General – Page 5 – Informative Flights – Musings of a Teacher Librarian

No life without laughter

Quarantine Day 5.
This may seem strange to see but today I’ve spent quite a few moments laughing until I have tears in my eyes and I’m unable to speak coherently. The reason? My Shanghai Quarantine wechat group. Or as they call themselves Sha QuaranTEAM.

Never mind stoicism or resilience or being prepared for the worst – the most important thing is probably to be part of a community that knows how to laugh at themselves and make light of the situation. Our group is now nearly 400 members and each new person has to disclose the snack / food stash by means of a photo (the snack food cold war) and pledge their alliagance to one of three teams.

So far Team Cheetos seems to winning out – motto: Stay Home. Eat Cheetos. Be naked.

And so another sun sets on a day of work and meetings interspersed with belly laughter.

The Time

Time stretches endlessly when you’re in confinement, and unlike say prisoners, there is no fixed schedule for anything. Unless you count our pavlovian response when we hear the rustling on the corridor that signals the twice daily temperature checks or the thrice daily deposit of our plastic containers with the rations for the meals.

Work hasn’t (officially) started yet, but I do have a ton of things I need to do in preparation and a couple of meetings last week, so that leaves a lot of unstructured time. Our Shanghai quarantine WeChat was pretty busy last night with bored people and funny quips, so social media does that a chunk of that time. Just like last year when we were in lock-down and doing online learning that whole question of synchronous / structured vs. asynchronous / unstructured comes into play. Over the last 18 months I’ve decided I’m definitely in the asynchronous camp.

I dislike agendas with times and generally plan my time using the bullet journal style (if you’ve never heard of it, watching this 4 minute video is time well spent) using a filofax so that I can add and remove pages. I start each day writing out my actual commitments that are at definite times and then I just make a list of what I’d like to accomplish, and open all the necessary tabs on my computer and work through and close tabs as I’m done.

Having no commuting time, no set times for waking and sleeping mean that I’m pretty much free do do whatever whenever however and I save about 2 hours a day that’s wasted usually.

Yesterday I experimented with multi-tasking – I had a great book that I needed to finish before it expired (Wish Lanterns – it’s really a great look at modern China through the lives of six young people born in the 80’s) and I needed to get in my 5000 steps minimum, and my neighbour was having a shouting match on the phone with someone. So I paced up and down reading my book on my phone while listening to the gorgeous Symphony # 8 of Dvorak. With some push-ups and squats thrown in every 1000 steps. It takes a LONG time to get in so many steps when your room is 8 paces from door to window.

That symphony is a particular favourite of mine, having played it when I was still an active cello player in the Hong Kong Medical Association orchestra, heavily pregnant with my first child, who now has my cello and plays better than I could ever dream of having played. We’re now officially empty nesters, with the next one off to art college – the reason that we ventured out of China this summer.

For my temptation bundling I decided to bundle two temptations and continued my crochet blanket – nearly done the first 22 colours and getting ready to start the colours again, while watching Netflix – I’m a sucker for medical shows – last quarantine was Offspring (my all time favourite) and this summer / quarantine has been New Amsterdam and The Good Doctor. Interspersed with The Blacklist – BUT my downloads have run out and Netflix doesn’t play nice with streaming. Suggestions for shows welcome.

I had a couple of nice long chats with friends and family and did the work I needed getting done. I also spent a bit of time on the Sisyphusian task of learning Chinese. I’m quite enjoying the self-paced online course I’m doing with GoEast, Yesterday I was trying to sort out my password mess of becoming more secure even on the obscure sites I’m signed up to, many of which I can’t even remember what the heck they’re about. I came across WordSwing again and spent a pleasurable hour or so reading a “solve it yourself” mystery – Murder in the Tea Room (谁杀了李市长?). It was a nice break from the usual studying but knowing myself and the time pressures once normal life resumes I resisted subscribing to it.

I love getting comments from people – Thank you so much to Sabina who suggested some work-out videos – I had a look at them yesterday and even passed them on to a colleague who is currently recovering from foot surgery (yup it’s been quite a year for accidents – I’m not the only one!) I’m going to be trying them out today as I don’t have any books that need urgent reading!

