When I was a junior in high school, my teacher unceremoniously dropped a test with a low grade on it on my desk and hissed at me, “The play you were in is over. There’s no excuse for grades like these.” This was one instance in a long line of many when a teacher called me out for not working to my potential. (I worked really hard, so I’d probably be a supernova of brilliance if I’d actually worked up to my potential. Oh well.)

She wasn’t taking a scientific approach to the whole scenario, though. My grades as I’d been rehearsing the play were excellent, because I’d been forced to carefully manage my time and plan for reading and studying. Now, with my evenings completely unstructured, I regularly told myself that I could study later. And later often meant half-heartedly doing the readings and cramming the night before the test.

On the other hand, when I was rehearsing multiple plays, leading the Latin club, writing a skit for the NC Junior Classical League competition, and creating fan works for Sailor Moon, I was handling it all pretty well.

High School Kimberly has some wisdom to offer to 30-something Kimberly. Since I received a diagnosis of Hashimoto’s thyroiditis in 2011, I’ve been carefully guarding my energy, living in fear of trying to do too much for my poor self-attacking body. This month, through a confluence of small accumulating commitments, I find myself working full-time, rehearsing an operetta, taking private voice lessons, serving on the boards of two arts organizations, serving on the boards of two academic organizations, taking a graduate level English course, and taking a sketch comedy writing class. In addition, I’ve taken on the projects in the books One Year to an Organized Life and I Will Teach You to Be Rich.

And in spite of the fact that I feel overwhelmed and occasionally flake out on my responsibilities to the various boards and have a giant mound of dirty laundry at all times, it’s been a great thing for me. I haven’t been this engaged with the world and with life since my senior year of high school.

I really like when people talk about “showing up,” meaning bringing your full self into the experience you’re having - whether that’s work, learning, family time, or something else entirely. For the past 15 years I’ve barely been showing up for anything - out of fear that parts of me will be unwelcome, or that I will exhaust my inner resources, that I will be a disappointment, or that experiences will disappoint me. This month, I’ve been forced to show up. I’ve got too many things going with too little time to do any of them half-way.

I’m learning from this first month of what is bound to be an intense spring semester that not only can I handle taking on lots of things, I can thrive, and I am a better person for doing it.

Pull Down the Night by Nathan Kotecki. Houghton Mifflin Books for Children. 2013. Reviewed from ARC from the publisher. Buy it from IndieBound or Powell’s (affiliate links).

Bruno and his brother Sylvio are the new kids at Suburban High this year, but they quickly make friends with the remaining members of The Rosary, a clique steeped in elegant, dark music and culture. Sylvio has always had those interests, but Bruno finds himself suddenly drawn to them - perhaps because of his powerful attraction to Celia, the protagonist from The Suburban Strange. Through his connection with Celia and his interactions with the school librarian, Bruno discovers that his intuitive understanding of maps has a supernatural source. He has to use these skills and his new understanding of the supernatural realm of the Kind and Unkind to help him solve two mysteries: why students around school are receiving “kiss notes” from a ghost and then discovering loved ones betraying them, and why kids all over the school are suddenly finding themselves deeply depressed.

My relationship with the author:

You should know that I can’t be unbiased about this book. Nathan Kotecki is my friend (see more about how we met in my review of The Suburban Strange). I’m listed in the acknowledgments. So if you’re looking for an unbiased review, you probably want to look elsewhere. But if you’re looking for the honest perspective of the friend of the author who’s also a former high school teacher and school librarian, well, you’ve come to the right place.

What I love:

• The supernatural stuff starts right away with Bruno mysteriously finding himself in the Ebentwine, a liminal space with a definite Wonderland vibe.
• The references to dark music and culture flow fast and free, just like in The Suburban Strange. But this time, I didn't find myself wishing I'd had goth friends to shepherd me around, probably because I got that out of the way in the first book.
• There sure is a lot of time spent in the school library hanging out with the school librarian, who is so much more pleasant than adults in YA literature often are.
• Bruno has a geography teacher who won't let him coast, but gives him the opportunity to work on an individualized project that also helps him expand his supernatural skills.
• Marco. Marco Marco Marco. He's a featured player in this book, and I love him, and it makes me so happy.
• Everybody, Bruno included, seems to love Celia in a way that makes her dangerously close to a Mary Sue, but there is an actual explanation for why everyone loves her so much.
• Bruno and Sylvio have a very positive relationship. I love siblings who get along most of the time. Of course they don't get along all the time, but they never seem to deliberately annoy each other or snipe at each other.
• All the little ways in which you know this book comes from the same world as The Suburban Strange, but it really is its own story.
• Bruno and Sylvio's dad, who is a minister, but understands that his sons need to explore faith at their own pace.
• The whole mythology of this world. There are Kind and Unkind, talented people who have the opportunity to use their supernatural gifts for good or ill. And these aren't things like super strength or throwing fireballs, but things like literally traveling through the pages of a book, or being able to shape reality through drawing it.

