(LJ edition: the Natsume icon speaks now)
It’s amazing how much weird crap floats through Circulations. >_>;;; It used to be that I would deliberately avoid sorting Children/Easy Reader-level because I’d get distracted by old books I’d read as a wee Yoshi-ling, and now I find the same thing happening while sorting Adut, specifically Non-Fiction. I’d find some bizarre thing here and there, and the temptation to flip through it a bit is essentially impossible to resist. o_o;;; So far, these have included the history of donuts, various recent Presidential bios (Clinton and Obama, specifically), an all-chocolate cookbook, French grammar, cakes with cute fondant figures, a 2007 edition of a PC hardware repair manual, lots of Simpsons reference guides…
…and the mother of all “out of left field” books: The Homework Myth. Basically, an argument about why homework is counterproductive (in that it does NOT serve to improve achievement and only turns students off to learning) and borderline age-ist.
Oh, if only I’d brought my library card with me, I’d have hijacked one of the internal checkout stations and checked this thing out right there! But I managed to speed through it during my shift. Testimonials about how there really is no hard data connecting homework load to test scores (otherwise known as “correlation is not causation”), about how some teachers have experimented with curriculae that do not include assigning homework and have found that their students do much better and actually WANT to learn the material, how there are actually parents who request homework as a means of avoiding having to interact with their kids, and how there’s a silent culture of both teachers and parents using homework as a form of inflicting torment on children and to keep them in line (because, of course, without homework, children will find ways to misbehave or, gasp, have FUN, and oh no we can’t have that).
Now, I could never ever become a teacher, I lack the patience and I don’t really have a soft spot for children at all… yet I find myself drawn to reading about classroom management and the whole “school culture” thing. Possibly it’s a latent wish to relive elementary school… which is ESPECIALLY odd considering how much I hated West Heritage for all the drama I suffered because of it.
Anywho, I’ve REALLY veered from my original point: holy crap, contrary to the impression that high school leaves you with, there’s actually oddball interesting stuff to read in Non-Fiction. Which, for me, is a good thing because I still can’t find anything appealing about boring-ol’ Adult-level fiction, it’s all bleh… and at the same time I would feel really weird bumming around in Teen/Young Adult.
What I SHOULD do is, like, devote a whole day to camping Non-Fiction. Haul Dinah+tablet, of course (in case while reading stuff I get blindsided by Ramen fodder as it’s best to handle that while it’s fresh), but otherwise just freaking camp the high-700 and 921 levels and just go freaking Cookie Monster on anything remotely interesting. I would do this tomorrow, except mother and Evil Stepfather are leaving early to transport the latter’s not-so-evil mother out of the senior rehab center (she had pneumonia and other things) and setting her up with a visiting nurse.
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I totally did not get to draw today, and I’m too tired to think of doing anything now.
Tags: library, yoshi likes weird things