does anyone who might read this know, or know someone who might know, or know someone who might know someone...who might know where a foreign, English speaking woman with naturally curly hair can get a haircut in Shenyang?
'Cause I'm getting desperate!
Tuesday, November 28, 2006
Sunday, November 26, 2006
If you think you're over-educated, clap your hands
Monday, November 27, 2006
For the love of god...
does anyone who might read this know, or know someone who might know, or know someone who might know someone...who might know where a foreign, English speaking woman with naturally curly hair can get a haircut in Shenyang?
'Cause I'm getting desperate!
posted by Renee at 7:47 PM 0 Comments
If you think you're over-educated, clap your hands
I've been away from school for almost four full months now (huh! is that it? It feels like forever)
There've been many moments over this period where my library training has served me well. I've MARC coded, I'm working on acquiring a new ILS and several classes have helped me with that, I've liaised to the best of my ability (thanks to Denise for clarifying the meaning of this), and I've put in ridiculously long hours, the factory having been a year long training session. But, none of my experience at school has paid off so greatly as it did this week.
As a brand new British Columbia offshore school, we are not actually certified. A team of inspectors is coming to check things out and say yay or nay to our official status. Not really a big deal to me, I get the experience I get regardless of status, the teachers are extremely concerned that they might not be teaching in an actual school, and of course it affects the students ability to move ahead with their studies. They can't move on to grade 11 if they've never officially made it through grade 10.
Consequently, there's been a big flurry of activity in the last few weeks. The teachers have all been prepped on how to behave when the inspectors come into their classrooms, they've all prepared their year plans, month plans, day plans, they've thought about questions they might be asked and prepared answers. And, truth be told, they'll do fine. If the school doesn't pass inspection, it'll be down to the facilities themselves which are still in the process of development. The gym has very few amenities and is still under construction; the library, well, the library has just under 1000 books and no indication of when more might arrive.
I'd been told that I would likely need to write up 'something' about what the plans for the library are, but they'd be 'nothing big'. On Monday, I was told that I would need to hand this in to the principal by Tuesday. And here's where my academic training both bit me in the ass, and then bailed me out.
My first thought was to request the Dalian copy of the same accreditation write-up. Surely I could use that as a guide. Well, no. I have no idea what happened in the process of having this handed down to me, but what I got were three basic questions posed and three garbled, gibberish sentences in reply. Next, I surfed the internet looking for examples of accreditation justifications for high school libraries. What I found were 30 page treaties. Urm, no. So, I went and talked to the principal.
The principal laid it on the line. Briefly discuss where the library is now, what resources are available, how we provide those resources, how we obtain them, and what we expect to have by the end of the year. So, turns out I was completely over-thinking it. Thank you very much, over-education.
Still, by this time, it was later in the day and I still had to formulate something that would make it seem like our sad little library was in fact a vibrant, resourceful and accreditation-worthy part of the school. That's a lot of pressure.
Now, in school, I always wrote my papers single-spaced, and if required, would double the spaces upon completion. And, the factory being the factory, I started out sweating each word and a paper could take hours and hours and hours, until I would was a caffeine soaked jittery mess at 3am. By the end though, I knew that I could knock out one page per hour, no matter the topic. And, I haven't lost my touch, baby. Nope, I still gots it! A three page accreditation paper done in three hours. And, if I do say so, without manipulating the facts, I managed to spin it so that the library really is a wonderful, functioning, vibrant and essential part of the school; poised to go on to even more spectacular and resourceful libraryness in the future.
I will say, though, that it felt a little weird not to have been writing it in the APK.
For the love of god...
does anyone who might read this know, or know someone who might know, or know someone who might know someone...who might know where a foreign, English speaking woman with naturally curly hair can get a haircut in Shenyang?
'Cause I'm getting desperate!
posted by Renee at 7:47 PM 0 Comments
If you think you're over-educated, clap your hands
I've been away from school for almost four full months now (huh! is that it? It feels like forever)
There've been many moments over this period where my library training has served me well. I've MARC coded, I'm working on acquiring a new ILS and several classes have helped me with that, I've liaised to the best of my ability (thanks to Denise for clarifying the meaning of this), and I've put in ridiculously long hours, the factory having been a year long training session. But, none of my experience at school has paid off so greatly as it did this week.
