned to love the library

Like many children, I dreamed about having a secret hideaway. I read and re-read The Secret Garden, and even envied The Boxcar Children their secret clubhouse in an abandoned train car. Although I never had the tree house I coveted, and my own house was without a secret walled garden, my childhood was full of the kind of places only a child could appreciate. Though my mother had few positive things to say about the house where she spent her teenage years, my grandparents’ mouldering (and moldy) Victorian in Uptown Minneapolis was hallowed ground for my brother and I and our cousins. The house itself was hardly a secret, but the world we constructed there as children, and the mythology that grew up along with us, was hidden from the adults in our lives.
The house was bursting at the seams with reading material. Fresh from whatever season it was, we would burst onto the porch and knock on the door. We knocked only on ceremony as it was never locked (to my mother’s horror.) Grandpa would greet us in the foyer with a hug, we would take off our shoes and coats, and we’d be off. On our arrival, we would careen through the living room to pound our fingers like elephant’s feet on the grand piano. By the fireplace, leather bound volumes handed down from my grandfather’s family flaked behind glass. The dining room held little that was of interest to us, so we would race back into the foyer and up the stairs. On the landing, we would pause at the foreboding portrait of William James Romeyn, one of our New England Calvinist forebears. At the top of the stairs we would stop in my grandfather’s study, where the shelves overflowed with titles about East Asia and Chinese religion. In the TV room, where television was rarely watched at all, we would rifle through my dictionary-loving grandmother’s condensed version of the Oxford English Dictionary.
The other bedrooms, relics of my mother’s and her siblings’ youth, were good places to find my mother’s copy of Blueberries for Sal or an uncle’s well-worn edition of Snappy Answers to Stupid Questions. My grandparents’ room was home to my grandmother’s own wall of books. If I came over without anything to read, I would invariably leave with something she deemed to be “good” reading material. A summer afternoon often ended with me lying on my stomach on a wicker couch on the porch, drinking lemonade and reading. Opposite me, my grandmother would study the New York Times crossword puzzle over the edge of her reading glasses.
If my grandparents’ house was hallowed ground in the story of my literacy, my grandmother might have been the person who turned me into a bibliophile. For all of my life, she grandmother found ways to nurture each of our talents. My cousin Molly was the dancer, Jessica the musician and my brother Michael the scientist. She must have decided I would be a writer, because she gave me a copy of Pride and Prejudice for my eighth birthday. In order to prove everyone wrong, I struggled through the whole thing. A year later, she gave me Mill on the Floss, which I inhaled. I loved the story of Maggie Tulliver and her brother, even relishing the novel’s rather dismal ending. For my 11th birthday, I received a copy of Roget’s Thesaurus, and my eighth grade graduation gift was a copy of the short stories of Flannery O’Conner. The books my grandmother gave me fired my imagination and fueled my own dreams of becoming a famous writer someday.
I breathed books; I had a book in progress at all times. Even as I was being diagnosed with a spatial learning disability that made math and other school activities excruciatingly difficult, I retreated into my worlds of reading and writing. At school, I might be found reading one of the Ramona books. On the school bus, I would be buried in L.M. Montgomery. At home I might as easily be reading Great Expectations as re-reading the Little House books for the third time. On the floor in my bedroom, I filled notebooks with elaborate stories and novels (none of which I ever finished). My grandmother both encouraged and no-so-subtly-steered our reading interests. She once broke my brother’s heart when she asked him if the Stephen King novel he was reading was “one of those books they sell at the airport.” Yet her first question on seeing us was always, “what are you reading?”
My grandmother, as it happens, was my introduction to libraries as well. My adoration of my librarian grandmother led to my announcement, at four, that I was going to be a librarian when I grew up. My grandma Taylor gave me my first library card when we visited the branch where she worked. Our family also made frequent trips to our neighborhood library, where our ritual was to run to the children’s area and look at the display case of felt mice. In the winter, the mice would be dressed in hats and scarves. In the summer, they might be seated around a picnic blanket. The little mice lured me into their tiny world, where I would stare with my nose pressed against the glass. When I was in preschool, my teachers asked a number of us what we would be if we could be anything, and printed it in the school newsletter. One little boy wanted to be a dragon. I answered (and I quote) “I feel like I want to be a librarian.”
As we grew older and my grandmother’s health declined, we (the grandchildren) recognized that our childhood space was threatened. We darkly contemplated the path our lives would take without the house (and with the unspoken assumption that we were talking about the path our lives would take without grandma). A shaky video we produced with a hand-held camera preserves the spaces that were so filled with meaning for us: the attic closet where little Molly’s imagined “baby ghosts” lived, the filled in room under the garage, the walk-through coat closet where we hid under piles of dusty winter coats during games of hide-and seek.
My grandmother died of lung cancer on a freezing March day three months before I graduated from high school, and the house was sold soon after. The day before she died, we gathered in chairs around the bed where she lay still and quiet. To pass the long hours of waiting, my Grandfather began reading her memoirs out loud and it was if she could speak again. We passed the book from hand to hand, filling the quiet room with her own stories about her childhood in Brooklyn. Across the country, unknowingly, my mother’s sisters did the same. As she lay prone and struggling to breathe, we gave back to her the love of language and reading that she gave to us. Even after five years, my grandmother’s voice is still the voice of discretion when I choose a book to read.

 

Here’s a little PSA for you:  your friendly local service professional has feelings too.  Sometimes we say “thanks” or “hope to see you again” when we really are thinking quite the opposite.  Even when you, as the library patron, are being mean and belligerent, we really want to help you, and we’d like you to come back again.
On Tuesday, I was having a somewhat rough afternoon due to circumstances unrelated to work.  A patron came up to at 2:20 with a pamphlet request.  I was busy linking books to the catalog in preparation for scanning by Google.  Our pamphlets are in the closed stacks, and we generally get them on the hour and the half-hour, so I explained that it would be about twenty minutes.  Twenty minutes came and went while I sat at the desk in a linking zone.  You know how absorbing repetitive work can:  you search for the call number, click “okay” when the record comes up, click “add item,” click on the second tab, type in “1” under “copy,” scan barcode.  Ad nauseum, ad infinitum.  At 2:40, the patron came up to me and asked calmly about her pamphlet.  I realized I had forgotten about my 2:30 pamphlet run, and apologized profusely.
“No, it’s too late. No, I’M sorry, she snapped, as she stormed out of the reading room.  “I’m sorry you’re SO BUsy.”  Thanks for your patronage, lady.

 

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