Plastic Purgatory

Quite a few of my readers have commented on the amount of plastic involved in my quarantine journey/meals. Absolutely – and you just saw the plastic involved with meals. It’s actually far worse.

The worst of it is that the only choices I can exercise in this is to cut the meal plastic by 2/3 by having one meal a day, by using my reusable washable cutlery instead of the daily packs and by only putting out my waste when the yellow bag is full instead of daily. I fear however that anything I don’t use will still be scrapped as “potentially infected” rather than re-used.

Rations of toilet paper, water, toothbrushes, combs and soap all wrapped in plastic

Not only quarantine

As this article Increased plastic pollution due to COVID-19 pandemic: Challenges and recommendations
by Silva, Prata, Walker, Duarte, Ouyang,Barcelò, and Rocha-Santos (2021) doesn’t even mention the waste in quarantine hotels – perhaps because it’s European based where the concept is not a reality yet. And the general waste generated is phenomenal. While they are careful to weigh up the positive and negative impacts of the pandemic they also warn “While the positive impacts of COVID-19 in the environment are resulting from a “postponed” anthropogenic activity that soon will entail after the pandemic scenario; the negative short-term effects (that are mostly related with plastic use, consumption and waste mismanagement as discussed below) will shortly add-up to the current environmental issues, aggravating their impact in the natural ecosystems and compromising potential mitigation/remediation measures.”

Image from: *Increased plastic pollution due to COVID-19 pandemic: Challenges and recommendations*
by Silva, Prata, Walker, Duarte, Ouyang,Barcelò, and Rocha-Santos (2021)

As Wired Magazine explains in their article – it’s not just the creation of extra plastic waste that’s the problem – it’s also the decline in recycling. I must admit I also get really annoyed at the articles that keep on pointing out that China is no longer prepared to act as the world’s garbage recycling center as if that’s not a good thing – heaven knows they have enough on their hands with the waste generated here without having any culpability in the rest of the world’s waste.

Medical Waste

According to this article “China has witnessed an accumulated 142,000 tonnes of medical wastes with the national medical waste treatment capacity increasing from 4902.8 tonnes/day before the SARS-CoV-2 outbreak to the current 6022 tonnes/day.” COVID pollution: impact of COVID-19 pandemic on global plastic waste footprint
Benson,Bassey and Palanisami (Feb 2021). And of course all the waste coming out of my room – the uneaten food, the plastic containers, my tissues and paper is all treated as medical waste because I’m assumed contaminated unless proven otherwise.

Problem rather than solution focused

The annoying part of it all is that there is a lot focused on the problem, but not much on the solution to this – we’re well past the 18 month mark and it looks like covid-19 is going to be part of the landscape for a very long time. The World Economic Forum’s Jacob Duer (President and CEO, Alliance to End Plastic Waste)just reiterates all the issues and then says: “As the global economy restarts, aid agencies, development banks, and NGOs should invest in building effective waste-management systems. Beyond helping to keep plastic waste out of our oceans, such systems can provide decent jobs and improved livelihoods, resulting in stronger, more sustainable economies in the long term.” I don’t see much on the ending of waste when the talk is just about investment in waste-management systems.

Tomorrow the second of the 7 covid tests I’ll be having on this leg of the journey – not sure what will happen when I get back to Beijing since things are locking down and it looks like I have another 21 days of (hopefully home not hotel) quarantine / isolation etc.

To end this rather depressing post – a picture of my crochet progress, me vitamin D bathing on my towel at the window where the sun is streaming in and the cloud that looks like it has a silver lining – please don’t tell me it won’t work through glass!

The suck line – choice or tatty towels?

