Three Days Left!

Just one more week of school.  Three days with students, two "post-planning."

I have learned a valuable lesson this week.  We usually do two book fairs a year, but I always feel bad that there are a few days in which we're not checking out books.  So we are having one of Scholastic's Buy-One-Get-One Free book fairs.

Now I know of two other schools that do this but they just have them open for parents and teachers, not students.  I thought that was weird and kept mine open for the kids as well.

Never again.

Now I understand their reasoning.  Kids, even 5th graders, just don't get this concept.  They make the worst choices or try to get the more expensive book for free. Or some such nonsense.  It's just too hard to get across to kids how to deal with this.  Not all of them.  A few of them are okay.  But for most of them, it's too difficult and it would be killing the clerk and I if it were busier than it is.

Luckily we can close it up Monday.  Whew!

I'm 99.99% moved out.  I have like three things left to grab on my way out next week.  Everything else is boxed up and sharing space with the lawnmower out in the shed.

I'm just hoping to be able to get into my new school on the 28th.

Our last book club meeting was this morning.  I decided, instead of buying frozen yogurt, to just do our normal donut holes and CapriSuns thing, then I also bought them ice cream for their lunch.  It's funny because I only bought enough ice cream tickets for the ones that actually showed up today.  The other half dozen or so were bummed, but I did give them a free book.  Somehow I always end up with a few books after every book fair.  They're usually things someone ordered and never picked up.  Or something.  Anyway, I whipped out that box of books and let each kid have a free one.  The stragglers who didn't get ice cream still got a free book if they came to see me today.  So that was cool.

Countdown to Summer...

SEVEN days left with students!  Then two teacher work days.  "Work" here is loosely defined for my part.

I'm almost finished packing my office.  I still have my calendar on the wall, my water bottle, my speaker dock for my iPhone/iPod, my glue gun and glue sticks and a handful of pens and such.  Less than a box to pack, for certain.

I'm simply concentrating on making what's left in here easily understood by whomever takes over the position.  So I have copies of things they'll need right away on the desk and labeled binders on the bookshelf and sticky notes on a couple of random things.

Other than that, I just have the typical end-of-year stuff to do.  Making room for all the classroom stuff that will come back like document cameras and things.  Shelving the million books coming in.  Taking payments on the lost ones.  Repairing the beaten ones and deleting the ones that are too far gone.  Shifting sections to accommodate the books coming back that don't usually ever take up shelf space, like the K section in fiction for Jeff Kinney.

I'm trying to hold off on thinking too much about my new position until I'm finished with this one, but it's difficult.  I'm so ready to start!  I'll probably be over there the day after Memorial Day if they'll let me in the building.  There's so much to learn about the place and so much to do!

Friday will be our last 4th/5th grade book club meeting.  It'll be mostly a party with free frozen yogurt and books.  Woo Hoo!

What are your summer plans?

Update your links if need be, because I'm reverting to the old address

I don't know who this is, but I was beginning to HATE her when I thought she stole my blog! 

I've had this little patch of the internet for a number of years now.  So I was a bit freaked this evening when I went to the site and found it had turned into some crappy ad with the above stock photo.

Some frantic web searching and some helpful folks on a blogger discussion board revealed that the blog had not, in fact, been hacked.  The custom domain had somehow expired.  So no more "www.teacherninjas.com" for me.

I'm sticking with plain old "www.teacherninja.blogspot.com" for now.

Whew!

I'm going to go enjoy my lowering blood pressure now...

New School Visit

So I visited my new school yesterday.  Everyone seems so nice and helpful but I may have bitten off more than I realize.  Over a thousand kids and no clerk?  Whew!

It's a bit farther from my house, but not a bad drive and it only gives me more time with my audiobooks, so that's all good.

Things I have to do at my current school that I won't have to worry about at the new school: bulletin boards, laminating, making slideshows for the announcements, looking for where someone else left the cordless phone, answering the phone no less than ten times a day to tell someone looking for the clerk that I haven't a clue where she went, helping the clerk look for her reading glasses, teach classes as part of the Specials rotation, pick up extra Specials classes when the counselor can't be there for hers.

Things I'll have to do at the new school that I don't do now (or only sometimes do): shelve books, check books in and out, run the Accelerated Reader program,  announce the buses and day care vans for dismissal (right now I put the arrivals on the slides, but don't announce them).

Sounds like a pretty good trade until you realize that there are over a thousand kids and without a clerk I could spend half my life shelving and checking in and out books.  But I'm working on it.  And they've already been working on it.

At my current school I have already been teaching teachers to check out their own classes because it's just not that hard and the clerk is often out and I'd rather be helping kids find books.  At my new school, after losing the clerk they have actually been experimenting with getting the kids to check themselves out!  From what I saw it mostly works but still requires supervision.  The biggest problem is that when one kid checks out, their information is still up on the screen.  The software isn't set p for self-checkouts. They have to remember to take the mouse and click on "reset" so it's cleared for the next student.  If they don't, not only can others see what they've checked out, but they could potentially have books on their accounts they didn't check out.

