Buffy Hamilton's Blog

If you don’t watch and listen to anything else today, make time for this interview with Nobel Peace Prize winning journalist and activist Maria Ressa. Her analysis of how technology has enabled our slide into tyranny and the urgency she advocates for individuals and institutions holding the line as all the safeguards crumble is going to stay with me. I have heard many wise voices the last 100 days, but she distills everything that has been happening through a lens that really gets to the core of...

I am retired from public education and libraries, but I am not retired from fighting for truth, liberty, and justice. Lost in the blitz of outrageous executive orders this last week was the Department of Education whitewashing and rewriting the reality of book bans across the nation, especially in the Southeast. As a resident of Georgia, I saw firsthand how far right groups engaged in guerilla warfare against school districts to ban books. There is still censorship going on in more insidious ...

For the last six months, I’ve had the honor and joy of creating and implementing a reading dog program for our middle school students through the school library media center.  When I first came on board to this school in September of 2022, our principal invited all faculty to submit a grant application for monies available from our school cluster foundation.  While I did a therapy dog visit in the media center at Chatthoochee High (he became a regular fixture and also visits elementary schools!...

Yesterday I had the pleasure of leading reading/literary yoga with 6th, 7th and 8th grade students in our Reading Connections classes.  Students in these classes may be reading below grade level and need extra help growing their skills as readers.  Their teacher used the classic “Goldilocks and the Three Bears” as a common and accessible text for us to practice our skills analyzing and thinking about literature with a focus on these standards:

ELAGSE8RL2: Determine a theme and/or central idea o...

As some of you may know, I retired from public schools here in Georgia last summer because I had completed my 30 years of service and because my dad is undergoing treatment for triple hit lymphoma, a rare variant of diffuse large B cell lymphoma.  In Georgia, you can work as a 49% employee in any public school as long as you stay within the monthly hourly limits established by the state.  I have been working part-time since early September at a metro Atlanta middle school media center; it is a t...

[image error] Photo used with written permission from Zenonas Meskauskas https://www.flickr.com/photos/zenonas/34947565136/sizes/l .

Ten years ago today, I began The Unquiet Librarian blog.   Its hard to believe a decade has passed, but the years have passed in the blink of an eye.  When I began blogging, I simply did it to have a space to reflect on my practice, period.  So many other great librarians were writing and sharing their work, and I thought how fun it would be for me to do so, too.

Ten years...

[image error] Photo used with written permission from Zenonas Meskauskas https://www.flickr.com/photos/zenonas/34947565136/sizes/l .

Ten years ago today, I began The Unquiet Librarian blog.   It’s hard to believe a decade has passed, but the years have passed in the blink of an eye.  When I began blogging, I simply did it to have a space to reflect on my practice, period.  So many other great librarians were writing and sharing their work, and I thought how fun it would be for me to do so, too.

Ten years a...

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In my previous post; I outlined the work we did to:

brainstorm topics narrow our topics conduct pre-search use that pre-search to finalize a topic choice generate questions about our topic using the question lenses chart finalize our research questions and complete an investigation plan/research contract

In this post, I’ll explain how we targeted these skills with our research/inquiry mini-project:

Adding sources to your bibliography in EasyBib. Taking notes with the notecards in your Eas...

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On our third and final day of our Lanier Schools Academy Institute, we participated in a fun and engaging activity that reminded me of the Harvey Daniels written conversation strategies.   Lanier High teacher Brooke Webb and LSTC Rhonda Stroud led us through a variation of the Four Corners learning activity, dubbing ours Five Corners because we had five questions to contemplate in small groups about our district LMS platform, Desire2Learn.  Our essential question was “How can eClass (Desire2...

[image error] Original photo by Buffy J. Hamilton

As part of the Georgia Teacher Keys Effectiveness System (TKES) , the common evaluation system designed for building teacher effectiveness and ensuring consistency and comparability throughout the state, we have an end of year conference with our supervising administrator.  My principal, Mrs. Jennifer Kogod, asked us to prepare a written self-assessment as a springboard for our face to face end of year conference.

I wrote way more than than was required, bu...