In response to yesterday

Yesterday's inservice served as a pretty much pointless day. The morning started off with a speaker who forgot to give us an introduction of what his talk was about and instead started presenting us with information and percentages that are flawed at best and can't accurately be evaluated in regards to student success. Good times. The next speaker gave us the same talk we had at the inservice in August and then we were sent to "technology workshops" where we could better learn to incorporated technology into our classrooms. @@ My post yesterday was somewhere in between speaker #2 and lunch when I was trying to entertain myself while hearing something I'd already heard three times before.

After lunch (the highlight of the day), it was two more hours of entertaining myself through pointless sessions and then we reconvened in the library to hear the Assistant Superintendent for Instruction speak to us a on all the great things the district is doing. I went from laughing (the district has now mandated "walk-throughs" by principals in that the principals must visit at least 15 classrooms a week for 5 minutes or what I have always thought WAS THEIR JOB @@) to being utterly depressed. I realized when I became the librarian that it was going to be a struggle to get teachers to use the resources I've worked to select as well as working to convince all concerned that librarians are very necessary. The stories of librarians being cut from school in the age of technology is becoming more and more common and listening to the asst. supt., I realized that APS is leaning more and more towards libraries and librarians being redundant. No, she didn't single me out and say so much but when the entire day is spent on technology and the asst. superintendent comes in and talks about how important it is to put students on computers and teachers are talking about how they are doing research on computers, I realize that my uphill battle is getting much steeper. The analogy I have always used in regards to online research is that you don't give a student a calculator and tell them to do math so why are we giving them a computer and telling them to do research. Yes, it's a valid tool to use but it's not the best one for a student, in my opinion. And for all the teachers telling me how valuable I am, I'm really not feeling it when I'm told repeatedly that they'll just use the computers.

So what to do in this battle? I spent much of the evening moping about the last hour of the day and talking over options with Paul. I've got some ideas on what I'm going to do at school in regards to this topic and better marketing myself. But the best option we could see? I'm going back to school. I love being the librarian but as we all know, I'm not thrilled with my job. I've put off getting my MLS (I have a master's in Secondary Education and teaching endorsements in English and Library Science) mostly out of sheer laziness. I think this has been the impetus I needed to give myself more options that the MLS (or maybe even PhD) will bring. I've also mulled over going in a different direction and pursuing some other area of interest. But on Monday, I'm going to contact UNT and TWU about their online programs and see what I need to do to get started and then decide if that is indeed what I want to do.

Maybe I don't hate inservice days so much after all. (OK, I mean I still despise the actual day but if it spurs me to get on with my life, it's not a completely wasted day.)