My plan is to make doubly sure teachers can check out their own classes, but also to make a big push for volunteers.  I've already got someone talking to the PTA about maybe setting up a volunteer committee and helping me find enough people to staff the circulation desk.  Ideally I'd get ten reliable volunteers, two four-hour blocks per day.  I'd create a training binder and get them really well trained on shelving correctly and checking in/out.  I know it's a fantasy, but that's what I'll shoot for and whoever I actually get I'll fill in the most needed areas first.  Thursdays and Fridays are always the busiest.

One thing the previous Media Specialist did to survive was use book fair money to pay someone to come in on Fridays to help shelve.  It sounds good on paper but the problem is that it kind of reinforces to the administration that cutting the clerk position was an okay decision.  I think I'd rather be underwater with shelving and continue to put in plugs for at least a half time clerk than spend money I'd rather use on new books and have everything kept up.  But we'll see what happens after I've been there a few months.

It was great seeing a few people I knew from a previous job.  It's a relatively new school (opened in 2009) and is near my previous school so there are at least half a dozen or so familiar faces.   And like I said, it everyone I talked to was delightful.  One girl apparently asked her teacher if she could go to the library just to come meet me.  She had even written a letter and brought it to me:

"Dear Mr. Randolph,
     I think you are going to be a spectacular Librarian. Some of the books are real Masterpieces. There is gary Paulsen, Dr. seuss for the Little ones, Encylopedias, almanacs, dictionarys, and other huge books...anyways I know you are going to have a Lot of fun with this Job.
              Sincerely,
              Abigail
PS: You will see me in the Library a Lot! :)"

Yay, fellow nerd!  I loved that and it reminds me that hey, even if I end up being a glorified clerk the worst that would happen is that I narrow my focus to just getting the right book to the right reader. That's the best part of the job anyway.

Wool

So I'll try to summarize, but it's one of those books that you'll enjoy while you're reading it but when you start to examine the details its minor plot details fall apart pretty quick.  It's also full of surprises so too much discussion leads to spoilers.

Basically, something Very Bad has happened back in the day.  So the surface of the Earth is now a WALL-E type post-apocalyptic wasteland filled with poisonous gasses.

Without giving too much away, all that seems to be left of humanity lives underground in a ginormous silo with over a hundred levels that have farms, apartments, mechanical engineers, IT, etc.  There are only a few viewscreens to to outside world and as bleak as it is, people like to keep an eye on it.  If someone goes loopy and breaks the taboo against mentioning the outside, they are deemed unfit to live among the rest of us and sent out for "cleaning," which means the are given a special suit to survive out in the elements for a brief time which they will spend cleaning the sensors outside to give the rest a clear view so they can keep watching for things to clear up out there.  In however many hundred of years this has been going on not one of the cleaners has failed to do the cleaning before succumbing to the poisonous gasses.

If you are having a hard time of it after the second section, let me just say that the character of Juliette is the main character and is the main character until the so-called ending, which is clearly designed for more of the story to come.  It's not clear from the first sections that she is the main character so that might help you get over a couple of depressing humps.

It's compulsively readable but the piecemeal way it was self-published online still leaves it with an episodic feel.  Mr. Howey has also ignored one of Elmore Leonard's rules of writing which is "try to leave out the parts readers tend to skip."  I found myself skipping a lot of detailed writing about mechanical work and walking up and down the steps of the silo (it's never made entirely clear why elevators can't be used).

Actually, along with the elevator thing, it's never made clear why these people aren't pasty, vitamin-D deficient mole people after hundreds of years away from the sun.  Or how the air everywhere is poison except in an underground silo where they have all kinds of feats of mechanical engineering but no obvious sources of air or air filtration systems. It's also not clear why this is called "Wool."  There's a bit of wool used to clean the sensors.  There's a lady that knits at the beginning for metaphorical effect, but not with wool.  There's a line about wool being pulled from our eyes.  But I would have gone with Silo myself.

But the characters and the story are always the most important part of any piece of fiction and these were done well and made me read it pretty darn quick. It's not giving anything away to say that there are big Secrets and Lies and Juliette is finding out Not Everything is As It Seems.  So she has to carefully uncover the Truth Behind the Lies at her own peril!  There's conspiracy theorizing, a dash of romance and lots of surprises and pulse-pounding action and suspense.

It'll make a good movie someday, that's for sure. I hear Ridley Scott has the rights.  Of course he's known for buying up the rights to all kinds of good things, then wasting his talents on junk like Prometheus so who knows if we'll ever see it.  He owns the rights to The Forever War too and that would be way better in my humble opinion.

Wool is getting a lot of hype because of it's self published status.  I don't really care about that.  It was certainly an entertaining diversion.  That's all I care about.  I think it would have benefited from an editor, but maybe I'm just responding to the way he wrote it in episodes, then put it together as one novel.  Either way, I'm giving it a good-not-great three out of five star review on Goodreads.