Room, by Emma Donoghue

Five year old Jack lives with Ma in Room.  In Room, there is Rug, there is Bed, there is Table.  All things are proper nouns, because this room and his mother are Jack's entire life, after she was kidnapped and imprisoned by 'Old Nick', who brings them food and comes by almost nightly to take advantage of his prisoner while Jack hides in Wardrobe.  Sounds horrific, and it is, but it is a story of more hope and love than I can remember reading in a long time.  The thing is that Jack's happy in this tiny world, it is all that he knows.  It's only when he tells us of his Ma's desperation, as the details of her story filter down to us, that the true horror of their situation becomes apparent.  It's difficult to say much more without saying too much, but this is truly an amazing book, narrated by an engaging and captivating character.  Looking forward to the discussion on this one.  Read it now.

Christmas Reading Update

Though I took a massive stack of books home over the break, the evil flu that decided to infect me stopped my eyes working properly and I managed to do impressively little reading over the two week break.  Boo.  But here’s what I did get through:

 

White Cat, by Holly Black



First book in the Curse Workers series, and my favourite of the break, White Cat tells the story of Cassell, who lives in a world where magic workers are heavily reagulated, but a black market of shady magical dealings runs like a dark river under him and his family.  The only non-curse worker in his family and haunted by his deeds years ago, Cassell suffers from strange dreams about a white cat, who seems to be asking for his help.

I loved this book and found it utterly gripping.  The characters are appealingly dark and tied up in a complicated world of allegiances and employment.  There are strong elements of horror in this story, and I wouldn’t recommend it for the faint hearted; there’s an underlying violence in some parts that’s quite harsh but fleshes the book out from fairy tale to a very human world.  Really looking forward to the second part of the series, Red Glove, but can’t believe I have to wait until June for it!  If anyone has an ARC they could slip my way, I will reward you biscuits.

 

Nobody’s Girl, by Sarra Manning



Seventeen year old Bea has grown up overshadowed by her energetic and exuberant mother, who is determined that her daughter will not repeat her own youthful mistakes.  When the popular crowd at school suddenly befriend her and invite her on holiday with them, it seems like the perfect way to step out of the gloom and into her own life, but when plans change and she finds herself suddenly alone in Europe, the world opens up and she starts to find her own way.

I read this as an attempt to read outside my comfort zone and experiment with some of the books that are really popular with my students, and I admit I struggled.  Around a third of the way through, I gave up for several days.  Not having been a girly girl or having a group of female friends at that age, the whole bitchiness and back stabbing, tried my patience in such a way that indicates that Manning captured perfectly how these relationships play out, with the mind games, manipulation and feelings of rejection that I’d always fought to avoid so stubbornly.  It was a bit like hating snakes but deciding to read a book about them.   But I returned to it when I started to recover a bit, and as soon as Bea and Toph (read it, you’ll find out who he is) were in Paris, I became very fond of this book and of the two of them, and when I closed the book after the last page, had a big silly grin on my face.

 

The Dark is Rising, by Susan Hill



If was dark, freezing and there was a thick layer of snow on the ground. Of course I had to read this book!  Book two of The Dark is Rising sequence, this book tells the tale of Will Stanton, seventh son of the seventh son, and born an Old One, warrior of the light.  In the dead of winter, the dark is rising and it’s up to Will to find the six Signs of Light and bring them together to save our world from freezing.

I first read this sequence of books when I was very young and absolutely adored them.  Magic, history, adventure bravery, there was nothing not to like.  Re-reading them as an adult, I still loved them, though this time I only read The Dark is Rising, as it was the most approapriate to the season.  Getting utterly carried away in this story is harder now, some elements have dated a little, and I occasionally felt that there was too much going on, such as Will’s first trip to the Great Hall, but the sense of wonder and the feeling that winter is something so much bigger than just the cold that bites at your fingertips will never be lost, and I’ll continue to reach for this book any time it snows before Christmas.

Experimenting with Pathfinders

We’ve often been told that the current generation of students in our schools are the ‘Google Generation*’, a group of students who use the web with ease and feel that they have no need for books and traditional research as we know it.  What we’re seeing in schools however, is a generation of students who though they may use the internet widely, do so ineffectively and use only a very limited number of applications.  They may be a whiz at Facebook and MSN IM, but ask them a question and their primary search strategy is to type the whole thing into a Google searchbar and hit enter.  Sadly, many of their teachers are also at a similar stage, but being better at selecting key words, get better results with only a little more skill.  Though students are taught how to use advance searches and strategies in ICT, this is seldom backed up and would need consistent reinforcement to become the norm.

