Jumping Ship: Why I’m Becoming a School Librarian, a guest post by Benjamin Ludwig

I never thought I’d say this, but I’m jumping ship. I’m leaving my role as language arts teacher.

It wasn’t a difficult decision to make. See, for a long time I’ve had my sights on something greater, on another boat anchored not far away. Getting there would take some swimming, but with hope and inspiration keeping me afloat, I’m confident that I can reach the vessel H.M.S. Librarian.

High School or Middle School Librarian, that is.

Yes, groan. But I’ve done my own share of groaning before coming to this decision – which, as I said earlier, was an easy one to make.

There’s always been an overlap between the role of English teacher and school librarian, and it comes down to one obvious word: books! I became an English teacher because as a kid, I loved to read. Libraries and bookstores were my favorite places to be, and I visited one of each every day on my walk home from school. I loved reading stories and writing stories. I especially loved English class, where I could engage in both of those activities. But in English class, my love of books quickly expanded to a love of inquiry as well, because I had several teachers who took an inquiry approach to the books we read together.

For me, inquiry meant – and still means – asking a question in order to discover new ideas that we didn’t know existed. My teachers started with questions like In what ways was the story of Adam and Eve foundational in Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon? and quickly taught us to move to How is Eve portrayed in different cultures? and then, Is there a difference between how characters of different genders are portrayed in literature?

The discovery of new questions, after all, is how we learn. I knew that the only life I’d ever be happy living was one filled with inquiry and books. So when it came time to apply to college, applying to the University of New Hampshire as an English Education major seemed like the best possible idea. To me, English teachers were rock stars, and lots of them were affiliated with UNH: Nancy Atwell, Donald Graves, Don Murray, Linda Rief – the list goes on. After graduating with a masters in my field, I became a middle school language arts teacher.

I loved every minute of it.

I could get kids excited about books by modeling the inquiry process. After reading Varjak Paw (S.F. Said), with a group of sixth graders, I could ask, “Which of the seven skills in The Way do you think is most important?” 

“Shadow Walking!” someone would say.

“Moving Circles!”

“Awareness!”

“Hmm. I wonder if any of these things are real. I mean, I wonder if they’re part of an actual martial art, or something.”

“Can we look it up?”

And then we’d look up the origins of kung-fu, which leads to questions about Buddhism’s spread from India to China, which leads to questions about how martial arts can somehow be wrapped up in religion.

In sixth grade.

But things changed, over the years. Now, thanks to the Common Core State Standards, No Child Left Behind, and the many standardized tests I’m required to administer, I’m forced to ask very different sorts of questions. Now I have to questions such as “Which line from the text supports the idea that the author is trying to sway our opinion?” and “Without giving your personal opinion about the message, what is the message of this poem?” and “Given these two essays on the same subject, how does the structure of each contribute to its own meaning?”

Of course, these things are all easily measured, and very easily reduced to a four-item multiple-choice question on a standardized test. But tests are finite, unnatural things, and so the questions end, right then and there. They don’t connect to other questions.

And I have to point out that there’s nothing wrong with them at all, in and of themselves. Teaching students to back up claims and cite evidence is extremely important. But such narrow, stay-in-your-box skills have become the sole focus of a middle school language arts curriculum.

Which brings me to the greatest fault of the Era of Standardized Testing in which we now find ourselves: the tests have convinced us that if something can’t be easily measured, it isn’t worth teaching.

Inquiry has become essentially hollow, in an English class. Its soul has been emptied. In fact, most people confuse the term inquiry and research, thinking they’re the same thing. Of course, librarians know the two terms aren’t synonymous at all: Research is about finding answers; inquiry is about finding new questions to ask. But since finding new questions isn’t a task easily reduced to a question on a standardized test, inquiry has disappeared from the English curriculum. It’s the beast we can’t control with multiple-choice answers.

Most ELA teachers are required to post, each day on the classroom wall, the precise standards that are being taught. The same thing happens in math, science, and social studies class. Students know – because they see the standards printed– that they’re in school not to explore or to discover, but rather to be trained in a very narrow a set of skills. The message is clear: We don’t care how creative or unique or clever you can be. We certainly don’t want to know what you wonder about. We just want you to learn this because it’s on the test.

Now, there’s certainly a lot of exciting work going on in language arts classrooms, but it’s only permitted when ELA teachers find ways to weave the standards into it. Anything that’s truly exciting can’t be taught for its own sake. Everything, even inquiry, is at the service of the standards.

The only mention of inquiry in the Common Core appears in a single strand of the 6-12 Writing Standards, Research to Build and Present Knowledge:

Conduct short research projects to answer a question, drawing on several sources and refocusing the inquiry when appropriate.

The phrase “when appropriate” is significant because it suggests that students ask a new question only in certain situations. We can assume those situations include times when there aren’t enough resources on a given topic, or the student discovers that the topic is too narrow. The strand doesn’t ask students to actively pursue new questions; it only asks them to adjust his sights if the situation warrants it. But in true inquiry, asking new questions is the whole point.

If research (answering a question) has completely replaced inquiry in the ELA classroom, then we’ve put the cart before the horse, you might say. We see trees but not the forest. There are lots of other metaphors we could apply. No one even tries to deny the fact that we “teach to the test,” now. Last year, when it was announced that our district would adopt a canned curriculum for ELA, my building principal said to me, “Ben, if the standards are imbedded in the tests, and the new curriculum teaches the standards, then really, we don’t even need grades anymore. Everything is becoming streamlined.”

