Teacher-librarians make it happen

by Constance Rulka

"The joy of victory—the agony of defeat." We were all reminded of those extremes of emotion again during the Winter Olympics. What, though, of those who put in more than their four years of struggle to prepare for the great effort, made it to the finish line, then found that not only was there no medal, but also that the cheers were inaudible and the crowds had vanished like a dream?

That was the case with our teacher-librarians here. For February 15, they had planned a district-wide PD Day on the Valentine theme—cupids, hearts-and-flowers, arrows, and the irresistible slogans of For the Love of Books, Literacy—Take it to Heart! For some years past, all the schools and communities in our area have been firmly behind them in this emphasis on reading as a solution to many of our students’ problems.

Newborn babies are welcomed with books and membership cards to the public library. Freshly arrived immigrant families are introduced to possible teachers and given boxes of books. (We have great reserves of second-hand reading material.) Story-time sessions for toddlers are held in the public libraries in the mornings. Each fall, new Kindergarten classes go to the library one evening, dressed in pajamas and slippers and clutching favourite toys, to hear adults read bed-time stories and to share some juice and cookies.

Mr. Wormsworth, the bookworm, with his long, green velvet body, wanders among them, making friends and leading them to look at the shelves of books. They soon see that the library is a magic place, with all kinds of doors leading to fantastic worlds they can visit at will.

In school, the teacher-librarians make it all happen. They funnel information from books, videos, magazines, and computers to the classes where it is needed for a unit of work right then. They make it all manageable, even for one individual student who wants to go exploring. They know how they fit into the students’ world and how to link them to the vast world of knowledge outside. They have given up many Saturday mornings to attend workshops on new methods, new theories, new discoveries about the brain and reading skills. One of their colleagues here even got a grant to look further into how problems in later grades can be avoided at the outset by early interventions in reading. You are familiar with the picture: the inspiration and the excitement of a truly worthwhile cause and the enthusiasm for changes that can improve students’ lives. The details of the Big Day, when all could celebrate, were worked out with loving care—the inspiring keynote speaker, workshops on every aspect of the written and spoken word, new technologies, a teller of the earliest folktales, a discussion of our manipulation by the media, and so on. In addition, arrangements had to be made for the booksellers to set up their displays for lots of door prizes (books!), for refreshments, for technical equipment.

A pleasant addition that almost seemed to arrange itself was the background music on the piano (by a library TA), on the violin (by a new student from Korea), and on a variety of instruments (by a spontaneously formed group of high school students, calling themselves "Sean and the Lawn Ornaments").

Now, a month later, what is the situation? The teacher-librarians do not know how their jobs will survive the cuts in funding. The solid ground has vanished from beneath their feet!

A midsummer night’s nightmare

by Constance Rulka

When I wrote, some years ago, in praise of our school librarians, I said that Shakespeare had created their prototype in Prospero. The erstwhile duke of Milan took his books with him into exile on his strange island, and in them, he found sufficient company for himself and enough material to teach Miranda. The books brought the whole world to their few acres of rock.

This seemed to me to be what the teacher-librarians were doing in the schools: bringing all areas of learning within reach of students and showing them how to admire, reject, or absorb what was to be found there, giving them a critical judgment and set of standards.

Ariel, I was whimsical enough to think, with his ability to circle the globe and extend the scope of Prospero’s guiding wisdom, symbolized all the technological aids that have come into the schools.

I was wrong. I had my plays mixed. We are not dealing with the pure spirit of Ariel, carrying out Prospero’s orders to achieve harmony and a distinct goal. Something has gone awry. The ill-natured Robin Goodfellow has replaced him. With no well-thought-out plan, this mischief-maker has gone about in the dark, indiscriminately sprinkling a lotion on our eyes. We have opened them to fall in love with the first object seen—even if it bears an ass’s head.

Only a midsummer night’s madness could explain what we have done during the last few years. Pleading lack of funds, we cut back librarians’ time and consigned their wide experience and ability to connect children with books, to some area where they could act as silent supervisors. Then, having exercised such economy, we turned around and poured out hundreds of thousands of dollars for rewiring schools to become adequate temples of a new idol, the computer.

We all jumped on a train with flashing lights as it rushed through a narrow tunnel to an unspecified destination. Parents helped us to get on board, because they hoped their children might be taken to some future where they would arrive well-equipped for some as yet unknown job market. Fear was driving us, as well as the train.

No wonder Robin Goodfellow shook his head and said, “Lord, what fools these mortals be!”

Funds were raised to put computers into the schools, with a hopeless goal of one per student. Unfortunately, it was not a one-time investment. Computers became obsolete, in no time at all, as more and more changes were made in technology, and different models (at ever higher prices) were constantly in demand. Worst of all, the delicate machines would break down; they needed highly skilled maintenance and repair. Parents and boards, having performed superhuman feats of fund-raising to get the whole thing started, found themselves back at square one every two or three years.

Robin Goodfellow could sometimes be the will-o’-the-wisp that lured travellers through bogs and brambles, pretending to show a light ahead, to mark a destination that never materialized. Now, we are mired in the needless costs of our magical technology and torn by the ever-increasing pressure to move this way or that in a hurry—before we are left behind.

Nobody seems to be measuring the effect on the children (especially in the earlier grades) of weaning them from librarians and plugging them into machines. Fond grandparents watch as the seven-year-olds manipulate the mouse and control the keyboard—willing themselves to believe that the future is now secure. Those children have been given the key, and the world is now theirs. Moral standards, social skills, and all that we mean by humanity seem no longer to count.

Fear forces us on, because other countries are rushing in the same direction. We may not know where we are going, but we dare not stop. We may not know what we mean by computer literate, but we despise those who are not. We see those who question our obsession with the machine as clods who would have suspected Copernicus because of his Polish accent and condemned Galileo for littering the streets of Pisa.

We think back, though, to Ada Lovelace (Byron’s daughter), after whom the high-level universal computer programming language ADA was named. Her “Sketch of the Analytical Engine,” in 1843, made clear the work of Charles Babbage, the computer pioneer. She foresaw that the machine could some day be used to write music. However, she lost her money on using the machine to help her calculate the winners in horse-races. At least she knew where she was going and what she wanted the machine for.

There is a vast difference between that kind of control and our loosing adolescents onto the Internet (or vice versa) and telling them that all the information is theirs. All they have to do is use their discrimination, as they decide what to do with it.

Like the people lost in the woods in Shakespeare’s play, I wish we could wake up, shake off the bad dream, and go home to Athens.

Constance Rulka, a retired teacher, is a school trustee in the Howe Sound School District.  She was an English teacher at Howe Sound Secondary School for several years.  Mrs. Rulka has been a strong advocate for school libraries.