D2. One of the things that has made coming back a little easier have been the many lovely positive messages from my colleagues. I wasn’t sure what to write about today yet, when someone sent me this:

“hope you are all settled in QT hotel. Is there a lot of restrictions? I hope you get good internet, good food, soft bed, enough towel, tile floor, AC, mini fridge, allowances to order in coffee/food and gentle nose swab”

I then rolled out of bed groggily (jet lag meant I’d been up from 4.30am to 2.30am) and went for a shower and contemplated my tatty towel. And had to think of another quote:

“A towel, is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitchhiker can have. Partly it has great practical value. You can wrap it around you for warmth as you bound across the cold moons of Jaglan Beta; you can lie on it on the brilliant marble-sanded beaches of Santraginus V, inhaling the heady sea vapors; you can sleep under it beneath the stars which shine so redly on the desert world of Kakrafoon; use it to sail a miniraft down the slow heavy River Moth; wet it for use in hand-to-hand-combat; wrap it round your head to ward off noxious fumes or avoid the gaze of the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal (such a mind-boggingly stupid animal, it assumes that if you can’t see it, it can’t see you); you can wave your towel in emergencies as a distress signal, and of course dry yourself off with it if it still seems to be clean enough.”
Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

And thinking back to the 100s of messages in my quarantine group, I wondered where exactly the suck-line lies? Personally I don’t think it’s towels. Of my colleague’s list I actually can only tick off two, maybe three items (the food is a bit hit and miss), and I must admit a small twinge of envy seeing another colleague’s quarantine digs photos, but I don’t feel so badly off. There are people who have no internet or aircon and dirty rooms and (in their view) inedible food.

It’s not even the worst accommodation I’ve stayed in. My husband and I, newly married, with an antenuptial contract that included a stereo and bicycle and steel desk as our assets going into the marriage had just moved to São Paulo, Brazil. We went off in one of the notorious Brazilian night buses to attend a wedding of a friend in Canoinhas. After the wedding we had one more night before returning, but since I’d not yet found a job, and my husband hadn’t had his first salary yet, we only had enough money for either dinner or a flea-bag hotel. We should have taken the dinner. We literally were up all night fighting off the fleas, hearing the other bugs gnawing at the bed posts and being startled by the strange noises on the corridor.

The other very memorable accommodation in terms of discomfort was the 10 day silent retreat I did in Thailand where I slept on a stone slab for 10 nights, and had surrendered all electronic media, all reading and writing materials and had a straw mat to and a single sheet to cover me. It poured with rain for 9 of the 10 days and I don’t think I had a dry item of clothing or anything by the end of it. But it was my choice to do this and I gained more than I had to (temporarily) give up.

And then again there are the more than double digits in moves we’ve done over the years. So I thought the suck line probably is choice rather than towels.

I’ve read just enough (or maybe too much) pop psychology and self-help and seen enough TED-talks to understand that (at least in Western culture) we have the illusion of choice and the illusion that it makes the difference. Knowing my readers, most of you will know about the tyranny of choice – basically (apparently) paraplegics and lottery winners return to baseline happiness a year after the event, and once we make a choice not much can induce us to change our minds.

So I think what galls most people about quarantine in China vs other places is not the fact of it but the lack of choice and control over where we land up – we like lotteries, but only when we choose to play.

I’ll end off with some pictures of yesterday’s meals. I looked at all 3, like last year, so that I could decide which to stick with – being semi-sedentary means that’s way too much food, so I’ll opt for one and cancel the rest, at the moment the winner seems to be lunch. There’s nothing wrong with the food – perhaps a little over-reliance on meat – I pity the vegetarians as even the vegetable bits have meat. But we have to remember that China very recently didn’t have the luxury of meat at every meal let alone every month, so I’m sure it makes most of my fellow-quarantine guest happy to see it in these quantities.

Channeling my inner PollyAnna / stoic

Today marks the first day of my 14+7 quarantine in Shanghai before I can return to Beijing. Unlike last year’s 4 star hotel, I didn’t strike lucky on the hotel jackpot this time, so I’m just focusing on what is good:

the room is clean
no carpet (so no icky marks, hairs and other debris)
nice view
Airconditioning
kettle (and I brought tea)
wifi works
I have electricity
nice shower with good stream and hot water
no food orders (I need to lose some broken ankle induced weight)
I brought my new crochet rainbow blanket project – so I’ll have plenty of time to do that
my neighbour wakes up at 4.30am and has a very loud voice so I get an early start to the day
I have noise cancelling headphones (Chopin ballads are very soothing right now)
I don’t need to wear shoes for 2 weeks
I don’t need to wear a mask for 2 weeks except for my testing on days 1, 4, 7, 14
I have more than enough to read and enough work

With Beijing now at 7 cases (out of a population of 20.8 million people – so please don’t be concerned about me living there), I may need to do a further 7 days of home quarantine before returning to work.

