Library Summer Hours

Not sure when to come to Regina or the ERC over the summer? Take note–our hours have changed until August!

The regular summer hours for the Regina Library have begun today and run through August 9. They are:

 

Monday – Thursday        9am – 9pm

Friday                                    9am – 5pm

Saturday                              10am – 6pm

Sunday                                 Closed

 

The library will be closed on Memorial Day (5/27) and Independence Day (7/4).

On Friday, May 31 the library will be open until 8 pm because of make-up classes from Memorial Day.

 

 

The regular summer hours for the Educational Resource Center (ERC) also start today and run through 8/9. They are:

 

Monday – Thursday        10am – 8pm

Friday                                    Closed

Saturday                              10am – 3pm

Sunday                                 Closed

 

The ERC will be closed on Memorial Day (5/27) and Independence Day (7/4).

To Grade Or Not To Grade?

Found this really interesting piece on whether or not the grading system is detrimental to the American education. What do you think? Do grades keep you from reaching your potential, or do you like having a measurable scale of your success?

The Case Against Grades

They lower self-esteem, discourage creativity, and reinforce the class divide.

By Michael Thomsen|Posted Wednesday, May 1, 2013, at 8:15 AM

Should schools abandon the A to F grading system?

There is always something or someone to blame in our struggle for education reform. Sometimes it’s the “bad teachers” who get the blame. Other times it’s standardized testing, insufficient funding, or slow-moving bureaucracy. I blame grades.

Grading students, from A to F, has become synonymous with education itself. Report-card day is an American rite of passage. Yet, there’s reason to believe the structure of grading students is the biggest culprit in America’s long, steady decline in education—SAT reading scores are at a 40-year low, and one recent study ranked the U.S. 17^th in education, worse than Poland, Canada, Ireland, South Korea, and Denmark. It’s becoming increasingly clear that the rigid and judgmental foundation of modern education is the origin point for many of our worst qualities, making it harder for many to learn because of its negative reinforcement, encouraging those who do well to gradually favor the reward of an A over the discovery of new ways of thinking, and reinforcing harsh class divides that are only getting worse as the economy idles.

A 2002 study at the University of Michigan found that 80 percent of students surveyed based their self-worth on academic performance—more than cited family support as a source of self-esteem. A 2006 study at King’s College showed adolescents with low self-esteem were more likely to have poor health, be involved in criminal behavior, and earn less than their peers. Since it’s overwhelmingly poor students who are prone to bad grades, a self-reinforcing loop is created. Poverty leads to bad grades and low self-esteem, which leads to more poverty and social dysfunction.

In its earliest forms, education was a Socratic practice of self-knowledge; an isolated act of enshrining religious traditions; or, most commonly, an informal transfer of skill on the homestead, with parents teaching children how to plant, harvest, raise livestock, or practice some craft passed through generations. That all began to change in 1792 when William Farish, a tutor and soon-to-be chemistry professor at Cambridge, became an early advocate of evaluating student performance through quantifying test results. A century later, the logic transformed into a letter-based scale first seen at Mount Holyoke College in 1897. By the 1930s, the ABC approach had been adopted by a wide group of schools and universities around the country and, not coincidentally, would be reabsorbed by a number of industrial interests, including dairy, beef, poultry, and plywood. (That’s some A+ plywood!)

These changes coincided with the rapid expansion of compulsory education in America, a legal standard that had been adopted by all 50 states by 1917. Grades were the foundation of this expansion, providing data points for a system in which one person would get a corner office and another would be lost to a life flipping burgers or changing motor oil. If you want to succeed in life, stay in school, get good grades.

The catch is that fear of negative outcomes has been repeatedly shown to be a major impediment to learning. A survey of students at the University of Cape Town found that stress and fear of failing tests led to “classic symptoms of procrastination and avoidance,” confusion and low self-esteem. “ … [I]t’s one of those things where if I have to fail a test, I’m Like, ‘Oh my goodness, I can’t fail a test.’ It’s like a really serious strain,” one subject reported. Another showed the classic habit of grade-weighted failure leading to disengagement: “But I just didn’t like the fact that I had failed, so I just moved on to something else.” These responses are echoed by a number of studies that show students’ willingness to take on challenging tasks diminishes when grades are involved, but without grades, students left on their own tend to seek out more challenging problems.