How my wish from last time got fulfilled:

• I said I wanted to see more menace in the school setting, and boy did Pull Down the Night deliver. This is the eeriest school library since they built Sunnydale High on top of a hellmouth. (We put that in lowercase, since we know there's more than one of them.)

What I need to warn you about:

• While this book is much quicker-paced than The Suburban Strange, it's still not an action/suspense thriller. So if you're looking for that, maybe pick up a different book, and give this to your goth friend.
• You're going to want to find all of the music that goes with this book. But you don't have to, because Nathan made a Spotify playlist. I highly recommend listening to the playlist while reading the book, if you're the kind of person who can have music going while you read.

[caption id="" align=“alignright” width=“224”] Image from Bytemarks on Flickr[/caption]

Lately I’ve been reading and thinking a lot about the Quantified Self movement. The basic idea is that technology has made it increasingly easy to track small changes in our behavior and our lives, and that the data we collect can be used to improve our situation. I wanted to start my very own Quantified Kimberly project, but as I thought about it, I realized that I’ve been practicing one variant or another of the Quantified Self for years.

Here are some of the things I’ve tracked:

• calories consumed
• weight gained or lost
• minutes spent exercising
• miles walked
• reps of various exercises
• blood pressure
• lipids levels
• blood sugar
• thyroid hormone levels
• menstrual cycles
• chores completed
• grades
• books read

Some people think QS has merit just by virtue of the fact that people are paying attention to what they do. But I think its real power lies in reflecting on the data and using it to inspire change and then track the results of that change.

Little Data

Of all the things I’ve tracked, the only ones that I’ve really used systematically or to improve my life are the medical data. I received two endocrine diagnoses (Hashimoto’s thyroiditis and polycystic ovary syndrome) largely because of my own efforts to track symptoms and hormone levels. Doctors are impressed by data. So are school administrators and legislators, of course.

It’s easy to feel bad about data collection; sometimes it feels like when we collect data on student achievement we are dehumanizing our students’ experiences and our own teaching. But I wonder if the QS movement has something to teach us about helping students take responsibility for their learning. This doesn’t necessarily mean having them pay attention to their own scores on standardized tests or benchmark assessments. It might mean something simpler and more readily visible.

QS and Formative Assessment

When I was teaching using the Cambridge Latin Course, each textbook unit came with an “I Can” checklist. The checklist put in jargon-free, student-friendly language the objectives for the unit. I would show this checklist to my students at the beginning and end of the unit. I think now that it would have been more effective for me to actually give them the checklist. Were I still in the school now, I think I might use completing the checklist as an exit ticket, and reviewing the checklist as a bellringer. As students walked in the door, I could hand them the checklist. Instead of checking or putting their initials in a box to indicate what they understood, I would have them note the date. I could then quickly review to see which students didn’t feel they had achieved the lesson objective. This would be a quick formative assessment and it would also allow students to see their own learning growing before their eyes.

QS in the 1:1 Environment

I think QS principles and techniques could be especially valuable in the 1:1 environment. I recently attended a Google Apps for Education summit, and I think you could probably use Google Forms and Spreadsheets to help students track their own learning. Many schools now require teachers to make grades available in a system that parents and students can review online, but how often do those particular numbers tell us about mastery or growth?

In the 1:1 environment, students might copy a simple form and spreadsheet that you provide, then fill out the form and be able to periodically review the data. The form might be as simple as one question - for example, “On a scale of 1 to 10, how much did you learn today?” It could also be used, however, to track the relationship between learning and other variables - for example, whether students had gotten enough sleep, or how long it had been since they had eaten. We know these physical needs affect learning. It might be valuable to students to see their own learning in relationship to these concerns.

All of this is me spitballing. As I explore this movement more, I think I will generate more ideas about how it might apply to learning.