As a brand new British Columbia offshore school, we are not actually certified. A team of inspectors is coming to check things out and say yay or nay to our official status. Not really a big deal to me, I get the experience I get regardless of status, the teachers are extremely concerned that they might not be teaching in an actual school, and of course it affects the students ability to move ahead with their studies. They can't move on to grade 11 if they've never officially made it through grade 10.
Consequently, there's been a big flurry of activity in the last few weeks. The teachers have all been prepped on how to behave when the inspectors come into their classrooms, they've all prepared their year plans, month plans, day plans, they've thought about questions they might be asked and prepared answers. And, truth be told, they'll do fine. If the school doesn't pass inspection, it'll be down to the facilities themselves which are still in the process of development. The gym has very few amenities and is still under construction; the library, well, the library has just under 1000 books and no indication of when more might arrive.
I'd been told that I would likely need to write up 'something' about what the plans for the library are, but they'd be 'nothing big'. On Monday, I was told that I would need to hand this in to the principal by Tuesday. And here's where my academic training both bit me in the ass, and then bailed me out.
My first thought was to request the Dalian copy of the same accreditation write-up. Surely I could use that as a guide. Well, no. I have no idea what happened in the process of having this handed down to me, but what I got were three basic questions posed and three garbled, gibberish sentences in reply. Next, I surfed the internet looking for examples of accreditation justifications for high school libraries. What I found were 30 page treaties. Urm, no. So, I went and talked to the principal.
The principal laid it on the line. Briefly discuss where the library is now, what resources are available, how we provide those resources, how we obtain them, and what we expect to have by the end of the year. So, turns out I was completely over-thinking it. Thank you very much, over-education.
Still, by this time, it was later in the day and I still had to formulate something that would make it seem like our sad little library was in fact a vibrant, resourceful and accreditation-worthy part of the school. That's a lot of pressure.
Now, in school, I always wrote my papers single-spaced, and if required, would double the spaces upon completion. And, the factory being the factory, I started out sweating each word and a paper could take hours and hours and hours, until I would was a caffeine soaked jittery mess at 3am. By the end though, I knew that I could knock out one page per hour, no matter the topic. And, I haven't lost my touch, baby. Nope, I still gots it! A three page accreditation paper done in three hours. And, if I do say so, without manipulating the facts, I managed to spin it so that the library really is a wonderful, functioning, vibrant and essential part of the school; poised to go on to even more spectacular and resourceful libraryness in the future.
I will say, though, that it felt a little weird not to have been writing it in the APK.
Tuesday, November 21, 2006
A picture is worth a thousand words
I've talked alot about where I live, and for those of you who are curious, you can now check out the pictures here.
That's right, I've finally got (just about) everything onto flickr. Considering that my upload rate only allows me to do about 10 photos per night, I'm pretty pleased.
The set titled "Village Life" is where I spend 90% of my time. For some reason, I haven't been taking my camera in with me when I go to Shenyang - I'll have to rectify that.
That's right, I've finally got (just about) everything onto flickr. Considering that my upload rate only allows me to do about 10 photos per night, I'm pretty pleased.
The set titled "Village Life" is where I spend 90% of my time. For some reason, I haven't been taking my camera in with me when I go to Shenyang - I'll have to rectify that.
Thursday, November 16, 2006
It's gotta be perfect, dammit!
In interviews, whenever I'm asked about what my weakness is, and how I'm working on it, I always answer that I'm a perfectionist. It's probably too predictable, but it's true, and it's one of those answers that sounds like a flaw that's not really a flaw. Well, it is. It's a weakness, not a strength, but it's sort of something I've never really been too concerned with. I'm not super-crazy anal. I am able to prioritize; in fact, I can slack with the best, but when I deem something a priority, I'm willing to put in the hours to get it done Right. If I have to work a little longer on it, on my own time, so be it. So, I used it as a suck-up interview response but never gave it too much thought.
Well, that's coming back to bite me now. Term exams were last week, and I think it's occurred to the kids that they might have to start doing some homework. Sadly, we still have only 70 or so non-fiction books and none arriving in the foreseeable future. So, what does a good librarian do? They turn to the internet. Now, the kids at the school still have fairly low literacy and that extends to their web literacy as well. It's a challenge to get them to use a decent search engine, much less one that is in English. So, baby steps. First, they can learn to use the internet through guided searches. Eventually, we can work on how to search the internet independently. I've decided to set up a library website. And this is where my perfectionism is turning out to be a problem.
