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I arrive at work at 7.45am, I’m in the workroom this morning so I make a cup of tea and spend the first fifteen minutes checking emails, there are only a few today. I have a quick look at the links on this morning’s ‘The Day’ email and come across this interesting information which highlights the class divide in UK education:
“A privately-educated pupil is 22 times more likely to win a place at a highly selective university than a pupil on free school meals. Private schools educate only 7% of the UK’s children but account for 32% of students at top universities.” Source: http://www.theday.co.uk/blog/blog/reasons-to-be-cheerful
I spend a few minutes creating a revised rota for the Reference Team for Monday as I won’t be around to do my reference desk duty. Jacqui and I are going to spend all day planning Information Literacy for the senior school in preparation for the first meeting of a whole school ‘Information Literacy steering group’ next Wednesday. Information Literacy is one of the key focuses for Tanglin next year and the aim is to embed information literacy in the curriculum, from Key Stage 1 right up to the Sixth Form; an exciting and vital task in making sure all our students have the skills to succeed academically, socially and in the world of work.
A librarian from UWCSEA Dover has contacted me to ask if I can recommend any useful PSHCE resources. She is UWCSEA’s primary librarian so I send a quick email to Celeste to see if she can help.
We are updating our non-fiction book collection so I spend the next half an hour or so sending emails to a number of teachers asking for recommendations of non-fiction books for us to purchase.
I reply to an email from a dance teacher who is interested in us creating a libguide to support her subject. I suggest we meet next week for a discussion and, as I’m in contact, I sneak in a request for book recommendations for dance!
Our new library website will be launched on 3rd June so Atiqah is creating a video to promote it to our students. I write a bit of the script for the video, about the ‘How to’ section of the website, and send it to Atiqah.
All the reference team have enrolled on an online training course through the School Library Association on the Extended Project Qualification. I am gradually working my way through the course when I get chance and I spend some time looking at module 3 which covers ‘Time management, Choosing a topic and the Production log’. One sentence makes me smile; it says librarians are ideal people to help students learn about time management as we are “experts in this field since a key requirement for a librarian is being able to multitask” – how true!!
Before I know it, the morning has gone and it is time for lunch.
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Over the students’ lunch-break I decide to see how many people are in the study zone and on the decking. I count around seventy people, with students from year 7 to year 13, one teacher and one parent all busily focussed on a wide variety of work. Looking in the interactive zone there is another parent using the library and around forty more students working in groups, reading, looking at magazines and chatting.
In between helping students with photocopying, dealing with printing issues, shelving books, monitoring behaviour in the library (which is easy as all the students are very focussed on revising for their exams) and sorting out all the other general enquiries that crop up (remember the multi-tasking comment!!), I spend the afternoon working on a revision of our Extended Essay libguide. The original libguide was created a couple of years ago so it needs to be updated and I want to add some new features to make it more appealing to the students. I am going to work on creating a new version over the next few weeks then I will update the Extended Project Qualification (EPQ) libguide too.
I hear back from Celeste about this morning’s PSHCE enquiry, she has been really helpful and contacted the primary school head of PSHCE for suggestions and Mui Sin is putting together a list of PSHCE resources in the primary school library.
A member of staff has a daughter who is looking at studying Geography at Leicester University, which is the department where I used to be Map Librarian so Jacqui has suggested she should speak to me. It is almost twenty years since I worked there but I’m happy to tell her what I know and it brings back some good memories!
A teacher comes in to the library to look through our collection of old Tanglin year books, he’s trying to put together a history of names of all previous house captains as there doesn’t appear to be a record of them. I search the internet (using all the search engines I can think of!) and find the names of two house captains on Linked In but I would have liked to find more. I’ll have to think about where else I could look.
And so, another interesting and varied day has flown by and already it is time to go home…