So you arrive at the airport, go through your first set of covid tests and forms and checks, pick up your luggage and then get herded into holding pens. They take your passport and fill in your details and once the holding pen has a bus-load full of people you get put on a bus for a magical mystery bus ride that ends up at a random hotel.

If you’re going into quarantine any time soon, a few things I’d suggest packing include Vitamin D (no sunlight for 14 days); your own plate, bowl, knife, fork, spoon, mug, lots of tea, extension cord, nice toiletries/shampoo etc, noise cancelling headphones & earplugs; perhaps food depending on how fond you are of Chinese quarantine “cuisine” – this time I just brought some anchovies in tins (helps the flavour of bland white rice) and bag of quinoa and “risotto de céréales” that I can “cook” in hot water.

Now I’m off to make my to-do list for the day – thanks to noisy neighbour I’ve unpacked and sorted everything and given the room a good wipe down with disinfectant wipes.

Learning but not yet

So I got fired up about learning Javascript and then I had to do some very practical stuff in HTML/CSS that took way longer than I thought it would with considerable troubleshooting. So that’s been parked.

Even as a teacher, when I do stuff I’m learning about learning. Like the fact that when I originally wrote that blog post about customisation of libguides at my previous school, I’d spent a lot of time in that summer getting acquainted with the ins and outs of bootstrap/HTML/CSS. And because I was using it a lot it seemed quite easy. And then with a hiatus of nearly 5 years, I’d forgotten so much I had to almost re-learn it all again. It’s a little bit like my journey with learning Chinese, and forgetting Chinese and relearning Chinese, and taking a break and having to start learning it all over again. The dilettante model of learning and doing is not necessarily super efficient – Adam Smith definitely had a point on comparative advantage.

And one of the big lessons? I spent quite a bit of time doing some fancy bootstrapping for the landing page and then looked back at the guides I’d made at my previous school and realised that there is no point if there is no one to maintain and sustain it (maintenance is a big thing in my thinking – see this post from last year which was one of the most read posts I’ve written). So I reverted to something more standardised – I also believe that constraints are an important thing in creativity.

So, I’ve relearnt some HTML/CSS and managed to make a good-enough header/nav bar and footer that functions, and I’ve re-discovered the nice geeky hideout that is the Springshare lounge with their very supportive community. And I know a lot more about what I don’t know … which is a lot.

And maybe when I need a career change I’ll do some more programming and stuff … I once thought I should become an editor because I have the uncanny ability to glance at pages of text and see the one spelling, punctuation or grammar error, and working through all of this I’m developing an eye for glancing through code … very infant stuff still, but maybe something worth developing.

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Photo by Joshua Sortino on Unsplash

Yay for learning!

Yes it’s been a while. A literal slump in life and learning and librarianship. Including a fractured ankle, surgery and being laid up for a month (2 more weeks to go), just as the worst 3 months of pollution in Beijing drew to a close.

But I’m feeling more energised (amazing what waking up only a few times a night can do vs. not being able to sleep at all) and have started a great new project on revamping our libguides – which has led to the fact that I need to learn me some Javascript – which weirdly has me excited enough to be excited about learning again. Not a lot, not at programmer level, but just enough to do some fancy things like in this AMAZING skills guide from York University. So really I have to thank York University and their amazing librarian Steph Jesper and Springshare for getting me out of the slump.

More after I’ve actually achieved something.

