Kimberly Hirsh

Hello, Internet! I hope you have a great day today.

📚 This is your reminder that The Frame-Up by Gwenda Bond is out today!

I’m currently doing Leonie Dawson’s 40 Days to a Finished Book ecourse and I love this that she said:

It’s a collage of words.

You don’t have to start at the beginning and write until you get to the end.

(If you use the link above to buy the course, I may get a commission.)

I’m taking a deliberate break from all things academia and academia-adjacent.

I spent the past 2 years working on a big project as the key academic personnel on the project. It’s not done; when my contract ended, I had to hand it off to my colleagues. (We couldn’t extend the contract for administrative reasons.)

I’m sitting on a couple of freelance academic opportunities but as I think about pursuing them, I know it’s just not time yet. I can feel internal resistance and it’s telling me that after being in an academic headspace for more than 8 years, it’s time to do something different for a while.

Do I plan to come back to these freelance gigs and be available for academic contract work in the future? Yes. Do I plan to return to FanLIS and fan studies more broadly after I fill my well? Absolutely! But right now, that’s not where I’m at.

It’s kind of like taking a sabbatical.

Finished reading: Two New Years by Richard Ho 📚

Winner of the 2024 Sydney Taylor book award.

Finished reading: The Truth About Dragons by Julie Leung 📚

A 2024 Caldecott Honor winner.

Finished reading: A Hunger Like No other by Kresley Cole 📚

Incredibly high spice level, all the chili pepper emoji 🌶️! A Valkyrie/vampire hybrid and a werewolf (there wolf) fall in love. I’m reading this as I listen along to the first season of Fated Mates.

🖖🏻 Odo is DS9!Data. (And I know, Data is TNG!Spock.)

Now I’m thinking about Odo’s maintenance of his humanoid form and how it can be read as an analog for neurodivergent masking. Like, he’s really trying to give back what he’s getting but it’s hard, okay? Faces are difficult. 🖖🏻

Finished reading: Fox Has a Problem by Corey R. Tabor 📚

Reading my way through this year’s American Library Association Youth Media Award winners. This won the Theodor Seuss Geisel Award for the most distinguished beginning reader book. It’s super cute.

Finished reading: Nacho y Lolita/Nacho and Lolita by Pam Muñoz Ryan 📚

Pam Muñoz Ryan won the Children’s Literature Legacy Award. This was where NoveList Plus recommended starting with her work.

Finished reading: Dreaming of You by Lisa Kleypas 📚

A sizzling historical that has two refreshing leads: she’s a writer, not a bluestocking. He is a gambling club owner, not a duke.

🎮 Finished Link’s Awakening.

Super fun!

Parents who are freelancers/self-employed, what do you do when your kid is home sick? Do you just sort of give up on getting work done?

It’s three weeks’ worth of week notes at once!

My son M’s school has a “Day On” on Martin Luther King, Jr. day. They choose a theme for the day and hold a celebration where the whole school community, including parents, is welcome, and then spend the second half of the day on service projects. Our family only did the celebration part of the day this year, but next year I plan for us to help with the part of the day where you sort book donations to Book Harvest. I’m also planning to join the celebration for the choir next year.

The theme for this year was “Love is the only force capable of transforming an enemy into a friend.” The choir sang 3 songs I love: “Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing,” “Heal the World,” and “Stand By Me.” Middle and high school students read poems they had written. Pauli Murray’s niece and biographer Rosita Stevens-Holsey was the keynote speaker and shared wonderful insight into Rev. Dr. Murray’s life and work. I was so happy to have attended.

At the end of that week, I took a quick overnight trip to Baltimore to present at the American Library Association LibLearnX conference. In the end, my session was less a presentation or workshop and more a conversation, as we only had about 5 people attending. We were able to really customize the conversation to the participants’ interest. My BFF lives near Baltimore, so I got to have dinner with her the night before the presentation and hang out with her after, when we went to the Edgar Allan Poe house and wandered around a cute shopping area.

After I got home from that trip, I was exhausted and then a little bit sick, too. So I rested a lot and had a pretty quiet week.

Then this past week was more quiet time at home and handling administrative stuff like having my car inspected and renewing the registration, rescheduling a dental appointment I canceled due to a migraine, and completing the job application to be the half-time school librarian at M’s school.

It was a good time for consuming culture. I’ve been reading romance novels, The Age of Cage, and How to Be Parisian Wherever You Are. I watched Emily in Paris. I played A Link to the Past, which is phenomenal and deserves its status as a classic, and the Switch remake of Link’s Awakening, which is super fun.

Saturday M developed a nasty case of pinkeye. He’s on his second day home from school and on antibiotics for it and seems to be improving.

