I'm finally posting on here after a long, tiring autumn.  After much debate, I dropped out of the PhD program and took a full-time teacher-librarian position offered to me by a nearby school district.  As it turns out, there were many more catches in taking this job than I imagined.  I'm basically doing the job of what should be two full-time people, the two library collections are a mess, the budgets are frozen so fixing these problems is a bit more difficult than it could be, and as a probationary teacher I have to deal with turning in lesson plans every two weeks.  Add to this the fact that I am dealing with three bosses with varying expectations for what I should be doing but no idea of what i have on my plate at the other facilities, and... well, you get the picture.  All in all, though, I'm quite happy -- I'm doing exactly what I'd planned to do, with the hours and commute I want.  I am using my skills at fixing things, and having to be creative on top of this since I don't possess the right resources to do this normally.  Now that I am FINALLY done with my last class in the master's program, I'll snag real hire instead of the probationary status I hold right now... that is, if the unexpected C+ I got in my last class does count toward my degree.  Now, I didn't exactly do a fabulous job in my class, and I can't tell you how overwhelming it's been to have that class hanging over my head in addition to the forementioned issues and the family to take care of, but I was so sure that I had a solid B to round out my master's degree.  And, of course, it's the holidays, so there's no one in the advising office to tell me one way or the other!  Ah, well.  I hope everyone is having a great break.  I sure did -- it was great to see my sister and her family for the first time in, oh, 6 years or so this Christmas, and I haven't slept past 7 a.m. in I don't know how long!

Another weak year for movies, in my opinion, so there are a lot of older classics on this list...

• Wall-e - As a mom, I am occasionally forced to watch kid movies that are worse then torture.  Usually, we Netflix 'em or get them from the library and let the kids watch these when we're, um, doing something else.  Luckily, they've started putting the good stuff on DVD, such as the original Scooby Doos, Thundercats, and all the other cheesy but much better cartoons that we used to watch back in the day.  WALL-E, though, does not fall into the torturous kid movie category.  It's fantastic.   It's got that post-apocolyptic flavor from Idiocracy, but mixes it with hope for humanity and a sweet little love story.  Love it.
• Meet the Robinsons - more cheesy Disney, but I really liked this one.  A cute tale about an inventor who loses hope, mixed with some time travel fun and a sweet-but-not-sickening theme about the importance of family. 
• Death at a Funeral - Featuring, among others,  Alan Tudyk from Firefly fame, this is a hilarious movie about a family's shenanigans during a proper British funeral.  Up there with Keeping Mum for dark humor. 
• Laura - fantastic film noir classic.  Gene Tierney and her male counterparts play it well.
• Dexter: The Series - the writers of this series (or, well, the writer of the book it's based on;I'm not sure where the brilliance originates....) take the tired old serial killer theme and turn it in on its head.  Michael C. Hall creates a completely sympathetic sociopath whose life unravels but improves as he learns how to feel for the first time since the age of three.  Anyone who has felt betrayal or a detachment from normal life will find much to appreciate in the fantastically complex, well-developed performances.  See it.  I am impatiently awaiting season 3 on DVD. 
• Terminator: the Sarah Connor Chronicles - Summer Glau, another Firefly alum, plays a kick-arse Terminator back to save good 'ole John Connor yet again.  Action-packed fun.
• War, Inc - I was initially disappointed with this one, as  huge fan of Grosse Pointe Blank, but after a second viewing this one started to grow on me.  Satirical performances from John Cusack, Marisa Tomei, Ben Kingsley, Joh's sister Joan, and Hilary Duff make for a crazy yet somewhat accurate trip through the life of a government contractor.   Many cringe-worthy scenes pointing out how ridiculous it is to rebuild a country you've destroyed.
• Casino Royale - Daniel Craig rocks as the newest Bond.  Enough said here.
• The Dark Knight - even darker than the first Christopher Nolan iteration of Batman, Heath Ledger does bring this one to greatness with his portayal of the twisted, tortured Joker. 
• Driving Lessons - A cute British coming of age story, starring the kid who played Ron Beasley in the Harry Potter series as a sheltered child who learns to live when he becomes the companion of an elderly actress.
• The Ghost and Mrs. Muir - Apparently, I was a Gene Tierney fan this year, since this is the second of three very different movies featuring her talents.  In this slow, quiet little tale, a woman meets and falls for the ghost of a ship captain who haunts the large house she and daughter visit, then move to after her husband dies. 
• The Shop Around the Corner - Gene Tierney again, in the movie that apparently launched the idea for the cute if annoying You've Got Mail.  James Stewart plays a clerk at a store who can't stand the new employee, a smart and opinionated woman who argues with him at every turn.  Meanwhile, he carries on an escalating love-letter relationship with a woman who, as you can guess, is a little closer than he thinks.  Viewers will find much satisfaction in the way Stewart's character accepts his love and slowly works to win over the woman who thinks he is the enemy.  
• Bell, Book, and Candle - Kim Novak and Jimmy Stewart (again) in another classic love story between a witch who hides her charms and an everyday guy.  Jack Lemmon provides much comic relief as Novak's brother. 
• Father Goose - Good 'ole Cary Grant deftly plays a lazy drunk in this comedy.  After a colleague tricks him into becoming a spotter on an uninhabited island during the war, a French teacher and her young charges crash land and turn his world upside down. 
• The Secret Garden - this film adaptation of the family classic held my kids rapt. Talented performances from the young cast and Dame Maggie Smith. 

