Check It Out: Faculty Edition
The CEO of 'sletters Returns, Servin' Lewks & Slingin' Books!
ONG, it's been too long, fam. We're about to go off. Let's spill that tea.
About the Art...
Featured works via the National Museum of African American History & Culture.
Setting the Mood
Ambient Music for Your Aural Pleasure | Just Push Play!
Black History is American History
Did you know that your LMC curates content for all manner of celebrations and public holidays? It's true, and our homepage highlights new materials every month!
This February, be sure to visit our Black History Month Resource Page! Chock full of handpicked, lovingly organized resources and edited with your classroom in mind, this page boasts everything from lesson planning resources to open web highlights to comprehensive fiction, nonfiction, and biography reading rooms! Won't you be a lamb and flock on over?
Yassified Standards: IYKYK
Readin', Writin', Roughin' It with the Revised NJSLS in ELA
No spoilers here; by now, even the slowest boats have trundled into harbor.
In October 2023, the nation's most fecund state adopted new and improved New Jersey Student Learning Standards for ELA and mathematics. FR FR, these standards hit different. They're fire. They're rizzed up. They're low-key snatched and everybody's thirsty.
We literary luminaries welcome these standards with open arms and a requisite iota of skepticism. In theory, educators can anticipate great rewards over the next decade thanks to dramatic realizations about language acquisition and the science of reading (no political implications intended, thank you). Did you know, for instance, that literacy rates surge when kids know what sounds the letters make? That's right: phonics on the rebound! Have you considered that an understanding of grammar and syntax proves essential when setting down succulent sentences? Yeah, baby: mechanics, spelling, structure, style! Perchance you've heard that reading is a complex skill that no proprietary system could hope to encapsulate? That suspicion is confirmed: it's true! Squad, these standards have us shook and we're straight simpin'.
Our wholly objective analysis reveals that the new ELA standards are preoccupied with system, structure, and informed choice. Reading standards emphasize text complexity and comprehension growth across media. Writing standards address specific skills for different writing types and stress the writing-reading connection (i.e. the paramount importance of expansive experiences and primacy of background knowledge). Both sets make a point of fostering vocabulary comprehension and acquisition. Research standards, of course, underline writing’s importance in inquiry. They're basic in the best way. They're vanilla like the finest Tahitian pod: sharp, sweet, fruity, and oh-so-intense. They're keeping literacy skills real tight.
Bruh. You know who already specializes in inquiry-based research, writing skills, and multimodal text analysis? That's right: your intrepid librarians! Don't get swerved when you can stan these standards! We're here to ship each member of faculty with every last bullet point. Call on us for assistance making sense of the new standards across the curriculum. We integrate! We invent! We poke fun at the pretenses of mandatory formal education but couch our critique in a deep and abiding awe for our invaluable vocation!
We're at your beck and call, eager to pinch hit across departments and meet your students where they stand. Drop a dime; we're already on the line. Bae.
Better Know a Colleague: Dr. Li da Graca
Don't Sleep On WOHS
Dr. Li da Graca, fondly known to her students as Dr. D, teaches chemistry. She grew up in China, then came to the US to study Biochemistry. She met and married her husband at Rutgers University. They have two teenage sons. She enjoys spending time with her nerdy family.
1. Why did you agree to this interview?
I will NEVER say no to our Library Media Specialists because the LMC opens its door to my students and me all the time. We love the break-out rooms, 3D printing, Book Creator, virtual reality experiences, the Makerspace... We were even allowed to sing Katy Perry’s “Roar”.
2. What's more plausible: room-temperature superconductivity or a lithium-air battery?
It's tough to say which will become a reality first. But if I have to choose, then I will say “lithium-air battery” because the symbol for the element Lithium is my first name.
3. Have you ever worked in another professional capacity?
I worked as a research scientist at the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in NYC and as an adjunct professor at New Jersey City University in Jersey City.
4. If you're cooking, what's your signature dish?
Garlic mushrooms (Oyster, Shiitake, Maitake, Enoki, and Wood-ear)
5. What's more mysterious: yawning or laughing?
Yawning, absolutely. I always know why my students laugh. But, a yawn, well, will definitely trigger my desire to find out why my student does that and I am determined to turn that yawn into a laugh.
Underrated/Overrated: New Jersey Edition
Underrated
Lauryn Hill, Jersey tomatoes, Montclair, the NYC skyline (I live across the Hudson River so that I can enjoy the skyline), William Carlos Williams, and Joyce Carol Oates, Snow and Sledding.
Overrated
Bruce Springsteen, Taylor Ham/Pork Roll, Wildwood, the Jersey Slide (while driving), Diners and Bodegas
An EBSCO Experiment
We're begun four database trials!