The Quantified Kimberly: Sleep

[caption id="" align="alignright" width="259"] SleepBot[/caption]

In the meantime, I’m designing my own QS experiment. In spite of the best thyroid numbers I’ve had in years, my energy has been low lately. I think poor quality sleep is the culprit. So I’m going to install SleepBot on my phone and track my sleep patterns for a week. After that, I’m going to use interventions based on the tips in this Lifehacker article. Follow me on Twitter for daily updates on my progress.

Here’s my schedule:

November 19 - 25 - Gather baseline sleep data; make no changes to sleep habits.

November 26 - December 2 - Intervention 1: Reduce screen time before bed.

December 3: Reflect on Intervention 1 and plan next steps.

What Do You Think?

Is the Quantified Self movement dangerous? Does it have potential for use with students? Are your students self-tracking already? I know self-tracking has been used in behavioral interventions; do you think it would be useful in academic interventions as well?

I think as a school librarian, there are some collaborations that come really easily, like language arts and social studies, while there are others that you have to work really hard to set up. It never occurred to me when I was in the middle schools that I should make an effort to work with the Health/PE teachers. I just didn’t feel like information literacy really fit with their programs. But lately I’ve been examining the North Carolina Essential Standards for Healthful Living, and I found some standards here that make me think I should’ve tried harder.

Because I work in North Carolina, that’s where I’m focusing, but I imagine the standards in other states have something similar.

Beginning with the fourth grade standards, there is a focus on analyzing health information and products. This is a great opportunity to teach critical literacy. You could have students watch clips from infomercials, examine magazine ads, etc. You could have them explore the internet and find conflicting information and try to resolve that information. This focus proceeds all the way through high school, with the objective “Monitor the effects of media and popular culture on normative beliefs that contradict scientific research on health."

If you’re currently in a school, I encourage you to talk to your health and PE teachers about how you can work together beyond just pulling books about the rules of certain sports (all that I really did for those teachers, I’m sad to say). This is a great opportunity to ask kids to think critically. It is incredibly relevant to their daily lives and will continue to be so as they become adults. Just figuring out what’s the healthiest food to eat requires us to use these skills daily.

If you collaborate with your health/PE teacher in this way, I would love to hear about it. Comment here or email me: kimberly at kimberlyhirsh dot com.

A few months ago, just for fun, I typed in “are the new vampires” in my Google search box, just to see what popped up. I found a stunning array of possibilities, including zombies, ghosts, and robots. But my favorite of all the suggestions was that mermaids are the new vampires. I’ve been obsessed with mermaids since I saw Splash more than 25 years ago; I sang “Part of Your World” in a mermaid costume at a high school chorus concert, insisting that boys carry me on stage since mermaids can’t walk. My home office is decorated around a mermaid theme, and this very website featured a mermaid in the header until yesterday. (See her in the picture on the right? My mom made her for me.)

A friend from high school recently connected me with the mermaiding community, where I learned about Raina the Halifax Mermaid’s book, “Fishy” Business: How to Be a Mermaid. Raina includes a list of recommended mermaid fiction, but even more useful, she provides the URL for this Goodreads list of the Best Mermaid Books.

As I’ve watched my former school library and classroom teacher colleagues chat about their summer plans on Facebook, I’ve occasionally had a twinge of longing for the times before I was a twelve-month university employee. That said, I wouldn’t trade my excellent job and full-time employment for anything, so I’m looking for ways to capture the feel of a summer vacation that match my current schedule. I think reading a giant stack of mermaid books (especially on my upcoming beach vacation) is a great way to get the job done.

So stay tuned for reports on mermaid reads. What are you going to read this summer?

The Poetry Friday roundup is over at The Poem Farm today. Our host, Amy, shares a poem about diving. I myself have been thinking a lot about swimming lately, and researching the Total Immersion method and my own options for pool membership. So I thought I’d look for a swim-related poem myself.

NPR obliged me with the beautiful “Swim Your Own Race” by Mbali Vilakazi. I’m just going to share some lines from the opening. Head over to NPR to read the whole poem.

Beneath the surface tension of shattered bones, dreams and splintered muscles things broken and those that may never be replaced.

Pulling the weight of it, you do not tread the water wounded and in retreat

By the determined strokes of fate you swim your own race

My husband has a cat that he generously shares with me. Or perhaps it would be better to say the cat has him.

We confuse people because we regularly call him “The Kitty,” but his name is actually Laertes.