A few of you have been asking where the heck I've been on LJ for the last month or so.  My answer comes down to two reasons: 1) school's out.  Right now I am currently ignoring, very purposefully, the absolute mayhem occurring in the other room.  Most of this chaos stems from the fact that my son has oh-so-considerately hidden my daughter's doll who knows where.  Ah, parenthood.  2) classes.  Who knew that one  online class would amount to more work than three of my spring classes put together?  I suppose 8:30 a.m. is a bit too early for a stiff drink.  Cheers.

Well, it's official.  I've officially broken the $50 fill-up barrier.  Gas at the cheapest station near my house crossed over to $4/gallon yesterday.  I said something about this to my friends at work, and they gave me looks.  Many of them have SUVs, so apparently they're paying over $70 per fill-up.  

Slutbucks!!!! This article is too funny.  

We're discussing immigration this week in class.  Here's what one of my posts said: "The ideas of social mobility, resiliency, and 'pulling one's self up by the bootstraps' are truly admirable, and speak to the fundamental philosophy behind the founding of the United States. It is truly shameful that a nation filled with the descendants of immigrants can harbor so many negative perceptions about immigrant communities in general, documented or not."

I have a lot more to say in this vein, though; I just feel that I should bite my tongue in certain settings. :) 

We're going to be a host family for a Belgian girl in August.  How cool is that?  

My husband hung up with a good friend of his just after I got the kids to bed.  He's back from Iraq, thank god.  Even better, he and his whole team made in back intact... physically, anyway. 

In the past two days: a) a second grader has jumped up from seemingly nowhere during a book talk and knocked the book from my hand directly on to a neighboring child's head (sharp book corner down, of course); b) a kindergarten student has flicked off the light mid-lesson, causing me to avoid stepping on 20 other children and/or knocking down endless book shelves while trying to reach the light switch at the other side of a completely pitch black room (that's right, in an interior room with no windows, both doors shut!); c) two fourth grade students have nearly gotten into a fist fight over the results of a game played during my lesson.  I arrive home nearly every evening with a splitting headache.  I don't know how elementary classroom teachers do it.  If I end up in a K-12 library, I'm thinking that secondary level is really the way to go.  Hormones? Snogging in the corner?  Yeah, I can handle that stuff MUCH more effectively.

I'm very conflicted about health insurance right now. 

We had health insurance a few years back; I worked for a lovely firm that provided very good benefits and a nice salary.   Under my old health plan, the firm deducted just under $200 per month for health benefits that covered my whole family.  Of course, coverage never covers everything; we had to pay a co-pay each visit of $10 to $25, plus a co-pay for every prescription medication, which ranged from $5 for a generic to $25 for a non-preferred, name-brand medication.  This is, in fact, a lot of money, but at the time, this was not a concern.  The salary was a good one, which made up for this monthly deduction.  Besides, we felt that having coverage just in case was essential.  We lived in an area where traffic was atrocious; I'd been rear-ended three times in one year.  What if any of those had been more serious?  The DC sniper shot a kid a block from our old house.  What if that had been our child?  Most importantly, we were having a second child (my daughter is now two years old).  Without insurance coverage, we would've had to pay out of the teeth to deliver her, keep her immunized, and bring her in for well-baby visits.  Itemized, these expenses would have run us about $8000 total for the first year, and she was healthy and happy baby with no complications.  Even before delivery, she would've cost us a pretty penny; prenatal care visits are monthly, with plenty of labs and imaging costs included in plan coverage.  Obviously, having health insurance coverage in this case is a no-brainer.   You don't have to be Danica McKellar to figure out that paying $2500 total for a year's coverage is much less than $8000.

