It is a new year and my name just popped up on the blogging calendar so I guess it is time for a new post. Now, for most of my 57 years on this planet new years has been a time for me to wipe the slate clean, purge my emotional (and actual) clutter, and lurch enthusiastically into the new year with clear eyes and a fresh new attitude.

Honestly, though, this year I’m struggling a bit. I don’t want to be, as can be my wont, Mr. Davey Downer, but at the same time sitting down at my laptop and tapping out a super optimistic, “Our library is so awesome!!! Life is so awesome!!! We’re doing so awesome!!!” would probably just read, to many, as another #ToxicallyPositive #HowToBeAnEDUCelebrity post.

In the words of Charles Munger, “The first rule of a happy life is low expectations. That’s one you can easily arrange. And if you have unrealistic expectations, you’re going to be miserable all your life.”

So… In the year 2022 which, to me, is feeling a little more twenty-twenty, too… than I’d hoped here’s the short skinny on our immediate and medium term goals for the new year…

1 Fling the Windows of the Library Open Every Morning!

I got a little ahead of my self at the end of last year and thought that things in Libraryland (and, well, across the land…) would be returning to normal “early in the new year!” #Yay! Now that those dreams have been dashed by the Omicron variant, I’ve had to reset my mindset. Disappointing as it may be (to me, but hey, I’m pretty sure it’s disappointing to everyone on the planet…), when I work at it I can find things that help me to find my new equilibrium.

I am blessed to work in a library with old-school windows that ACTUALLY OPEN!!! I am blessed to live in a place where it is 73º outside on this January 6th so as soon as I get into the library in the morning, my first order of business is to fling open the windows of the library! #VentilationIsOurFriend!

On good mornings, I imagine myself singing to the wildlife like Cinderella, but on other days I just grunt and try to get it done quickly so that I can get my cup of coffee. #PandemicLifeHasItsUpsAndDowns

My library assistant wasn’t super pleased, yesterday, when the bird flew in and hung out in the library, but you know life is trade offs and sometimes we just gotta look over, see that there’s a bird in the library, shrug twice, and then write about it on Twitter. #WhatchaGonnaDo?

2 Upgrade our Masks…

If you and your library staff haven’t “upgraded” from cloth masks yet, you might consider making a change. I started wearing KN95 masks about a year ago. There are, apparently, quite a few counterfeit masks that don’t truly meet the KN95 (or similar) standard. Here’s the thing, sometimes knowing how to SEARCH and EVALUATE aren’t truly enough to know with certainty that the masks you purchase are the real deal, but all we can do is look for recommended manufacturers from typically reliable sources and do the best we can. #RealLifeIsHard

While we’re at it. If you are having trouble wearing your KN95 all day, you might want to look into getting ear saving mask extenders. There are many options and types. I’ve tried many. I like extenders that are adjustable and that are made of elastic fabric. I’ve found that they have the added benefit of allowing me to pull my masks more securely to my face so, I’m hoping, that it helps create a better fit for my masks as well.

3 Build Weighing of Arguments into the Curriculum…

On the curriculum front, we’ll be looking to build weighing arguments into our curriculum. In the first semester, we pushed really hard on systematically introducing SIFT to all of our frosh and as many 10th-12th graders as we were able to reach. SIFT is great for on-the-fly, quick-and-dirty, real-world source evaluation, but IT’S JUST THE START of good source evaluation. I’ve come to believe that our content area teaching faculty do a really good job with the teaching of deep reading strategies in their various content areas, but sometimes students need some explicit scaffolding/frameworks that we can use to activate the appropriate strategies in a given context.

This is, exactly, what SIFT does. Our students know how to search. Our students know strategies for learning about the person/organization that’s posted something online. When they’re looking for statistics on the percentages of people vaccinated in the hotel industry in Hawaii for a class activity, they don’t always think to apply that knowledge on-the-fly in that moment so it helps if a teacher can shorthand the strategies with, “Where’s that statistic from? Did you SIFT the source?”

I’m noticing that we need a similar scaffold or framework for the weighing of arguments so that students can better contextualize the data and arguments that they come across as they search. In debate classes, we call this “weighing the debate.” The Middle School Public Debate program teaches has a nice streamlined framework that works well:

• Magnitude: Severity of the impact.
• Scope: How many people an impact effects.
• Probability: How likely an impact is to actually occur.

But there are other sources, like this one from the University of Texas at Austin that bring more nuance to the task:

I’m honestly not quite sure where to go with this, but that’s the goal for the next few weeks.

I hope that this post finds you well! I’d love to hear about your goals for the new year. Please hit the leave a reply button below and let us know!

So… With Charles Munger’s advice in mind, here’s to wishing each of you a Better Than Ambivalent New Year!!! #Yay!!! #LOL!!!