Am I Still Making A Difference?

I had lunch with an old friend today. After we caught each other up on our respective spouses and children and others, we spoke about our professions. Melissa is a graphic designer of textbooks. Her husband teaches Biology at Villanova. Our academic connection is just one of the many reasons we are friends. Melissa has always been a great sounding board for me and I've spoken with her many times about my duel professions: librarian and teacher.

I've talked about how hard I have to work be proactive in staying connected to classrooms and other special area teachers. The rigid schedule of classes that we specialists deal with, is not conducive to establishing collaborative practice.

I've talked about budget cuts. It's a challenge to remain visible and vital, but I have to, in order to fight for every dollar. In this age of budget slashing, I'm trying harder than ever to encourage my students and teachers to use subscription databases and spend more time in the library.

I've talked about how hard I've worked to stay relevant: video conferencing, blogging, and podcasts are becoming an increasingly important part of my program.

I've talked about the efforts I've made to offer staff development to acquaint them with the library's resources, in the hopes that they will want to collaborate with me to plan lessons that will enrich teaching and learning.

Am I still making a difference after all these years? No Child Left Behind can be an obstacle to achieving the goals I've set out for my students and for myself. Or it can be an opportunity to shine a light on the library as the information hub of my school. NCLB includes a section that states that libraries are important: "... to improve literacy skills and academic achievement of students by providing them with access to up-to-date school library materials; technologically advanced school library media centers; and professionally certified school library media specialists" (NCLB, 2001).

I'm not a numbers person. I'm math- phobic. Thank goodness when I need to come up with statistics I can use Titlewise (from Follett). I'm never asked to produce data but I produce it every year at budget time. I'm learning to overcome my fear of numbers and plunge into the world of Excel in order to generate the data that I will most certainly need in the coming months and years for grant applications and for administrators who may not understand that the media specialist is still making a difference.