Challenge one : I probably should have learned Dreamweaver when I had the time. The bootleg version I have now is beyond me. So, one day wasted trying to get it to save, and I decided to go with Google Web Creator.
Challenge two : This website is for low literacy teenagers. Logic, and everything I've read about website designs says that my site should be full of easy to read, fast loading graphics and bright colours. Well, I can format the site, or I can get the content on first. Still, it bugs me that it's so plain.
Challenge three : Turns out that creating a page for each subject, which I think is necessary, can be quite time consuming. Take into account the fact that in an ideal world, I would like there to be not just a page per core subject but a page per topic, and I'd be looking at getting the site up sometime around the books arrive (ie...um, someday..?)
Challenge four : The kids, and the teachers for that matter, need to be made aware of what is now (or will soon be) available to them.
So, I've got a very bland looking, half completed website which is in serious need of advocacy. The rational part of me knows that it takes time to do this, and in addition to the day-to-day duties of the library like check-in/check-out, ordering, budgeting, cataloguing, looking into a new ILS, dealing with serials vendors, ad nauseum, I can only do what I can do and for now, something is better than nothing. The perfectionist in me, though, is dying tiny little deaths every time I think about it.
[If you'd like to contribute to the cause, please feel free to check out the site here and send along any links you think might be useful for grade 10 kids who read at a grade 3 level]
Well, that's coming back to bite me now. Term exams were last week, and I think it's occurred to the kids that they might have to start doing some homework. Sadly, we still have only 70 or so non-fiction books and none arriving in the foreseeable future. So, what does a good librarian do? They turn to the internet. Now, the kids at the school still have fairly low literacy and that extends to their web literacy as well. It's a challenge to get them to use a decent search engine, much less one that is in English. So, baby steps. First, they can learn to use the internet through guided searches. Eventually, we can work on how to search the internet independently. I've decided to set up a library website. And this is where my perfectionism is turning out to be a problem.
Challenge one : I probably should have learned Dreamweaver when I had the time. The bootleg version I have now is beyond me. So, one day wasted trying to get it to save, and I decided to go with Google Web Creator.
Challenge two : This website is for low literacy teenagers. Logic, and everything I've read about website designs says that my site should be full of easy to read, fast loading graphics and bright colours. Well, I can format the site, or I can get the content on first. Still, it bugs me that it's so plain.
Challenge three : Turns out that creating a page for each subject, which I think is necessary, can be quite time consuming. Take into account the fact that in an ideal world, I would like there to be not just a page per core subject but a page per topic, and I'd be looking at getting the site up sometime around the books arrive (ie...um, someday..?)
Challenge four : The kids, and the teachers for that matter, need to be made aware of what is now (or will soon be) available to them.
So, I've got a very bland looking, half completed website which is in serious need of advocacy. The rational part of me knows that it takes time to do this, and in addition to the day-to-day duties of the library like check-in/check-out, ordering, budgeting, cataloguing, looking into a new ILS, dealing with serials vendors, ad nauseum, I can only do what I can do and for now, something is better than nothing. The perfectionist in me, though, is dying tiny little deaths every time I think about it.
[If you'd like to contribute to the cause, please feel free to check out the site here and send along any links you think might be useful for grade 10 kids who read at a grade 3 level]
Friday, November 10, 2006
Radio silence
What do you do when you have nothing nice to say? You do what your Momma told you to; you say nothing. So, I know I haven't been posting alot lately, and it's mostly because for a little while there, I lost the plot. Or, if not the plot, at least my sense of humour. While I know that I can be a bit of a cynic, I like to think that my natural, god-given negativism is balanced by a healthy sense of humour. And, up until this year, it's carried me pretty far.
But circumstances here felt, for awhile anyway, completely hopeless. The power was going off all the time; occasionally at work. Water came, briefly, and then went off again. The official day for the heat to be turned on was November 1st and we didn't quite make it. If there's anything that's gonna make me lose my cool, it's being cold. So, I huddled at home next to a Chinese heater (which is nothing like a space heater at home. Chinese heaters glow nuclear orange, almost burn your skin if you get to close but give off absolutely no heat unless you are within a foot of them) and focused all my energy on metabolizing.
