For a shortened week, it was pretty jam-packed. The AQs that I lead for Queen's University and York University started this week. I hosted the annual Scholastic Book Fair in my library. Also on the calendar was our school's Curriculum Night, Terry Fox Run and the TDSB Teacher Librarian Facilitator Meeting and Planning Session. Did I mention taking my parents to get their haircuts and arranging Thanksgiving dinner? Busy, busy, busy.
Two moments this week reminded me about the importance of flow - both traffic flow and going with the flow.
Last year, the book fair resembled a packed dance club at the hottest night spot; it was so crowded that people could barely move, and even with five staff members helping out, by the end of the night we were all exhausted. This year, the admin team came by to scope out the space and make suggestions on how to improve the situation. I appreciated their interest and concern. My principal recommended a change that actually made a huge difference: create a corridor where shoppers would line up to pay that did not block people still browsing and selecting in the book fair. We moved the cashier location to a spot near my circulation desk and the door to help with this shift. I don't have any photos of the alteration, but it worked well. We only had three staff members monitoring the book fair, and those wonderful colleagues, Connie Chan and Julie Tran, sped things along even more than before by writing and calculating the purchase amounts on sticky notes that the buyers passed to me at the checkout. That meant that I could focus just on collecting the payment and making change when needed.
I've mentioned frequently about how disruptive and dysregulating the book fair can be. I am now the primary prep provider for the kindergarten classes, and I thought I'd be clever and avoid all the distractions of the book fair by holding my music class on Wednesday in their kindergarten classroom instead of the library. The decision wasn't that smart. I couldn't log into my MusicPlayOnline subscription while in the other class. I improvised my lesson as best as I could, but the students began to get restless, and some of my usual redirection tricks relied on items left in the library. No worries - why not go to the library and use my laptop with my saved password intact? This would have been fine, if my laptop speakers had not suddenly decided to stop working. Having no sound on a music website isn't useful at all. By this time, I was getting a bit frazzled. I was saved by two things: our compassionate Educational Assistant, Joan D'Souza, who saw I was struggling and rearranged her schedule to help me out, and my handy-dandy box of instruments. Although I wasn't feeling like a very competent teacher at the time, I can be a bit creative and think fast on my feet on occasion, so we did some compare and contrast, including a repetitive song phrase I made up on the spot to match one of two instruments (bells or tambourines). It worked so well that I repeated it with the other kindergarten class I saw later that same day. (In case you are curious, the song chants were "This is a tambourine" [ta / tee tee / tee tee / ta = so, so, so, mi, mi, so] and "Bells, bells, bells bells bells" [ta / ta / tee tee / ta = so, mi, so, so, mi]).
Going with the flow isn't easy when the flow is more of a rushing river than a lazy stream. The same goes for traffic flow; managing traffic is better when it isn't like rush hour on the 401. However, life's course never runs smoothly and these tales make for entertaining stories and helpful lessons learned.
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