John Taylor Gatto, a one-time New York State Teacher of the Year turned fierce education critic, proposed an education system built around “independent study, community service, adventures in experience, large doses of privacy and solitude, [and] a thousand different apprenticeships.” Schools built on these values have flourished in the margins of state-funded, graded education throughout the 20^th century. The most famous example is the Montessori schools, noted for their lack of grades, multiage classes, and extended periods where students can chose their own projects from a selected range of materials. The schools have educated many of today’s wealthiest entrepreneurs, including Google’s Larry Page and Sergei Brin, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Wikipedia creator Jimmy Wales, business management legend Peter Drucker, and video game icon Will Wright.

A 2006 comparison in Milwaukee found that Montessori students performed better than grade-based students at reading and math; they also “wrote more creative essays with more complex sentence structures, selected more positive responses to social dilemmas, and reported feeling more of a sense of community at their school.” Some contend that Montessori schools attract more affluent and successful parents, who give their children an inherent advantage, but the Milwaukee study was built around a random lottery for Montessori enrollment. All the children in the study came from families with similar economic backgrounds, with average incomes ranging between $20,000 and $50,000.

Free schools have taken the gradeless structure even further, treating the school as an open space where students are not only allowed to self-direct but are given equal responsibility in the organization and rule-making of the school itself. The Summerhill School in England is one of the most recognizable and longest-running, founded in 1921 by A.S. Neill. Summerhill is built around the idea of creating stable, happy, and compassionate humans capable of filling any role in society—a janitor being no less a success than a doctor. In place of dedicated courses, students are free to follow their own interests while teachers observe and nudge them toward new ways of thinking about what they’re drawn to. Students with an interest in cooking, for instance, might learn the basics of chemistry by way of thickening a sauce. Those drawn to playing soccer might learn to improve their game with some fundamental principles of Newtonian physics.

Schools inspired by the Summerhill model have flourished in recent years, with free schools operating around the country from Portland, Ore., to Sudbury, Mass. The Brooklyn Free School has earned attention for its open structure and regular democratic meetings, where students debate how to handle problems like boredom and whether playing video games on the school computers should be considered a learning activity. The higher tuition costs do tend to attract wealthier families with well-supported children, but many go out of their way to provide assistance to low-income families, favoring diversity over bill-paying. The Manhattan Free School in Harlem makes do on an annual budget of $100,000 and collects full tuition from only 20 percent of its students. The Brooklyn Free School operates on a sliding scale of tuition, collecting full payment from only half of its students, with some paying as little as $20 every few weeks.

It’s a common misnomer to assume no student evaluation happens in environments like these, but in most cases free-school environments require more teacher attention than traditional classrooms. Instead of testing for comprehension of a select group of facts or ideas, teachers constantly monitor a child’s behavior, support an array of student experimentation, and subtly encourage efforts that best match the student’s abilities. In free schools failure is not a punishment for bad study habits but the sign of students testing their knowledge to see if it holds true in practice. In our soccer analogy, success wouldn’t be evaluated by students scoring goals but in gradually learning how and why the ball curves in some cases and goes straight in others, a process that would surely produce many more misses than scores.

And free schools perform reasonably well. A survey of former students at Sudbury Valley School in Massachusetts found 80 percent of its students went on to college or professional school, and 20 percent enrolled in graduate programs. In 1998, 75 percent of Summerhill students who took Britain’s certificate-qualification exams passed.

Abandoning grades would be a massive shock, but holding onto them has not forestalled decay, from waves of school closures for poor standardized test results to the trillion-dollar debt guillotine awaiting college students who’ll struggle to win unpaid internships for all their hard work. Eliminating grades would not singlehandedly bring salvation. There is a whole new world of challenges and complications in a classroom without pedagogy and rank. But it would be an ideal place to start anew, to stop motivating students, teachers, and underperformers with the fear of being flunked, fired, or shut down. Without that dysfunctional ranking we could instead form a child’s education around his or her eagerness to discover, contribute, and share. An A-to-F grade scale is only a distraction from that process and in many cases an outright deterrent. It’s time to admit that system has no place in our future.

Great Summer Reads

Excited that summer break has arrived, but have nothing in your picnic basket to read at the beach? Look no further!

Here is a list from Good Reads showcasing their summer 2013 reads–many of which you can easily check out here at the library! Remember–we’re here for you through the summer with all your book, research, and dvd needs.

Happy May Day!!

Ever wonder the origins of today’s Spring holiday? Encyclopedia Britannica can help–learn something new below!