I explain this by saying that “The Kitty” is the name that the family use daily, but “Laertes” is his name that’s particular, peculiar, and more dignified. Of course, we’ll never know his deep and inscrutable singular name.

The Naming of Cats

by T. S. Eliot

The Naming of Cats is a difficult matter, It isn’t just one of your holiday games; You may think at first I’m as mad as a hatter When I tell you, a cat must have THREE DIFFERENT NAMES. First of all, there’s the name that the family use daily, Such as Peter, Augustus, Alonzo, or James, Such as Victor or Jonathan, George or Bill Bailey — All of them sensible everyday names. There are fancier names if you think they sound sweeter, Some for the gentlemen, some for the dames: Such as Plato, Admetus, Electra, Demeter — But all of them sensible everyday names. But I tell you, a cat needs a name that’s particular, A name that’s peculiar, and more dignified, Else how can he keep up his tail perpendicular, Or spread out his whiskers, or cherish his pride? Of names of this kind, I can give you a quorum, Such as Munkstrap, Quaxo, or Coricopat, Such as Bombalurina, or else Jellylorum — Names that never belong to more than one cat. But above and beyond there’s still one name left over, And that is the name that you never will guess; The name that no human research can discover — But THE CAT HIMSELF KNOWS, and will never confess. When you notice a cat in profound meditation, The reason, I tell you, is always the same: His mind is engaged in a rapt contemplation Of the thought, of the thought, of the thought of his name: His ineffable effable Effanineffable Deep and inscrutable singular Name.

A post from a friend on Facebook that linked to a blatantly incorrect article about new reading requirements in the Common Core prompted me to create this graphic.

I learned just today about The Learning Resource Metadata Initiative. This initiative, sponsored by the Association of Educational Publishers and Creative Commons, aims to develop a common metadata framework for describing learning resources on the web. At LEARN NC, we have applied domain-specific metadata to our learning resources for years. Our resources are aligned to curricular objectives and searchable by grade level and subject area, among other characteristics. I would say we’re ahead of the curve on this one.

But I didn’t learn about LMRI until today. I consider myself fairly tapped into what’s happening in libraries, especially in school libraries, and I feel like this should have been on my radar before. When I explored the LRMI site I found that while they have solicited input from teachers and school librarians, the connection between this work and the work of school librarians, which seems so obvious to me, is not present in their framework.

I fault no one involved with the LMRI for this. To myself and other trained school librarians, the notion that making educational resources more discoverable would affect our work perhaps more than that of anyone else in a school might be obvious. But so many people don’t know what we do, that I’m not surprised or even chagrined that we have to make the connection ourselves.

But we have to make the connection. We can’t wait for somebody else to do it. We can’t sit around waiting for others to invite us to these conversations about open educational resources and how to make them easy to find and to use. It is our job to make this happen and we have to go out there and do it.

While I’m not situated in a K-12 school, I consider myself to be the librarian of a vast digital professional collection, and I think the LMRI, if adoption is widespread, will necessarily influence my work and how my colleagues and I ensure the findability and usability of LEARN NC’s resources. I’m going to keep a close eye on this initiative, and I would encourage all librarians, but especially those in school and academic libraries, to pay attention to it as well - and to look for opportunities to add our voices to the conversation.

What do you think about the LMRI? Is it an exciting development? What pitfalls might be involved? I myself am cautiously optimistic about the whole thing.

The Suburban Strange by Nathan Kotecki. Houghton Mifflin Books for Children. 2012. Reviewed from ARC from the author. Buy it from IndieBound or Powell’s (affiliate links).

Celia Balaustine is entering her sophomore year of high school, but it’s her first year at Suburban High. She’s all set to spend the year trying to be as invisible as possible, with only her sketchbook for a friend, when fellow artist Regine takes her under her wing and introduces her to a clique called The Rosary. The members of The Rosary are interested in dark alternative culture, including literature, fashion, and music. They pride themselves on being different from the other kids in their school. But as different as her friends are from the rest of their classmates, Celia can’t help but be drawn into the school’s drama as young girls begin to be gravely injured on the eve of their sixteenth birthday. She wants to stop these incidents from happening, as well as protect herself from becoming the curse’s next victim. But can she?