Now, that's not the case.  The math is very simple for us right now: insurance costs way too much compared to the real costs of health care.  I'll be starting the Ph.D. program this fall.  Tuition is covered and a stipend is included, but health benefits are not.  We can choose to purchase a health plan, but the costs are substantial -- $7000 for the family!  That's over $580 per month.  You can be sure that I would never let an employer scrape that much off of my paycheck every month.  For this bargain price, the plan covers just 80% of the costs for normal visits.  This is outrageous.  Are we really going to spend over $7000 per year on health expenses, making this plan worth the investment?  My daughter is not a baby anymore.  Each of us, including the two kids, needs a yearly checkup and occasional shots.  My current doctor gives you a discount when you pay cash, as his staff needs to do no paperwork to gain payment.  So, well child and acute care visits cost about $75 each.  Immunizations are about $15-$30 a shot.  That works out to be less than $600 per year for preventive care.  Throw in 4 acute care visits and prescriptions, and that still keeps expenses under what I used to pay just for coverage alone.   Even adding in the $50 for a pack of birth control pills every 28 days (that's about $660 per year) keeps costs comparable to what we were spending as insured people in the DC area.  It seems stupid to put so much of our money into a plan like this.  We're better off putting that cash into savings and making interest income from it.  Buying this kind of insurance DOES NOT MAKE RATIONAL SENSE.

Or does it?  On the other hand, there are the what-ifs.  What if we get into a car accident, and require surgeries to re-attach limbs?  What if I get cancer?  What if my husband collapses on the farm, and has to be rushed to a hospital, incurring ambulance fees on top of his treatment expenses?  What if my son breaks an arm on the playground?  What if I miss a pill, we end up expecting another child, and this pregnancy is more complicated?  This decision is a horribly risky one to make.  I don't know what to do. 

I recently accepted an offer to start a Ph.D. program in the fall.  Your favorite little librarian may very well be a professor in another 4 or 5 years.  My husband is already giving me !@#$ about it.  "Hey, professor, think you can handle remembering to turn the oven off?"  "Hey, college girl, is that doctorate going to help you find your keys?"

*grin* 

I finally watched myself giving a lesson today on iMovie, and I must say that I look like a complete and utter idiot.  Does my voice really sound that way?  Do I really move like such a geek?  I really don't like what this practicum requirement has uncovered! *sob*  At any rate, it's easy to get over this given the absurd news on NPR today.  First, there's the Earn to Learn idea.  Apparently, they're PAYING kids at some school in Georgia to show up and do homework!  How is this possible?  I'm all for motivating kids, but this just reeks of improper use of extrinsic rewards.  Deci himself metioned that money was an improper motivator back in 1971!! (I have this article saved somewhere, if you'd like to read it -- I won't post it here since I probably got it through a licensed database for some paper in the past.)  Can I get an Amen from one of my iSchool colleagues here?  Oh, and speaking of Amens, I had to chuckle at the report that a church group has started a Prayer at the Pump group in DC: "...Rocky Twyman says nothing else has worked, so he's urging motorists to pray for lower gasoline prices when they fuel up."  Hey, if that works, I'm all for it... but I'm not sure if the Almighty is with us on that one.  We humans reap what we sow, eh?

For my last post about electronic whiteboards, I thought I'd post a case study about use of these devices in a school for the deaf and blind.  Teachers working with students who are legally blind, but have some sight capability (like our new governor), can view things much more easily on the large display.  Sign language teachers noted that the ability to use their fingers instead of markers or chalk made their work much easier.  Teachers noted more generally that students like the technology, which facilitates their motivation to pay attention in class and learn.  SMARTboard has posted other case studies about use of the technology in school with various needs on their website.  

Feds Lose Laptop Containing Sensitive info -- Again.
This time, it was an NIH laptop.  Hmmm.  Perhaps the feds should stop using laptops for all of that sensitive info?

A European company found that 70% of people will give away their login and password info for... dum de de dum.... candy!  Identity thieves, take heed!

Nature Blog: School’s plagiarism code plagiarized. 

Apparently UT-San Antonio students had a little problem drafting an honor code for their institution -- good thing they were able to copy from Brigham Young!  This kind of story just makes me chuckle.

In other news, scientists have discovered that dyslexia is indicated by different portions of the brain, depending on whether the language is alphabetic (English, for instance) or pictorial (Chinese, for instance).  Researchers had children with and without dyslexia perform reading tasks under an MRI, and conducted this experiment with both English and Chinese speakers.  English learners with dyslexia had significantly different brain activity in two sections near the back of the brain, while Chinese learners exhibited problems with activity in a frontal portion usually linked to "working memory."  This is some fascinating stuff -- if I'm with a child with dyslexia in English, does this mean that I could teach him to read Chinese with no problem?  

Teacher Librarian toolkit: Electronic Whiteboards.  This article looks at some uses of electronic whiteboards undertaken in Australia and the UK.

AccessIT Knowledge Base: Are electronic whiteboards accessible to people with disabilities?  Electronic whiteboards do bring up an access issue.  That is, there are some people that cannot use a mouse or stylus -- how can we deal with this fact in the classroom?

