January Reflection

Hannah Buckland January 30, 2017, 4 comments

[First attempt at this reflection thing!  I hope I'm doing this correctly.  If not, may you all learn from my mistakes.]

After five days in Atlanta, I’m happily settled into a new semester at the tribal college, some new teaching adventures, a new role in the community workforce development project I fell into last spring, a new grant application to avoid until two days before it’s due, and on and on.  I am not happily settled back into winter, but this is a separate issue.  Admittedly and understandably, I didn’t make any direct progress on my library’s Future Ready project during this short time (aside from the whole going-to-Atlanta thing).  But in tiny libraries, all work runs together.  With January bringing new classes to visit and new students to meet, I most often noticed this running-together of my usual responsibilities and Future Ready possibilities when teaching.

Melting snowballs

So far, I have just shy of thirty undergrad class visits scheduled this semester, including a research-heavy public speaking class I see weekly.  Wednesday, January 25, was my first day with the public speaking students (15 of them! this is huge for LLTC), and I tried something new based off the Snowball activity we did during Thursday’s workshop session with Dru.  I provided students with a broad research question (“What role have housecats played in human history?”—chosen to match the forty million pictures of cats littering (pun!) my office walls) and asked them to write down three to five pertinent search terms or phrases.  Then, the students crumpled up their papers, tossed them into the middle of the room, retrieved others, and circled their peers’ “best” terms.  We did this for a couple more topics and used the students’ choices to start a conversation about forming strong searches.  I look forward to playing more with this activity in other classes: Maybe we could take a broad research topic and list different ways to narrow it; or we could take a research topic, list different sources we might use, then circle the most authoritative source based on context; or we could take a topic and list potential research questions; or, or, or...

The vicious baby sleeps in the library’s book-canoe. (Shared with permission.)

Back in the library, my student-worker--she works so, so hard: single-parenthood plus full-time classes plus working plus being 21--brings her almost-ten-month-old son everywhere with her because she can't afford childcare.  Her son recently learned to crawl.  Enabled by this new mobility, his latest hobby involves creeping into my office, slowly peaking around my desk, and then shrieking.  Because I am afraid of babies, I defend myself against these attacks, and because I am not purely evil, bubbles are my weapon of choice.  We do this repeatedly throughout my student-worker’s shifts: baby creeps in, baby shrieks, I blow bubbles at him, he laughs, he leaves.  Over and over.  With him around, it’s difficult to finish anything, but after they leave, I return to my to-do list feeling refreshed and more focused.  Also, he’s kind of cute.  I guess.

Once, I had more than just cat pictures in my office. This happened six days before leaving for Atlanta, so I’m deeming it relevant.

Play is not just for babies.  For adults, playing--throwing things up into the air to see where they land and sneaking up on something new and tinkering and experimenting and rearranging and imagining and scribbling and doodling--is an important part of learning.  (The concept of “gamification” is weird to me, in part because it seems to obscure the lightness of play with the weight of Research-with-a-capital-R.  My choice here to use “play” rather than “gamification” is entirely intentional.)  The public speaking students looked deeply concerned when I told them to crumple the papers upon which they’d painstakingly penned their search terms, and their first tosses were done with limp wrists and zero enthusiasm.  By round three, they were whipping paper at each other’s faces and sprinting around the room.  It was messy!  It was chaotic!  It was fun!  No one got hurt!  In the coming months, I strive to balance learning and play within my library’s Future Ready project.  When talking with middle school students about The Future, it’s easy to forget play, especially from the perspective of (early, in my case) adulthood.  Utility bills are not fun.  Student loans are not fun.  I was led to believe health insurance would be easier to navigate.  Realistically, you need a job because you need to survive all this.  Settling into something new--a new semester, a new project, a new phase of life (like that awkward time called adolescence)--is difficult.  Having a job may be how we survive expensive car repairs, but remembering to play is how we survive the rest.

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