Manifest(o)

All right, The Universe, listen up. I need a new job. It needs to be near a place that I can live, and feel at home, and not have to move for a few years at least. It needs to be a place that I can love like a home all day when I'm at work. This is going to happen because I am making it happen. I will not settle for being unfulfilled or unhappy. I don't settle for things. I seek out what I want until I can achieve it. I have been cranky and worried and felt like no one would want to hire me because the phone isn't ringing and the email isn't emailing, but not right now. Right now, I believe that I will have what I want.

Look, Universe, and other people, and probably potential future employers because you can definitely find this blog if you decide to follow my Internet presence down enough links, there are things you should know about me. Yes, I'm young. I have not had many years of experience yet, but I learn fast. I am already a much better librarian and teacher after just one year of a full-time job. I engage completely with a job. I am a fantastic team player and well-liked by my coworkers. I believe in collaboration. Information Literacy cannot be taught in a vacuum, it wants context and context needs to align with curricula if we have any hope of finding enough time to teach everything that we need to cover in a year. I know that this is possible, no matter what the frameworks say, no matter what tests our students have to take, in the midst of this we can still teach them how to find and interpret information if we work together.

I believe in libraries as centers of all kinds of literacy and community. Literacy means reading information, not just books, not just databases, not just websites, or films, or advertisements or magazines or newspapers- it means reading and thinking critically about all of these things and more. There are nearly constantly being invented new kinds of information that people are going to have to deal with in the future. And community means more than just a physical place today, it means having access to all of the information that is going on online and having the ability to make connections with our fellow humans all around the world. At the same time as all of this expansion, libraries still need to provide traditional access to traditional information: books and comfortable spaces for productivity that may be the productivity of a classroom or a computer lab or individual productivity, which can mean homework, or research and can definitely mean reading a good book in a comfy chair. A library must have light and an engaging atmosphere, even if it is in a school and thereby a place that students will occasionally be required to be, it must still seek to draw people in. The creation of this atmosphere is joyful work.

I believe in imagination. When we give children literacy, we open doors. We open doors to fiction and all of the lives and minds and places and tropes and stories and words a person can visit, real or make-believe. We open doors to discovering our own world through books and media. We open doors to creating content and creating the future. I want to be there, I keep picking up keys, and I want to be someone who opens these doors, and someone with an ear to listen to young travelers who come back with all of the myriad things they will find- treasures and horrors and puzzles alike.

This can happen. I work hard. And I believe.