New Headmaster

We're in the middle of a search for a new headmaster. We will be having the final candidates coming through here in the next couple of weeks and it will all be very interesting to see who we finally end up with.

I am scheduled, along with all the other department chairs, to meet with the candidate for an hour. That means I might be able to get in two questions. So, we are having a team meeting to decide what the two questions should be.

If you got a new headmaster, what would your two questions be for him/her regarding the library? What would you ask that would give a feel for where they stand on electronic v. print materials (The Cushing Question) or does that matter to you? Should they be a reader? Should they be a technologist?

We have a headmaster who is a voracious reader of mysteries. He is also a strong library supporter. We've had quite a good run under his sponsorship because he believes in the mission of the library and that we are a part of the educational mission of the school and not just a warehouse for books that volunteers can run. His retirement is going to leave us feeling very sad.

So, if you have conducted a search in the past and found a question to be particular useful, please share it.

Banned Books Week: Banned Author Buttons

This Wednesday we will be having a contest where students will need to identify the banned book author from a series of original drawings created by our student library proctor Yunhan Xu. She's an amazing artist as you can tell by her portrait of Harper Lee above. I'll be adding a drawing a day and seeing if you can identify who it is. I won't identify the one below until tomorrow. We'll be handing out a prize on Friday. There are ten authors to identify. We've also created buttons of them at Cafe Press.

Who is this?

Banned Books Week Is Starting!

What do you all have planned for Banned Books Week? We have quite a few things planned, which I will detail in the next few posts. First, is our very short video to kick it all off tomorrow at convocation.

The Happiest Book Club in the World

I have tried student book clubs in the past, but since it has been initiated by me the success of them has been lukewarm. Usually the members halfheartedly read the books, just to please me. Mostly they liked that we had a nice room where we could all get together and chat and have nice treats. Which, after a while, was fine. But, I did yearn for a real book club.

So when I got an honest to goodness request to have on FROM A STUDENT you can imagine my elation. I tried to play it cool. Then I found The Jane Austen Fight Club video on youtube (you can watch it below. It rocks!). I showed it to the book club presidents (two of the most positive and cheerful girls in the entire universe.




They loved it. I suggested that we could show this video when they presented book club to the upper division students at convo and then our first book would be Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. So, now we have a Jane Austen (mashup) book club and will be reading Bridget Jones Diary, Clueless, Emma, PPZ, etc. I'm very stoked about it.

Plus, Paige and Hilleary are amazing book club presidents. At our first meeting, we made bookmarks.

Here's one of the bookmarks we made. They brought all the supplies, stickers, crayons, everything.

Everyone got a happy pencil with a cute eraser topper! 8-)

Here are the presidents setting up the table. They are so cute!

Here's the chest of jewels and prizes to be handed out to anyone who makes a great discussion point. At the end of the year the person who has contributed the most will win a gift certificate to one of the bookstores.

Here's how the table looked with some of the stuff laid out on it. They really are dynamos.

New Theme for Our New 2010-2011 School Year

One of our student library proctors (SLPs) designed a t-shirt for our SLPs to wear this year to follow our theme of comic book heroes (to celebrate graphic novels). We wore them today to celebrate spirit day and to mark the release of our Library rules video! It rocked!