Photo by Ferenc Almasi on Unsplash

Maths and beyond

A few weeks ago one Friday, just before our WEIRD (WAB Extended Independent Reading Day) there was a sudden surge in interest in maths books from our G8 students. Unfortunately a little further questioning revealed that it wasn’t so much math books on demand as some kind of math text very specifically on quadratic equations as the students had a test in the next block but couldn’t spend the WEIRD block cramming / practising spreadsheets but had to in fact borrow and read a book.

The only book that really sufficed unfortunately was Everything you need to Ace Maths. While this type of book is a necessary part of a middle school library collection (we are after all there to meet the needs of our students), it got me thinking about the other wonderful books we have in our collection that were summarily rejected by the students.

For a while one of my favourite has been Giorgia Lupi and Stefanie Posavec’s “Dear Data“. While not considered to be a traditional “Math” book it can help both teachers and students to change their pre-conceived ideas of how data can be represented. A book like this is particularly valuable in encouraging students who see themselves as more artistic and creative to seeing that one of the important parts of numbers is making the information contained in them visible visually. A point well made by Hans Rosling in his memoir “How I learned to understand the world” – a very enjoyable read by the late author of “Factfulness”.

Recently a most wonderful book landed on my desk. Actually the book that motivated me to write this post at all. Power in Numbers by Talithia Williams – it was an order from before the winter break that I’d made to expand the biographies available for our Grade 6 Unlikely Hero unit. Until now “Hidden Figures” (mainly as a result of the movie by the same name) was the main exposure our students had to the idea of women mathematicians. This type of combined biography is so exciting because it finally gives these women the exposure they deserve. And what I mean by deserve is in a big well designed hardcover glossy full colour book. It’s a trend started by “Goodnight stories for rebel girls” but goes far beyond both in form and content. The women are put in context both of the age within which they lived and the mathematics that they pursued. It’s a book that I was reluctant to let go of to be catalogued and one that I had to immediately share with the math teacher who shares my passion for books! For more from the author see her TED talk below.

Asian parents set a very high stake by their children’s abilities in maths. Our students at all ages are often exposed to acceleration in their arithmetic and math skills whether by Kumon or Abacus or other means. As my colleague is at pains to keep explaining, speed and the ability to use equations and “tricks” don’t always equate to true longevity in maths. One series of mystery books I enjoy exposing this age group to is “Red Blazer Girls” – where the boarding school based heroines use maths to solve mysteries. Often the kids with the so called “math smarts” struggle applying their skills to word / problem / real life based situations.

A few other books that I’ve added to our collection recently include “The Wonder Book of Geometry” , “How not to be Wrong” by Jordan Ellenberg, “Maths in Bite Sized Chunks” , “How to Bake PI“. Continuing in the line of trying to encourage creativity in Maths, there is the Mathematical Origami book and for historical context “Great Breakthroughs in Mathematics” and “17 Equations that changed the World” . Finally something for the sports mad – the Full STEAM in sports series such as “Full STEAM Basketball”

One of the Maths Teacher resource books that have been a hit recently is Peter Liljedah‘s “Building Thinking Classrooms in Mathematics. One of the benefits of social media includes being able to reach out to and engage with the authors of these books.

To end up this post, here is our Mathematics resource Library guide – happy to get more ideas of resources and the Maths books recommendations on a great website I was just introduced to today – Fivebooks.com! Worth some exploration as experts share their favourite top five books in various aspects of mathematics.

(Header Photo by Roman Mager on Unsplash)

To Blog or not to blog?

Today is clear up day… that inevitable day near the end of a vacation when I try to set up my bujo (Bullet Journal for the uninitiated – it’s great – even some of my library staff have adopted my bujo habit and it’s one of the books on our WAB-Reads list this year); sort out my desk; my overflowing to-do list (as in delete anything that I’m not likely to get to and reassess if I or anyone else cares); back up all my files and photos and peripherals like phone and watch and ipad (it’s done weekly anyway but this is an extra) and try to yet again tackle my burgeoning email inboxes.

And that’s where the crisis of whether to blog or not comes in. I’m forcing myself to delete my subscriptions to newsletters and blogs and update etc. because if I’m honest I just don’t get around to reading them, and then I wonder if this blog is creating similar angst in my (limited) readers. The things I need to write and reflect on are probably not really suitable for public consumption without getting me into trouble of one type or another, and I’ve lost the capacity for handwriting in a journal and I certainly wouldn’t do both.