That’s it for this post!

The personal brand paradox wepresent.wetransfer.com

When a person aspires to be a brand, they forfeit everything that is truly glorious about being human.

What are you obsessed with right now? For me it’s the podcast Fated Mates, all things romance book-adjacent, and Parisian vibes.

📺🎄 Watched Christmas Flow, mostly for the Parisian locations.

📺 Watched Emily in Paris. All of it, fairly quickly.

Gorgeous views of Paris and fun to see how much of the French I understood but I don’t find Emily herself particularly winning (she’s like a caricature of what Boomers think Millennials are like).

Finished reading: Then Came You by Lisa Kleypas 📚

Classic 90s pre-Victorian historical, medium spice level.

📺 Watching Emily in Paris, mostly for the gorgeous locations and Sylvie’s fashion. Emily’s relationships with men stress me out.

I just shared in a fibromyalgia Facebook group what it takes for me to get decent sleep. Thought I’d share here as well:

• 300mg gabapentin (prescription)
• 250mg GABA
• 10mg melatonin
• 50mg CBD oil
• 900mg oral magnesium
• 400mg topical magnesium

All selected with my doctor.

Finished reading: The Charm Offensive by Alison Cochrun 📚

Lovely! What if the dude who was producing The Bachelor fell in love with the bachelor? This book is all kinds of sweet and affirming, with great queer, neurodivergence, race, and mental illness rep.

…a good school is one that is constantly engaged in self-examination, in improving itself, in becoming wiser in its ability to both teach and inspire.

Smith returns to this idea many times in this chapter. Every school I’ve worked at had some sort of process for this, but Smith says that in a Quaker school, everyone in the school is involved in this process. In the public schools where I’ve worked, there was always a School Improvement Team (PDF). This is basically a committee and it consists entirely of adults. Students aren’t on the SIT. Further, as you might expect in a public school, the success of the School Improvement Team and the School Improvement Plan is evaluated based almost entirely on students’ scores on standardized tests, which to my mind is an incomplete measure of learning.

It’s a school that is intent on turning out good people who will help make a better world.

At the beginning of every school year, M’s teachers have us complete a survey and one of the questions is always about our hopes for the school year. We always answer that we want him to grow into himself and to continue to learn how to be a caring member of our community. I love this idea. While I suspect most teachers in most schools have this in mind as their intention, the systems and structures of compulsory public education, at least in North Carolina when I was working in public schools, tended to focus on performance in a few academic subject areas and compliance with school policies. I like the idea of a whole school taking this approach, rather than only individual teachers.

It’s the soul of a school—its intangible persona, its character, its principles, its daily life over time, the impressions it makes, the efforts it inspires, and the moral authority it possesses—that helps mold a child into an educated, assured, humane, and caring adult.

Yes! Especially the daily life over time: how we spend our moments is how we spend our days is how we spend our years is how we spend our life. The life of a school is in the day-to-day.

At a good school teachers and students are jointly engaged in a search for truth…

This jibes well with a school librarian’s focus on inquiry-driven learning.

Teachers… work to provide a climate of sensitivity to the human condition.

This is so critical. When I was a student teacher and first set foot in my mentor teacher’s classroom, I was appalled by what seemed to me to be an out-of-control class with absolutely no attention paid to Latin, the class’s subject matter. (I was 22 and I like to think I’m less judgy now.) By the end of my four months in student teaching, my perspective had totally transformed: I saw that my mentor teacher was more concerned with supporting her students than with a laser focus on their academic achievement, and that her love and support was a critical foundation before they could have academic success.

Without input from people of differing life experiences and cultures, a school quickly becomes insular and intellectually stagnant.

It seems obvious but it’s absolutely necessary to say.

…moments of silence help students center themselves amidst the hubbub of the school day.

To quote the Carolina Friends School website:

Settling In and Out
We use this Quaker practice of shared silence as a meaningful way to make oneself present in the moment, focus or redirect attention, and create a shared energy and sense of intention with a community.

Back to the book…

Another characteristic of Quaker schools is that they have involved students in community service at all grade levels.

Experimental education is the name of the game in Quaker schools, and they are constantly cooking up new ways of doing things.

And what’s probably my favorite quote from the chapter:

There is no formula for imparting love of learning. Despite new methodologies, there must always be reliance on the old virtues of skills, care, love, patience, and time.

Care, love, patience, and time are all things that the structures of public schools make it hard for teachers to prioritize, though I bet most teachers would love to be able to prioritize them.

My kid has started randomly singing “Bela Lugosi’s dead” (like, that one phrase) so I can retire now. My adorable babybat.