The Sassy Bibliophile

You can buy this awesome T here! I am so excited to welcome back and welcome anew all the students and faculty and staff members as school begins. All of them. Every.Single.One. Of course, it is important to have standards in your library.  Don't tolerate meanness.  Don't tolerate bigotry.  Don't tolerate misogyny. It's all about love your neighbor in my library.  And everyone is your neighbor. The world can be harsh, and high school can be rough, y'all. We need to provide safe spaces for kids and adults alike to be themselves, see themselves, and to learn to appreciate one another. We need to have courage, be kind, and choose joy.  Reading Material: We need to have the courage to do what's right, what's equitable, what's good for kids, and what is, in fact, the job of the librarian in encouraging reading by curating a beautifully diverse collection of books and other items. We need to remember that it isn't always about what is e...

Sometimes the world feels especially heavy. Sometimes I struggle with it all.  Always, but especially in those moments, I turn to some of my mentors to help me sort through my feelings, help me know I'm not alone, and find actions that help.  They help me both to remember and to come to new understandings. As an educator, I follow many other educators. These particular mentors, however, are educators in the larger sense of the word for me. They educate me on life. Social media definitely has its flaws and limitations, but it also enables me to be inspired by these mentors, most of whom I've never met and none of whom will know or remember me should we run into one another at some point.  I read their work, I follow them on Twitter, I watch for TED talks and interviews.  I learn from them. So here are 10 of my fabulous mentors: Jason Reynolds - I just love Jason Reynolds so much.  He is one of my most favorite humans.  I've had the pleasure of me...

Every good trip to Austin, for me, includes a stop at Book People. It's magical, really.  Two glorious floors of books and various wonders. Funky and eclectic. Workers who know and love books, and who help but don't hover.obtrusively. A fantastic children's area. I could (and have) spend hours there just breathing in the air and soaking up all the goodness. It is a soul-healing space. I always find a multitude of things I want to purchase, of course, but I also am always super inspired to bring home to my own library a bit of the magic they've created in that space. As one of my favorites, Austin Kleon , says, steal like an artist .  So, here are 5 things I've taken with me this time around: 1. Book People is an Independent bookstore, so they get to do what they want, unbound by any far-away entity telling them how to market.  They know their people and they know their books, and they create the best displays to showcase their stuff.  I'm goin...

Some truths about me. I have a serious notebook addiction. I love awesome pens. I love to journal. So, I guess it stands to reason that when I do my reflections over the year, and when I do my planning for the upcoming year, I love to do it with old-school, hand-written, paper & pen, in awesome notebooks. This year, I picked up a medium-sized hot pink number at a local discount store for 2.99.  Maybe it seems odd, but I really like to start each new BuJo-ish library-planning journal right after the end of the school year. All the things are still fresh in my mind. I've just completed end-of-year reports, and all that data is handy for pondering. I've just made my state library standards review, and my EOY infographic to share with stakeholders. So, I've learned to begin at the end.  As it turns out, for me, at least, starting at the very beginning isn't necessarily a very good place to start because: 1. I want this year's data and other info cle...

Doug Robertson (@TheWeirdTeacher) posted recently on Twitter about his frustration with the quitting martyr teacher posts that always seem to go viral on Facebook about this time of year.  Shared by educators and non-educators alike.  I've seen them, of course. We've all seen them.  I've read them, and I hear their words.  They decide to burn it down when they leave, I suppose, filled with frustration and anger and sadness, too, perhaps. But Doug's Twitter thread really resonated with me, y'all.  And then this morning someone in the thread (@MoniseLSeward) suggested we use the hashtag #WhyIChooseToStay to share our stories. Yeah, I son't know that it was necessarily meant as an actual call to share, but I loved the idea, so here's mine. I just completed year 28 as an educator. I've been a kindergarten teacher, an elementary teacher of grades 2,3,4,5, an elementary school teacher-librarian, an intermediate school teacher-librarian, a middle scho...