Europe, holiday (May 1) for the celebration of the return of spring. The observance probably originated in ancient agricultural rituals, and the Greeks and Romans held such festivals. Although later practices varied widely, the celebrations came to include the gathering of wildflowers and green branches, the weaving of floral garlands, the crowning of a May king and queen, and the setting up of a decorated May tree, or Maypole, around which people danced. Such rites originally may have been intended to ensure fertility for crops and, by extension, for livestock and humans, but in most cases this significance was gradually lost, so that the practices survived largely as popular festivities. Among the many superstitions associated with May Day was the belief that washing the face with dew on the morning of May 1 would beautify the skin. Because the Puritans of New England considered the celebrations of May Day to be licentious and pagan, they forbade its observance, and the holiday never became an important part of American culture. In the 20th century, traditional May Day celebrations declined in many countries as May 1 became associated with the international holiday honouring workers and the labour movement.

Article retrieved from Here!

Shaken, Not Stirred

Exciting News!

A new shipment of James Bond classics has come to the library and is available for you to check out! Have you ever watched the older versions? Maybe you joined the 007 wagon later on, as new movies have been coming out with Daniel Craig? Either way, whether you want to brush up on the movies you loved or open your eyes to the many faces of Bond for the first time, you’re just one check out away.

Just imagine how many classic quotes you’ll find that you never knew came from here. And don’t forget the place:

Library, Regina Library.

Growing a Potted Garden

With this gloomy drizzle engulfing us today, I’d like everyone to remember that the warm months are just around the corner (or tomorrow, with a brief 75 degree break from the cooling!). That being said, we live in a state that’s pretty big on self sustaining–and there will be plenty of sun coming to start your own potted garden!

Don’t think you have a green thumb, or maybe not enough space to grow your own vegetables? Think again! Below is a link to the easiest veggies to grow in a pot–all you need is sunlight and a reminder on your phone to beep at you when they need a watering. Imagine picking some fresh green beans off your own vine, pairing it with a cherry tomato, and patting yourself on the back for a job well done and a healthy snack.

If you’re looking for a summer project, consider getting your hands dirty with your own convenient garden. And let us know how it turns out.

Best Crops For Pots

Need a guidebook? Browse through Container Gardening for Dummies, available online in our ebrary.

Advice I Wish Someone Had Given Me for My First Job

Found this great article for all you seniors out there, by Thorin Klosowski!

Advice I wish Someone Had Given Me for My First Job

Whether you’re straight out of college or starting a new career path, that first job can be scary. You might think you know the ropes, but it’s a lot more than just getting your work done. Here are a few tips I wish someone gave me before I took my first job.

 

Everyone’s workplace is a little different, but when it boils down to it, we all face the same set of challenges at a new job. You’ll probably need to start at the bottom of the totem pole even if you’re an experienced worker, and integrating yourself into the company culture is a lot harder than you think. Keeping your expectations in check is a good place to start.

Accept Your Newbie Status and the Work that Comes with It

When you’re just out of college, it’s easy to get a big head about what you can do in the workplace. Unfortunately, chances are you’ll need to clean the proverbial toilet for a while before you’re given any real responsibility. This means you need to show off your work ethic even if you’re stuck doing tasks you don’t like.

It might sound like simply “paying your dues,” but it’s easy to get a little full of yourself when you first start a job. In a recent episode of Still Untitled: The Adam Savage Project, the podcast crew detail why work ethic is insanely important when you’re faced with work you don’t want to do:

When you do [the boring work] and you do it well, about 10% of the time you get to do the fun stuff. You get to dress something and make it look cooler, or you get to solve a problem. If you do that well, you get to do a little more of it. Then a little more… You have to dedicate yourself to the drudgery, and doing the legwork that’s not fun or glamorous… No one comes out of college or trade school knowing what they need to succeed down the line.

Their advice? Revel in working hard no matter what the job is. You might be smart and clever, but a solid work ethic is the main thing that’ll separate you from all the other viable candidates. You may start with a bunch of grunt work, but you can’t be an oversensetive employee. If you’re not learning anything, it’s time to look at yourself and figure out what actually sucks: the job or you. Photo by Leigh Marriner.

Stay Organized and Never Miss a Deadline

Your new career is probably nothing like school, or any other job you’ve ever had. That means the organization principles you used in the past may not be any good to you now. Being on time, getting your work done, and keeping it all together is incredibly important at a new job.

