There is such a thing as a free lunch

My poetry books talks for the fifth graders went well today. The best part wasn’t the book talks themselves, though, (which you can see here), but the part where they followed me to the library and tore up the poetry section (don’t worry, I’m using “tore up” figuratively). Some readers’ advisory highlights:

• Poetry about horses
• Shakespeare’s sonnets
• More poems for two voices
• An “easy short” poem
• Robert Frost

Most of the books I talked got check out, too. Here’s a pic of my display:

After the fifth graders were taken care of, I went to work on getting the third grade readers’ theatre onto my blog. It’s a long story because I had to keep changing file types in order to edit the audio with Audacity (which is, incidentally, surprisingly easy to use), and then I realized I couldn’t upload audio onto a WordPress blog and that I’d have to host it on my UW space, but I didn’t want to download SFTP onto the Bush School computers, so I just emailed myself the files and I’ll have to put the plays up when I’m on campus next. Whew.

And let me now take time to acknowledge how wonderful Bush School parents are. They host an amazing lunch for the faculty and staff two or three times a year and today was one of those days. I got to go enjoy it with Lisa. I even got to take home a plant! (I asked which would be the hardest to kill and they pointed me towards the primroses.)

One last thing: there was a small book shelving crisis at the library yesterday (there were so many books to be shelved they started stacking up on the ground around the carts) so I went ahead and reshelved all the books from the displays that were taken down today (my award winners and the red books for V-Day). At the iSchool they tell you that when you’re doing a DFW you’re not there as an intern everyone can dump unpleasant tasks on, you’re there to learn important skills. This sometimes gets translated as, “You’re not there to shelve books.” But sometimes everyone’s got to pitch in and shelve some books. That’s just how it is. (And, you know, it’s pretty good exercise–lots of deep knee-bends.)