A brief hiatus turned into nearly 6 months and I had to find my password to log back in – how sad is that.

I fear part of the reluctance to blog is that it was always a showcase for my work as a librarian and now that job is being (over)shared and encroached upon with my role as a tech-integrator. I feel like I’ve lost a lot of library-mojo, coupled with missing my Singapore ISLN network, and being in a library that is more of a passage-way than a destination.

I spent 6 weeks in the classroom after schools restarted before our teachers were all back as I was one of the first to re-enter after the covid visa stop. It gave me a great appreciation for what teachers do, and understanding of why the library may not always be at the top of their list of things to do each day. It was a great way of getting to know some students better, since I’m no longer in a school / school section where weekly/regular trips to the library is normal.

I must also admit that part of my hiatus was that I didn’t feel I had a right to say much in these months of Covid-19. I am still of a very privileged minority. Yes, my son and I were separated from my husband and daughter for 8 months. But as soon as I got my PU letter from China, the Chinese embassy in Bern were absolutely amazingly helpful in getting us through the hoops for a new visa. Yes, our ticket was cancelled and changed and I nearly had a heart-attack when they wouldn’t let us board as we had a “ghost” flight due to the typhoon in Korea on the way back, but we got back safely. Yes, we had to quarantine for two weeks in Shanghai, but our hotel was relatively decent, allowed for deliveries from outside and the staff were lovely. Yes, we wear masks all day every-day, but we’re back at school and the kids are all fine. They really are. Most of them happy even, despite being middle school teenagers.

I was chatting to a friend last night who is in education in the UK and her daughter is also a teacher. Hesitantly she asked me if I thought that we sometimes make it worse for our students with our emphasis on mental health and constant revisiting of things. It’s a good question. Personally I feel that when we got back being reminded of our “trauma” both made me feel guilty (too much work and not enough sleep had been my main trauma) and also took time away from me getting the things done that I needed to do to move on and make things better for myself and my students. It was like a scab that was successfully healing and closing a wound was continually being picked at and ripped off. She said she felt the same, but didn’t think she could say as much to most people around her. That is not to under-estimate the great work being done with people who need help. But too much reflection and not moving forward may not be what we need.

Life here in Beijing has been good, the occasional pollution days excepted. People are sensible and cautious. We’ve had some good hikes, walks, runs. Parties have been cancelled or limited to fewer people spontaneously not because anyone has insisted on it. We had a few extra cases (2) in the neighbourhood and 2 million people (including us) were tested in 24 hours, free of charge, with the results back in 24 hours.

Even just putting these thoughts into words has been good – because it makes for some actionable points. So maybe this blog will remain for my professional growth for now. I have a lot to be thankful for in the past year.

And here’s my book overview for the year.

Hiatus

I’m not blogging and it’s for a reason. I’m still trying to clear out the detritus of a rather busy and stressful year. Most of it spent online. Part of that is to seriously consider each and every subscription that is creating a digital deluge in my inboxes. It’s disheartening as I unsubscribe or delete or just archive things that are great, well written, well thought out but where I just don’t have time to read.

So then I had a crisis of confidence that I’m just one more thing creating other people the same problem, and that’s had me reluctant to write.

I’ve cleared about 700 items from my personal email, and have another 260 to go. Professionally it’s worse with about 900 items unread – many of them emails to myself of things to follow up on, curate, add to libguides, etc. etc. And that’s even after spending time every weekend culling at least a 100 emails at a time – AND it’s better since I’ve moved most of my communications with colleagues to microsoft teams.

Right – to make this worth your read – here is a link to the Summer Guide that I created with Stephen Taylor. It’s a reminder to our families of the many and rich resources we have and the fact that they continue to be available over the summer.

I have a list of things I want to blog about when I’ve cleared my mind and other clutter in my life, until then – a happy restful summer.

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Not only quarantine

Medical Waste

Problem rather than solution focused

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