Christmas comes to High Street

Lunch with visiting teacher-librarians - High Street, Penrith.

Today I had a visit from the editor of "Scan" (my old job!) and two teacher-librarians undertaking their retraining course with Charles Sturt University. They had come to absorb the atmosphere of the school library and hopefully pick up some tips to try out in their own schools. It's always fun to be a mentor, and I find I usually learn as much from the process as my "mentee".

Monkeying around

From out of the blue (pun intended), I received a wonderful email this week!

An Internet friend from USA, Lori Custer, contacted me to say:

"Hope this finds you well! I went and checked out your websites, did a bit of reading up about you, and decided that you needed a little Therin [the Andorian], to go with your 'Lori Custer Monkey' collection. You now have three; that makes it a collection!



"All I need from you, is your mailing address, I`ve lost it, and I will get the little critter in the mail to you.

"There are a couple 'additions', but they will help him, not hinder, in his adventures. The 'tail' is equipped with the same 'feelers' they have on their heads, giving them a great advantage when being preyed upon from behind!

"The best to you this holiday season, Lori.

PS. I have enclosed a couple of snapshots, at his insistence... he is a bit of a ham..."
You're telling me, Lori!

What an amazing surprise! I lost contact with Lori not long after our eBay transactions were settled, but I found her again two Christmases ago when providing links to her sock monkey eBay projects. And then, this week, the email notification that something was on its way!



The miniature skateboard-riding Lori Custer sock monkey (above) was bought in an eBay USA auction in 1999, and is actually made from baby-sized "red heel" socks. The purchase started out as a joke when I was demonstrating to some colleagues (at the Scan office, where I was the editor) just how eBay auctions worked, and we all fell in love with this particular one. I decided he'd be perfect as a Christmas ornament for my tree that year. Note how he is hanging next to two M&Ms: "the candy of the Millennium".

Winning that eBay auction was fun, but the day the perfectly wrapped box arrived at Scan was a highlight of a great communal Internet adventure.

A few months later, when the creator, Lori, realised she'd overcharged me on postage, she sent me out a second miniature sock monkey for free: an editor sock monkey, blue pencil tucked over one ear, wearing spectacles, and working away at a tiny computer (below):



I have no idea what size sock monkey little simian Therin is, but it'll be fun (and frustrating) waiting to find out!

Back to the books

As I mentioned here, I recently applied for a transfer - to my own school! - as the next teacher-librarian.

On Friday afternoon, I tried to ascertain just where in the continuum my application had progressed, but to no avail. Yesterday, my principal tried to find out the same information. While at first he had no news, later in the day he was contacted about what codes were required for the filling of the classroom teacher position I'd be relinquishing.

Today the confirmation came through: I've been appointed to the position of teacher-librarian. It's a four-day position, with the additional day per week being made up from our Priority Schools Programs (PSP) funding budget. This means that our school library can be made available to the school population five days per week, a similar strategy to the one I suggested at my first school (when I "fell" into the job as an untrained teacher-librarian, after I'd been doing the relief-from-face-to-face (RFF) teaching position the previous year).

So I start the new job in 2007. The last time I was in a school library, as the fully-trained T-L, was in 1997, before I was seconded to Scan as editor. A decade ago?

I shudder to think how much has changed. But I can't complain; my teaching colleagues are excited for me, and I'll be back in the unique teaching and learning niche that I find the most rewarding and exciting. Teaching is certainly a job that opens many doors and new challenges, often without even leaving the security of the Department of Education and Training.