The school, both helping and hindering, looked into various possibilities. We were going to move to a different school in Shenyang. We were going to move to a different building in Dalian. We were staying but things were going to be fixed. Nope, we were going to move again. An ex-co-worker and I had a firm policy. "No crying at work." For the first time in my life, I broke that policy. Twice. In one week. But, knock on wood, everything's been running smoothly for a week, and we're here for good.
Now, I think that every job has an adjustment period. There's always going to be a month or two where you hit the ground running and realize that maybe you don't quite know the path you should be following yet. With all of the other nonsense going on...it's hard to focus on work when you have to run home three times in one day to show workers where the bathtub is leaking...I hadn't really been feeling like I'm here to do a job. This week, though, I hit my stride. I've been running the path for awhile now, but I've stopped to look at the map, figure out where I'm going and what I'm headed into, and wow. One month out of library school and I thought I could start up and run a library? In China? What was I thinking?
But circumstances here felt, for awhile anyway, completely hopeless. The power was going off all the time; occasionally at work. Water came, briefly, and then went off again. The official day for the heat to be turned on was November 1st and we didn't quite make it. If there's anything that's gonna make me lose my cool, it's being cold. So, I huddled at home next to a Chinese heater (which is nothing like a space heater at home. Chinese heaters glow nuclear orange, almost burn your skin if you get to close but give off absolutely no heat unless you are within a foot of them) and focused all my energy on metabolizing.
The school, both helping and hindering, looked into various possibilities. We were going to move to a different school in Shenyang. We were going to move to a different building in Dalian. We were staying but things were going to be fixed. Nope, we were going to move again. An ex-co-worker and I had a firm policy. "No crying at work." For the first time in my life, I broke that policy. Twice. In one week. But, knock on wood, everything's been running smoothly for a week, and we're here for good.
Now, I think that every job has an adjustment period. There's always going to be a month or two where you hit the ground running and realize that maybe you don't quite know the path you should be following yet. With all of the other nonsense going on...it's hard to focus on work when you have to run home three times in one day to show workers where the bathtub is leaking...I hadn't really been feeling like I'm here to do a job. This week, though, I hit my stride. I've been running the path for awhile now, but I've stopped to look at the map, figure out where I'm going and what I'm headed into, and wow. One month out of library school and I thought I could start up and run a library? In China? What was I thinking?
Monday, November 6, 2006
It's the little things
Despite all other evidence, it seems that I do not, in fact, live in a black hole. Since I have arrived, I've been trying to get publishers catalogues. I can remember working at places where they were the bane of everyone's existence. A stack would land in an inbox, and there they would sit until the person in charge of ordering would get on everyone's case to get a move on them. However, I have no books, and I'd like to order, well, alot of them. However, I have no tools to do so. I signed up for the free month of Publishers Weekly, Quill & Quire, Library Journal, School Library Journal, etc., but those have run out. I've been reduced to searching blogs, discussion groups and various awards, Chapters recommendations, anything I can think of that might have suggestions for math books, social books, biographies...at a high school level.
This isn't to say that they don't exist here. They do. They just don't seem to make it to my school. The poor man in Shanghai who I deal with has sent them out to me on three separate occasions. The first time they didn't arrive, we double-checked the address and he sent them again. But, they never arrived. So, we re-checked the address and, sure enough, it was correct. So, we double-checked with the school secretary, and sure enough, the Chinese address was also correct. Off they went again. And, despite the fact that it should only take a week, a month later - today, in fact - the sweet 16 year old 'guard' brought them into the library. I'm not sure if I'm more relieved to know that the school doesn't just exist in some sort of rural vortex or if I'm happier to get the catalogues.
This isn't to say that they don't exist here. They do. They just don't seem to make it to my school. The poor man in Shanghai who I deal with has sent them out to me on three separate occasions. The first time they didn't arrive, we double-checked the address and he sent them again. But, they never arrived. So, we re-checked the address and, sure enough, it was correct. So, we double-checked with the school secretary, and sure enough, the Chinese address was also correct. Off they went again. And, despite the fact that it should only take a week, a month later - today, in fact - the sweet 16 year old 'guard' brought them into the library. I'm not sure if I'm more relieved to know that the school doesn't just exist in some sort of rural vortex or if I'm happier to get the catalogues.
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