My relationship with the author:

Before I jump into telling you what I loved about this book (and there’s a lot), I need to tell you how it came to my attention. My former supervisor Emily (whose old job I now hold) contacted me and told me that her friend was having his first book released soon and would love to get a big name to be present at his book release party, and she knew I had connections in the YA lit world and thought I might have some suggestions. After some back and forth, Emily and Nathan and I sat down for lunch so he could pick my brain for my expertise as both a kidlit blogger and a school librarian (by training if not position). Over the course of the conversation it came out that we are both seekrit goths, me coming at it more from the fashion angle and him from music, with both of us crossing over into the other interest some. I confessed my lack of education on the music part of things, and he assured me that he could fix that. So, yes, I do have mix CDs that serve as, essentially the soundtrack for this book. Yes, the author treated me to lunch since I am helping him with publicity. Yes, I felt like it would be good if I liked this book.

So know all of that, because I don’t want to deceive you about my relationship with this book.

What I loved:

• Celia's friends in The Rosary are darkly glamorous. They discuss music, art, and literature in ways that some reviews have suggested aren't realistic for teenagers, but as a former high school teacher, I found this eminently believable. Kids are into all sorts of things, and some of them are beautifully pretentious. Mostly they grow into pretentious but self-aware adults, the kind of people I like to spend time with.
• This book has a gay couple in the most stable relationship in the whole book. And it's not a huge deal. They're just a couple, who both happen to be guys. And they're probably two of the most fully-realized characters in a book full of interesting people. They're my favorites.
• The curse has a component whereby girls who are virgins seem to be the only targets. This leads to a lot of frank but not vulgar discussions of sex, its importance, when you should do it and who you should do it with. I think books that model this kind of conversation are far preferable to those that ignore it or make it all gross.
• The members of The Rosary are immensely studious. Yes, they do party at Diaboliques (described in Colleen's review as a fairytale goth club and I can't put it better than that) until three in the morning, but they also encourage Celia to do her homework as soon as she gets home from school.
• There's a romance in here that is a slow burn, which is exactly my kind of thing (both in my own love life and the stories I like to read). There won't be any flailing and crying, "I love you, but also I want you to be my dinner!" here - the obstacles to romance are external reactions to internal circumstances and I kind of love that.
• The decadence of description of the clothes, atmosphere, music, and Celia's emotions. I spent a good chunk of this book being a little sad that I didn't have a tightly-knit group of goth friends to shepherd me through school. (I had a tightly-knit group of diversely-interested friends who were wonderful, but I was one of only two of us you could categorize as goth, and not at all aware of it as a genuine subculture rather than just a cruel label folks gave spooky kids.)
• The quiet menace of the supernatural. You know the whole time that supernatural stuff is going on, but it's not the focus until far into the book.
• The subtle way in which this fits the mold of a classic Gothic novel, going as far back as The Castle of Otranto and Jane Eyre and as recent as Rebecca or even The Thirteenth Tale.

What I'd like to see more of:

• The school setting as a menace itself. This is definitely present here, but I have hopes that it will be even more present in future books in the series. I was lucky enough to hear Nathan speak to a young adult literature class at UNC's School of Information and Library Science (my alma mater!) and he mentioned that the school itself would serve as a unifying thread throughout the series. I hope he explores the relationship of this place with the supernatural mythology he's building more as the series goes on.
• More supplemental materials (appendices, maybe?) consolidating the myriad cultural references. But I'm a librarian, so it's likely I'll do a re-read and pull together literary and musical references (perhaps even create a Spotify playlist) and share that here.

What I need to warn you about: This book is deliberately paced. There was definitely a point at which I thought, "Okay, I see why the Amazon reviewers complained about it being slow." That said, it's all leading somewhere and it's all valuable. If I were doing reader's advisory, I wouldn't hand this to somebody looking for fast-paced action. I would hand it to somebody looking for atmospheric spookiness.

The big climax and resolution of the mystery are not why you want to read this book. They are of course very important to have, but what’s going to keep you interested is the mood and the world-building. Don’t jump in here expecting a typical suspense thriller. If you ran the numbers, I suspect you’d find mystery resolution takes up a very small percentage of pages or words here. But the supernatural element is woven throughout.

My favorite quotes:

"We're a set of small black shiny beads who string around together, finding beauty the rest of the world has overlooked." (p. 5 in the ARC)

“We’re in high school. Of course we’re egocentric,” Ivo replied matter-of-factly. (p. 83 in the ARC)

Who should read it: I would recommend The Suburban Strange to readers who like books with a lot of atmosphere, a little mystery, and a slow but sustained reveal of supernatural elements.