It's easy to get bogged down by academic projects. Right now, I've got 4 courses that I'm teaching for York, with a particularly large number of participants this term. I'm getting mentally ready to take my ESL Part 2 AQ with Queen's (it starts Monday August 12) and I've been chipping away at a project on Digital Media Literacy with CSL. Thankfully, I've been able to make time to see some friends this past week.
My "citation savior" Joanie Proske was in Toronto recently. Joanie lives in BC and we first met when we were both taking our Masters of Education courses online with the University of Alberta. We had lunch together at the delicious Pigeon Café on King Street West. (Excuse how wet we look in this photo. We got drenched while walking.)
My long-time friend Wendy Kaell turned 50 and I attended her birthday celebration on Saturday.
My TDSB pals Wendy Burch Jones and Kim Davidson went for lunch mid-week in Scarborough.
I was also rescued by the wonderful Jennifer Brown from Peel DSB on Thursday. My scheduled guest speaker for my York TL AQ had to drop out unexpectedly last minute and Jenn kindly agreed to sub in and give the same presentation she gave to my July 2024 cohort. We had a good time playing with new Zoom features, like embedding Jenn directly into her slides as a background, and the listeners were absolutely enthralled with Jenn's presentation.
I noticed that a large number of my friends are educators. This should not come as a surprise. You make friends at school and at work, and I'm surrounded by teacher types. What I wanted to comment on was on how many of my friends are teacher-librarians and how utterly wonderful it is to have friends that are school library professionals. Having a friend that's a TL has all sorts of benefits. For instance, TLs are very generous with their time and skills. Jennifer Brown (a TL) willingly volunteered to give up part of her evening to support new TLs in my course. My friend Joanie (a retired TL) helped me immensely when we were both in the Teacher-Librarianship via Distance Learning program with U of A. She patiently taught me how to do proper APA citations. TLs are also great conversationalists and (usually) attentive listeners. They are (in general) intellectually curious and eager to continue learning. Joanie and I both teach TL courses for Queen's, and she shared so many ideas and resources. We are both keen to embark on a project so we can work together and invigorate graduate-level scholarship in the field. Wendy Burch Jones and I drove to Wendy Kaell's party together and we couldn't help but "talk shop". As OSLA president, Wendy has some ambitious plans for helping the state of school libraries. TLs are action-oriented people; they like to get things done! TLs can be counted on to give good book recommendations even if they are in casual social settings. When Kim and Wendy (both TLs) and I went to lunch, the book titles mentioned peppered the conversation. TLs are good researchers, friendly, and good connectors. It turns out that our server and the sous-chef at the restaurant we ate at were former students of Kim's, and they had nothing but positive memories of "Ms. McNaughton" (her maiden name). TLs also seem to have good memories. I can't believe some of the things my friends remember from the past.
This doesn't mean that I only have or want TL friends. Some of my other friends are "TL adjacent". I exchanged a few nice emails this weekend with GamingEdu alum Andy Forgrave. He's super-organized like a TL might be and is a great resource and source of stories himself. I had a short but sweet picnic in a local park with some members of my teaching staff.
Some of my other friends have nothing to do with education, so they ensure I don't exist in an echo chamber. My husband had "the boys" over for some gaming on the weekend.
Either way, it's great to have friends and great to have friends that are TLs.
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