Database Trials
If you enjoy yeeting your students into the unknown, we have splendid news! (Said news isn't conditional. Even if you have no affinity for yeeting--NO YEET?!?--it's still splendid.) The LMC is experimenting with a slew of potential EBSCO subscription database acquisitions, and we're keen on gauging your opinion.
Trial databases include:
Click here to access the databases, then use these credentials to log in:
User ID: wohslmctr
Password: EBStrial2024!
If you opt to toy around, do share your thoughts in-person or via email. Don't sleep on this one! YOLO, PERIODT.
Pass Scamming
Accepting Peculiar Pass Requests? OK, Boomer.
Sweetest friend, did you know that students be cappin'?
You heard it here first: some of the teenagers may sometimes attempt to DELIBERATELY DECIEVE YOU!
Have you ever received a SmartPass request from a youth you know who absent from your roster that period? From a child you've never met? From three Chromebooks in a fedora and trench coat?
Allow us to tickle your cochlear with a tendril of shop talk. Here in the LMC, life is lit. We have books, we have carpeting, we even have fluorescent lighting. It's pretty Gucci round these here parts, and all the babies want a piece of this painted paradise. Unfortunately, said babies are supposed to spend their day receiving the highest quality state-subsidized education this side of the Nile, even if they'd prefer hiding in that one corner or watching disconcerting cooking videos on a desktop computer. How do we defend our demesne? What mechanisms have we adopted to ensure students spend their time per pedagogical dictate?
My dawg, it's all about the passes. We require an active hall pass to enter the LMC.
Suffice it to say that some students may, in a feeble attempt to flee the teacher going loco parentis to enrich their life, spray out SmartPass requests like an ATM that ate some bad oysters.
It's called PASS SCAMMING, and it's the SCOURGE OF THE MODERN AGE, and it STARTS WITH A "P" and that RHYMES WITH "T" and it stands for TRUANCY!
What are you to do if this baleful fate should befall you? Well, like, just decline the request, man. Appreciate it.
From the Stacks: Twin Book Suggestions from Your Intrepid Librarians
The publisher says...
Human Resources follows a woman working in the male-dominated world of AI, designing women that don't exist. In discerning verse, she workshops the facial characteristics of a floating head named “Nia,” who her boss calls “his type”; she loses hours researching “June,” an oddly sexualized artificially intelligent oven; and she spends a whole day “trying to break” a female self-improvement bot. The speaker of Stevenson’s poems grapples with uneasiness and isolation, even as she endeavors to solve for these problems in her daily work. She attempts to harness control by eating clean, doing yoga, and searching for age-defying skincare, though she dreams “about the department / that women get reassigned to after they file / harassment complaints.” With sharp, lyrical intelligence, she imagines alternative realities where women exist not for the whims of men but for their own—where they become literal skyscrapers, towering over a world that never appreciated them.
Chilling and lucid, Human Resources challenges the minds programming our present and future to consider what serves the collective good. Something perhaps more thoughtful and human, Stevenson writes: “I want to say better.”
The publisher says...
In How to Do Nothing, Jenny Odell wrote about the importance of disconnecting from the “attention economy” to spend time in quiet contemplation. But what if you don’t have time to spend?
In order to answer this seemingly simple question, Odell took a deep dive into the fundamental structure of our society and found that the clock we live by was built for profit, not people. This is why our lives, even in leisure, have come to seem like a series of moments to be bought, sold, and processed ever more efficiently. Odell shows us how our painful relationship to time is inextricably connected not only to persisting social inequities but to the climate crisis, existential dread, and a lethal fatalism.
Inspired by pre-industrial cultures, ecological cues, and geological timescales, Saving Time brings within reach a more humane, responsive way of living. As planet-bound animals, we live inside shortening and lengthening days alongside gardens growing, birds migrating, and cliffs eroding; the stretchy quality of waiting and desire; the way the present may suddenly feel marbled with childhood memory; the slow but sure procession of a pregnancy; the time it takes to heal from injuries. Odell urges us to become stewards of these different rhythms of life in which time is not reducible to standardized units and instead forms the very medium of possibility.
Saving Time tugs at the seams of reality as we know it—the way we experience time itself—and rearranges it, imagining a world not centered on work, the office clock, or the profit motive. If we can “save” time by imagining a life, identity, and source of meaning outside these things, time might also save us.
Book Your Librarians!
As always, our menu of library services paints a partial picture of what we do and who we do it for! Remember that we support all subject areas. Hurl a curricular concern our way and give us the pleasure of exercising our variegated abilities.
Full Steam Ahead! Third Marking Period Awaits!
