Miss M. Reads

  “We may appreciate the qualities of an antique ... but increasingly most of us choose to use the more modern version of things in daily life.” - Layla McCay   Eight years ago, columnist Rafael Behr wrote in an opinion piece for The Guardian, “We can’t embrace the future if we’re longing for the past.” Now, I have no idea what he wrote in the rest of the piece, if it has anything to do with libraries, or whether I even agree with his other opinions, but I thought that this was a particularly apt description of the state of reference services in the school library learning commons (LLC).   My LLC is a bustling hub of the school, with students flocking there everyday to socialize, play games, and find their next favourite book; busyness aside, the LLC is sorely lacking in one key area. You guessed it – reference services.   The State of the Collection Don’t be fooled by my use of the word “lacking” – the non-fiction collection currently boasts over 5500 texts. Unfort...

The roles and responsibilities of a teacher are extensive, even if one doesn’t take into account the many “hidden duties” of the profession. The last few years of teaching amidst the ever-changing conditions of the Covid-19 pandemic have made this evident; I would argue that these last few years have added duties and expectations, like learning how to completely shift teaching practice to a virtual method and enforcing health guidelines in classrooms. At times, this can make professional development and implementing new initiatives into their practice (a requirement of the job) sometimes fall to the bottom of the teacher priority list.   Fortunately, the Concerns Based Assessment Model (CBAM) for exploring innovations in teaching practice takes this into account, and as educator Susan Riley says on her podcast “it provides you with information on what professional development your teachers need, how to deliver your professional development effectively and provides opportunities to ...

“Hi! Mr. Fletcher (pseudonym) told me I could find the definition of ‘Swiftie’ in urban dictionary, so I came down here to the library. Where are the urban dictionaries?” The look of disbelief in this student’s eyes when I chuckled and told him that Urban Dictionary was a website, and not a physical book was fantastic. Don’t you love charming misunderstandings?  After he left though, I thought, how awesome is it that this student recognized the need for a dictionary, and came down to the library to find one instead of turning to a phone or personal device? That then got me thinking further though, that my school library learning commons (SLLC) doesn’t have a large collection of physical reference resources like dictionaries, because the natural go-to nowadays is to look the information up online. This then led me to spend more time waging an internal war over the value of physical reference resources over digital reference resources, and my role as arbiter of library budget and res...

Evaluation of a Reference Work Science 8 is a fascinating curriculum in BC, and never more so than in the past three years. A key content area of the Science 8 curriculum is “the relationship of microorganisms with living things”  ( Building Student Success - B.C. Curriculum ). At the immediate level, the curriculum asks students to look at how diseases and infections impact the human body; at the broader level though, it asks students to take a step back and examine how pandemics and epidemics have impacted human populations. It’s a rare learning experience for students of the past three years, to be learning about how epidemics and pandemics impact the world while seeing the immediate effects of a pandemic in real time with Covid-19. Theoretically, the hope is that the immediacy of the classroom learning in their own lives would help students to become more invested in their learning experiences.  Selecting science reference materials can be a tricky business though. Being a...