The Gift of Teaching

I've always admired teachers. It amazes me how they make sharing their knowledge look so effortless. When my daughter was in school, it was a steady battle with homework and assignments, because I just didn't have it in me to help. In my opinion, good teachers are our greatest and most underrated assets.

I recently traveled (on the road again!) to Brookhaven with my colleagues Joy Garretson and Jennifer Nabzdyk Todd. These two ladies were asked to teach librarians about Microsoft Office, MAGNOLIA, and customer service. I really enjoy going along on these trips, because not only do I learn something myself, I also get a chance to visit the outstanding libraries across Mississippi.

Joy and Nabz, as we affectionately call her, were outstanding and personify the term "teacher" in every way. Along with the participating librarians, I learned a great deal that day, too. MLC is so fortunate to have them sharing their knowledge with those who are serving communities in libraries across the state.

Kudos to the Brookhaven Library; you guys are doing outstanding work in your community. Not only is your newly renovated space beautiful, but your team is a testament to your dedication to providing the best possible services to those in your area.

 

Here at MLC, we will keep teaching, sharing, and serving as we travel Mississippi's roads. It's what we do and we wouldn't have it any other way.

You Are Entering A Dimension of Sight, Sound, And Math

The other day, Tracy and I became completely sidetracked from our discussion about how to tackle our next reference request. Neither one of us could determine the proper subject/verb agreement for a sentence using a phrase containing a percentage. I turned to the Credo Reference database for answers. (By the way, did you know that if you're a Mississippi resident, you have access to this awesome database for free through MAGNOLIA? Be sure to go check out what's available here!) Credo definitely came through:

Percent can take a singular or a plural verb, depending on the intended focus. Thus both Eighty percent of the legislators are going to vote against the bill or Eighty percent of the legislature is set to vote the bill down are possible, but in the second sentence, the group of legislators is considered as a singular body, not as a number of individuals. The word percent without a following prepositional phrase may take either a singular or plural verb; both are acceptable.

I love vague grammar that allows me to be footloose and fancy-free in determining verb endings. It makes me feel downright decadent!

In a completely unrelated math question, my neighbor, who, funnily enough, is also a reference librarian, and I were watching an old Twilight Zone episode called A Game of Pool last night. (It stars Jack Klugman before he was in The Odd Couple or Quincy M.E.--definitely worth checking out!) About five minutes into the episode, one of the men mentioned that he bought his pool cue for $600 sometime before he "died" in 1959. You just can't throw that kind of thing out into a room of reference librarians and not expect some feedback! We all know about how things used to cost less back in the dark ages and that the value of "x" amount of money in the 1950s would be a vastly different number today. Neighbor Reference Librarian and I both immediately determined that The Value of a Dollar needed to be consulted.

According to this old reference standby, this formula needed to be used:

$1 in 1955 equaled $7.75 in 2007.

2007 was "the most recent year with reliable comparisons" according to The Value of a Dollar. Plug in your numbers and presto!

$600 in 1955 equaled $4,650 in 2007.

Now that is one snazzy pool stick! Now, I wonder what percent of Rod Serling fans own pool cues and what ratio of them own pool sticks worth over, say, $1,000.... Too much?

"percent." The American Heritage Guide to Contemporary Usage and Style. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2005. Credo Reference. Web. 14 October 2010.
Derks, Scott. The Value of a Dollar. Amenia, NY: Grey House Publishing. 2009. Print.

A Little (Third Person) Perspective.

If there’s one thing I truly love about media personalities it’s their ability to effortlessly go third person. Take our good friend Rick Sanchez for example. When asked if he would consider working for CNN again, Mr. Sanchez said, “absolutely. CNN is a wonderful, wonderful organization. CNN didn’t screw up. Rick Sanchez screwed up.” This response made me wonder why some people refer to themselves in the third person. Luckily, Jesse Kelley had time to search MAGNOLIA and find an article that offers some perspective.

Dorthe Berntsen and David C. Rubin’s article “Emotion and Vantage Point in Autobiographical Memory” looks into why certain perspectives are used when reliving certain memories. Here’s an example: let’s say you’ve been asked to remember your most severe punishment. Now, when you have this memory, do you see yourself being punished as an outsider or do you remember the punishment as it happened? Without question I see the punishment from a third person perspective. I can see me jumping around while my mother chased me brandishing a belt. What’s reassuring is that this is typical. Berntsen and Rubin state “findings from other studies also suggest that individuals with more severe reactions in response to traumatic events tend to have more observer perspective associated with their memories of those events” (1196). Basically, remembering unpleasant events in the third person perspective helps the victim create distance from the event.

So, when we see Rick Sanchez speaking about himself in the third person it’s not because he’s a narcissistic jerk. Well, maybe he is, but what he’s mostly doing is describing a third person perspective memory. What I’m saying is Rick Sanchez feels bad about what Rick Sanchez did and to distance himself from his actions, he’s blaming Rick Sanchez. It’s that simple.

Berntsen, Dorthe, and David C. Rubin. 2006. "Emotion and vantage point in autobiographical". Cognition & Emotion. 20 (8): 1193-1215.

MAGNOLIA.

One of the resources we use all the time here at the Library Commission is MAGNOLIA, an awesome (and free!) resource available to publically funded schools, libraries, and universities in Mississippi and provided to those institutions by the Mississippi Legislature.

MAGNOLIA stands for Mississippi Alliance for Gaining New Opportunities through Library Information Access (aren't you glad they shortened it to MAGNOLIA?). It contains full-text articles in databases on virtually every topic: the arts, business, biographies, health, law, computer science...and the list goes on.

Periodically we'll take a minute here to tell you about an interesting feature we've discovered, or something fun we found on MAGNOLIA. Stay tuned!