The difficulty that we face in library based research lessons is that there is neither the time or the space to teach these skills.  The library isn’t laid out as a classroom, and unless it’s a small group it’s nearly impossible for me to speak to a whole class all at once, let alone monitor their progress.  So more and more this year we’re going to be focusing on passing these skills on to teachers to drill down to their classes, and setting up Pathfinders for students. This involves breaking down the task of research into a series of stages and providing them with starting points, or sign posts long the way.  Often these also open up the possibility for talking through search strategies with individual groups, as by providing a clear direction, they are able to see quite clearly where they want their research to go.

The format of these Pathfinders is proving tricky to perfect as yet.  Unfortunately our VLE just, well, isn’t, so there’s no central space to display the information.  At the moment I’m experimenting with creating documents and webpages that will guide them through, but haven’t quite found the right formula.  What I need is something that our students can get to with one click from out home page.  You know, like a VLE…**  So at the moment we’re making good use of sites such as Diigo to collect key sites, and also Pearltrees, which allows you to display your links in a way with huge student appeal.  This is the Pearltree created for the Year 12 English groups who are just about to start studying The Great Gatsby:

Great Gatsby Pearltree (Sorry, it won't embed.)

Students were able to find starting points on many areas of interest and then take their research further using key words that they identified during their reading.  So far it’s working well!  We’ll continue to investigate and develop formats and presentation until something clicks, then feedback on the process.  Wouldn't it be great to use something like a VLE for this?  *winks at ICT people*  *bats eyelashes*

*And may I congratulate the writer of this article on his wonderful moustache.

**Apparently there is one, it just hasn’t been set up, and staff haven’t been trained on it.  This is hugely useful, as you can imagine.

Hello, New Term!

Back to work!  Missed most of last week thanks to an appalling attack of flu that was well on its way to turning pneumonic* but now we’re back!  And plans for the year are already coming in thick and fast.

It looks as though the Government are reconsidering their cuts to Booktrust.  I'm a little worried that the wording is still very fluffy and could result in there still being a massive cut.  The hope of course is that there will be a way that the gifting schemes will  be able to keep running in some way that resembles how it is now, but we'll wait on the new funding announcements for that.  Students are asking if next year's Year 7s will get books too but I can't give them an answer.

The first email about the Carnegie Shadowing came in today and I admit it, I squealed.  Last year was my first year co-ordinating our Shadowers and we had so much fun reading, reviewing and arguing about the short listed books, I just can’t wait to do it again.  Hoping that some of the teething problems with the Shadowing site will have been sorted out, such as the endless logging in and the lack of paragraphing capability – grr!**

There have also been some discussions with students lately about what they’d like the library to be, and how we can make it better.  Sadly many of the suggestions are things that we just can’t do*** but some of them might be possible, and we’ll do our best to make it happen.  We’re in discussions with ICT now about the possibility of getting a small number of netbooks to compliment the computers that we have already, so that there are more available for break and lunch times.  The issue is money, mostly, and connectivity.  There’ll be no point in getting them if we can’t use them to connect to the internet and the school network.  The hope is that the ICT budget will be able to meet us half way, and with any luck, we’ll have five netbooks available over the next couple of months.  We’re also going to be buying some portable DVD players, so that the DVDs we stock can actually be played in the library.  Whoever thought of putting in computers without a CD/DVD drive, big  sarcastic thumbs up.  Well done guys.

Sadly it looks as though our Kindle plans will have to go on hold.  The good news is that they’re allowing Kindle users to loan out their books to others, which would make the whole system so much easier, but sadly at the moment you’re only allowed to loan out each book once.  Ever.  Which kinda defeats the whole being a library thing, so we’ll hold off for a while until that’s sorted.  Fingers crossed that by the time they make it feasible for us to have them, we’ll also have a wireless network up and running to make loading them up easier.

Work’s also underway to extend the INSET work that we started with teaching staff last year.  It was so much to pack into one session that we’re hoping to run a year long activity based on the ’23 Things’ format that’s been used so effectively by many groups, particularly last year by the Cambridge librarians.  If we can get approval and support from those on high, we’ll be working with teachers from across the curriculum to develop their use of Web 2.0 technologies and tools.  When there’s so much out there available for free, if would be daft in these times of cuts not to take full advantage of them.

Time to conquer 2011!

 

*Not sure if pneumonic is a word, but it should be.

** Can’t help it – ex-English teacher.

*** Would love to have a café and loads of armchairs!  That would be AWESOME.  But it’s just not going to happen.