I’m all for revising grading standards, but I’m not so sure that all students in a given class would perform equally well in the annual footrace if we forced them to wear the same size-eight boys’ sneakers. Plus, not all students want to race. This if/then, oversimplified, let’s-maximize-efficiency logic that administrators so often tout smacks of factory-model education, which of course is exactly what standardized testing has always been about.

The result, in the end, is that most students are far less motivated to learn. And teachers are far less motivated to teach.

I was miserable when Era of Standardized Tests began, even more so when I was handed a canned curriculum. I hadn’t signed up, as the saying goes, for any of this. I wanted to teach inquiry for inquiry’s own sake, which is what I set out to do in the first place, and had been doing up until the Era of Standardized Tests began.

But a few years ago, something miraculous happened. Because I loved books so much, I’d been writing my own for years and years. I had stacks of unpublished novels, some in drawers, some on the computer. In 2017, my debut novel, Ginny Moon, was acquired by HarperCollins/Park Row Books. To help promote the book, my publisher flew me to Atlanta for the American Library Association’s Midwinter Meeting. I went to share and sign ARCs of the book for hundreds and hundreds of librarians. A lot of them were school librarians, of course. My publisher arranged for me to have dinner with a group of about twenty of them. When I sat down with this group of amazing people, my eyes were opened.

Because they taught inquiry, every single one of them.

They taught it while co-teaching.

They taught it through the research lessons they taught.

The taught it while helping students select books to read for pleasure.

I was flabbergasted. Had I been blind? Asleep? I wasn’t sure. In the end, I concluded that I’d been so tangled in my own subject’s trees that I hadn’t noticed there see was a whole other forest to explore, and that it was right down the hall. Regardless, I saw a vision that matched my true goal as an educator. I knew that I wanted – no, needed – to become a school librarian. Immediately.

But I was on tour, and would remain so for the next two and a half years.

And then Covid hit.

And my wife’s mother moved in with us, and passed away.

It would be four full years before I was able to apply to a library certification program. I finished my coursework this past May.

Librarians help students get the information they want, and discover the questions that they want to ask. Inquiry is at the heart of everything they do. It says so in their standards. In the AASL Standards Framework for Learners, there’s an entire category for Inquiry. It’s one of their six Shared Foundations and Key Commitments, and is even mentioned in two of the non-Inquiry categories.

I don’t know if we’ll ever exit out of the Era of Standardized Testing. I don’t know if inquiry will ever be a priority in the English classroom again. But I do know that librarians have made it the foundation of their profession, and that for me personally, sharing books and questions with students is much more important than teaching them to defend whatever claims they might have been handed. The goal of education should never be reduced to imparting a finite set of skills. We might train animals this way, but not freethinking human beings. The purpose of education should be to open a students’ minds to new possibilities and perspectives. I’d rather teach them to swim from boat to boat or island to island in a quest for knowledge rather than to stake their claim on only one.

I just signed a contract to become the middle school librarian at a K-8 school in my district, and couldn’t be happier. But if  I’m honest, I think a bit more inquiry earlier in my career might have saved me a lot of time and heartache.

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References

American Association for School Librarians. (2018). AASL Standards Framework for Learners Retrieved from https://standards.aasl.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/AASL-Standards-Framework-for-Learners-pamphlet.pdf. American Association for School Librarians.

National Governors Association for Best Practices & Council of Chief State School Officers. (2010). English language arts standards. Common Core Standards Initiative. Retrieved April 22, 2024, from https://www.thecorestandards.org/ELA-Literacy/W/6/

Said, S. F. (2003). Varjak Paw. David Fickling Books.

Meet the author

Previously a middle school language arts teacher, Benjamin Ludwig is now proud to be a K-8 librarian in New Hampshire. He is also a novelist. His next book, OUTSIDE, is about a homeless teenager who prevents a school shooting. He loves to hear from librarians and educators, and is always up for a school visit. Connect with him via his website at www.benjaminludwig.com 

Socials:

Twitter/X: https://twitter.com/BILudwig 
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Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/BenjaminLudwig.Author/ 

About Outside

Fifteen-year-old Dylan and his Bigfoot-obsessed brother Bam-Bam are homeless. They sleep in a tent, even when their mom finds work cleaning houses in exchange for a place to stay. A temporary dwelling, it seems, is the only place he’s ever felt he belongs. But when Dylan stops an act of violence at school, putting the perpetrator into a coma, no place is safe for him anymore. The media is hounding him, and he’s suffering from PTSD. In order to escape and recover, he accepts an offer from Dr. Campbell, an educational philanthropist, to be part of an elite leadership camp in Alaska called The Perspective Project. Dr. Campbell’s own son died in an act of school violence, and so he’s since dedicated his life’s work to helping students belong – to give them a sense of tribe – by ending standardized testing in schools, and creating experiential learning opportunities.

At the Perspective Project, Dylan meets five other teens: Dave, who wants to be a firefighter; Jed, whose fast-talking manner can charm the birds from the trees; Molly, whose hell-bent determination saved three girls at a party but also hides a secret past; Charlie, a musician who rescued an auditorium full of people; and Celia, who’s studying to be an EMT, and who becomes Dylan’s first true love. Together the six of them embark on a series of wilderness survival tasks, all designed to build them into a team – but when Dylan discovers Molly’s secret, and reveals it to Dr. Campbell, the man becomes unhinged. Instantly, the tasks become overwhelmingly difficult, and Dr. Campbell’s unpredictable behavior puts everyone’s lives in danger.

Then Dylan discovers an even greater secret, one that will force him to confront his deepest fear, and face a truth that he thought was as good as dead.

Written for teachers and students, OUTSIDE is about the importance of belonging, the choice between trusting authority or your gut, and the danger of letting yourself become just another data point.

Coming November 12 , 2024

Filed under: Guest Post