In a lot of careers, your boss isn’t really going to notice you at first unless you’re doing something horribly wrong. Being on time every day, keeping your desk clean, and doing your job ensure they won’t single you out right away as being unproductive. You can worry about standing out later. At first you just need to get your work done as efficiently as possible.

If you need some tools to help keep track of everything, our Lifehacker Packs have everything you need to stay organized, productive, and on time. It might seem like a minor thing, but showing you can reliably get things done goes a long way. Photo by Blake Patterson.

Pay Attention to the Company Culture

Every company is different, and fitting in is increasingly important when hundreds (if not thousands) of other people want your job. We’ve heard that interviews test for cultural fit and that carries over into the job itself. While you don’t need to go out of your way to change your personality for an employer (if you do, you probably shouldn’t be working there), you should make an effort to meet everyone as quickly as possible. Introducing yourself around the office is certainly a good start, but the Harvard Business Review also suggests you never eat lunch alone:

One of the best things about a new job is the incredible learning experience it provides. Every single person you’ll work with in your new position—from the receptionist to the CEO—can teach you something valuable, and each of them can be a friend and mentor in your career… Your office is full of intelligent, thoughtful, and experienced people. Get to know them. Treat them with respect. Ask them questions. Learn from them. And have fun in the process.

You don’t need to literally eat lunch with everyone. The goal is make a good impression with various people around the company, and learn as much as you can. Making friends is the easiest way to do that.

When you’re constantly seeking a broader knowledge of the company as a whole, it makes you look good. It also helps you figure out what really matters at a company, and you can change your own behavior slightly if needed. Photo by Jere Keys.

Ask Questions

One thing you likely learned in school that carries over to the real world: asking questions is important. Your boss and your coworkers want nothing more than for you to do your job correctly the first time, and the best way to do that is to ask questions when you’re starting out. Be sure you actively listen to the answers, and ask followup questions so you avoid miscommunication. If you’re still not entirely certain you’re doing a project right, give your boss simple progress reports that outline where you’re at. That way, your boss can steer you back on track if you get lost.

You want to ask questions when you need to, but don’t overdo it. Wanting to learn is an excellent quality, but so is initiative. If you understand the basics and what’s expected of you, don’t be afraid to find your own shortcuts to get the job done, and don’t pester your boss for help with every small decision.

The next best question you can ask is: “What should I do next?” Pretty much every boss on the planet loves to hear that you’re done with a project and ready for more work (or even better, just find something that needs to get done and do it). While it’s important not to stretch yourself and take on too much work, one of the best qualities of a new hire is the “run not walk” attitude that keeps you busy. You’ll have time to relax once you’ve settled in at the company, but now is not that time.

Even when you ask a lot of questions, you’re also going to make mistakes, and that’s perfectly okay as long as you don’t repeat them. Unless you start a fire in the office your boss will likely let your first few mistakes slide. Just be honest about it, ask what you should have done, and make sure you learned something from it. Photo by Gavin Bobo.

Watch for Burnout (and Deal with It the Right Way)

It’s remarkably easy to get caught up in moving your career forward when you’re first starting out. Regardless of how young you are, this eventually leads to burnout, which means you end up doing your job poorly. It might seem like you need a gung-ho attitude at a new job to really get ahead, but your productivity and creativity can suffer when you work long hours, so it’ll do more harm than good. Here’s what you need to keep in mind:

• Recognize when you’re overworked: If you’re working too much, you’re not sleeping enough, you’re not taking breaks, and you end up stressed out. When you’re first starting at a new job, it’s tough to request a two week vacation, but that doesn’t mean you can’t take a day off every once in a while.
• Give yourself breaks throughout the day: Work-life balance is incredibly hard to manage when you’re starting your career, and chances are you’ll have a lot of long hours when you’re first starting out. When things start to get messy, remind yourself to take short breaks and reward yourself with something small and simple. It won’t save you from that 16 hour day on a tight deadline, but it’ll at least save a bit of your sanity.
• Take those sick days: You want your new employer to see you as reliable, and taking a sick day seems in exact opposition to that. However, when you’re sick—truly, honestly, horribly, sick—nobody wants you around. Any good boss should allow you to take a sick day when you’re actually ill, so don’t feel the need to push yourself into work when you have the flu.

It’s a fine balance between maintaining a consistent work ethic, being reliable, and still giving yourself the time off you need to survive. Your first job is not only about showing that you can get the job done, it’s also about forming connections and learning as many tricks of the trade as possible. This likely won’t be your last job, and the more you can take away from it the better.