We’re discussing cybersecurity this week in class.  For me, cybersecurity has to do with much more than worms and spyware.  Perhaps that’s just an indicator that I’m paranoid :).  I am going to digress in this direction to what spyware is designed to do – track your actions on the Internet – and connect this to electronic surveillance.  As a recent Washington, DC area "escapee" this happens to be one of my pet topics, so I’m going to step onto the soapbox here and talk about this subject and its relation to libraries. 

In 2003, the Washington Post broke a story about National Security Letters, Dept of Justice documents that requested specific information on a patron or customer while placing a gag order on the recipient.  In 2003 after the news leak, then-Attorney General Ashcroft stated that no libraries had been tapped for Patriot info.  However, according to this article, as of mid-2003, 444 out of 1500 libraries surveyed had been approached for patron information by a government agency (225 of them refused to provide info).  I'm not sure what the survey methods were, so those numbers may or may not be accurate.  The only publicized case thus far involves a librarian at a non-profit that handles records for 20+ Connecticut public libraries who filed a suit via the ACLU in 2005.  According to an article in the Washington Post, the district judge declared the action unconstitutional last fall, so it will be interesting to see how this ruling plays out. 

The ACLU has documented case progress here, even providing a pdf of the actual national security letter.  PBS show NOW also featured an interview with the librarians involved with the suit.

A link on the Post article noted that the FBI issues tens of thousands of these letters per year, but the source does not categorize by recipient type (phone companies and ISPs, booksellers and libraries, banks, etc).  The ALA has posted extensively on this topic in its intellectual freedom section, and provides guidance for librarians dealing with this contentious issue.  Most state library associations have also adopted policies (NYLA's is here). 

Some library systems (Seattle provides a good example) have developed internal policies.  I know that my library does not have a huge policy, but we follow the New York State law on confidentiality (namely, info requests require a subpoena).  We upgraded to a new system recently, and during training I was pleased to see that it defaults to an option where patron info attached to any circulated item is dumped after check-in.  We offer patrons the option to turn on a “reading history” if they want to keep track of their books, but if they do so a warning pops up noting that if they choose this option, the government may have access to these records without their knowledge.  Hurray for the system developers!

If you're very interested in the issue, I recommend looking at the work of Mary Minnow, a librarian-turned-lawyer who consults for the ALA, runs the librarylaw.com website, and has written extensively on this subject.  This article is one of her efforts and includes many good footnoted sources for further reading.

Rachel Singer Gordon, the mind behind the Liminal Librarian Blog, the NextGen Librarian books & columns, and the LIS Jobs website, has struck up a fascinating discussion on her blog.  She has hit the nail right on the head about what I call a "superiority complex" among MLS-minted librarians in the field:

"It’s one thing to value the MLS. It’s another thing entirely to condescend to non-MLS librarians (yes, I said librarians), paraprofessionals, and other non-degreed library workers, to discount their opinions, and to ignore their contributions to their libraries and to librarianship as a whole. We don’t need to be infighting; we have better things to do."

I straddle this topic as a library student working under the librarian title at my small, rural library.  My boss does not have an MLS, but she is a worthy and dedicated director.  After a I graduate, I by no means expect to suddenly feel like I know more than she does just because I've got a new certificate for my wall.  However, I do value the ideals behind an MLS degree.  Otherwise, I wouldn't be in the program.  I think the MLS offers the hows and whys behind the everyday actions undertaken in a library.  Great, non-degreed librarians may do the right thing, but may be at a loss when trying to connect their actions to the big picture. 

I was astounded when, a few months back, I discovered that I couldn't get class credit for completing a real-life project at my own library because.... dum-de-DUM... my professor did not consider my director a real librarian.  This instructor required all projects to be conducted with the partnership of an MLS-degreed librarian.  This sparks some very mixed feelings for me.  My director is a much better library professional than many of the MLS holders I have dealt with.  Yet, at the same time, I can understand my professor's dilemma here.  A non-MLS librarian may seem like an unknown quantity to a stranger.   An MLS holder, in theory, at least knows about all of the material they should be applying to the profession, even if they're not, in practice, doing so.  Non-MLS holders are self-made; if they're good it's because they have reached beyond their potential.  They just haven't forked out that cash and jumped through that hoop. 

I'm glad that Rachel stirred up so much thinking about this issue.  I encourage you to read her blog entry and the active discussion following it. 

Science News Daily: Officials found the fossil of a giant dinosaur jawbone while investigating a suspicious package on a bus in the mountains of Peru on Tuesday....    Now, I'm not sure what genius came up with this idea. It's not like you can shrug this one off with an "oh, sorry, officer -- didn't know that was in my bag!"  The jawbone pictured is easily the size of a man's torso.