I’m at the CoSN Conference in Nashville, Tennessee this week, meeting almost all of my new colleagues at SETDA in person for the first time. This morning’s general session had a focus on Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion. I’m very glad that CoSN is attending to this issue at their event and giving it time right smack in the middle of the event, before brains are scrambled and travel plans interfere with actualities of travel options.

As we were listening to the presentation, a panel of two thoughtful experts and practitioners, their core message about belonging resonated. And I started thinking, as I often do, about the next moves for a room full of IT professionals who will go back to work next week and try to implement some, if any, of what they experienced here.

Keynotes should certainly inspire. They should certainly entertain. But the best ones actually move people to action ¹.

I’d like for this one to have done that.

When, I wonder, will the folks in the audience, myself included, make space to think about how our information infrastructures create/invite/support ensuring that everyone belongs to their school or workplace? When will we attack questions like:

• What are the moves that we can make next week or the week after that can create more belonging in our infrastructure?
• How could we make our LMS or app environments more people-forward and less task structured?
• Where are the excellent examples of this work that we might borrow from or outright duplicate?
• What do the configuration changes, firmware updates, certificate changes and whatever else is the daily stuff of your IT team’s work look like that create more belonging?
• When in a project plan are you attending to building organizational culture while also getting the project done on time? What do those tasks and deliverables look like?

Certainly, keeping bad actors or malicious agents out of our networks and schools is a piece of the work. But building a fence or putting locks on a school building isn’t how we build a place of belonging. It’s a first step.

As I’m still getting used to my new role, it’s the first time in a long time where I’m not directly responsible for a network in one way or another. I’m a steward of other folks who support and steward other other folks. I’m a little removed from the moment. I’ll have to watch that, but I also have to continue to think about the ways that the work I do does create belonging, too. How can I model, or support, or walk the walk of creating invitations and experiences that feel more invitational than confrontational ²? How might those experiences support change to infrastructure in the ways I hope they will?

So as I’m here at the conference this week, I’m wondering about, and looking for, ways to set our infrastructure in ways that support cultures where everyone belongs. Thankfully, I have smart friends wondering about this too. One of them mentioned earlier that we need to ask questions about how we design the access to our networks in ways that feel more invitational than confrontational. I was reminded of my ongoing quest for a filter exception page that feels like a teachable moment rather than a slap on the wrist. I’d love to go to a session at CoSN or somewhere like it where we explore practical tips and moves for creating networks that help people belong.

Maybe you have some thoughts here, Please share your ideas in the comments ³

1. I know a thing or two about this, as I’ve given a keynote or two. I have a frustration with the form, as it’s typically expected to be a one-way transfer of information and experience – which is a pretty crummy way to teach, if you ask me. But that’s another post.
2. As I get older, I wonder sometimes how being skeptical might feel more of the second than the first.
3. Remember comments? I know – SO 2008.

I love that it’s a love story. I like that it’s got a clean beginning, middle, and end.

It’s something to do with words and my brain for a few minutes.

What I noticed yesterday, pretty much by accident, is something that I like, too.

Every Wordle attempt is a two to six word puzzle. Look. Here’s Julia’s from yesterday ¹:

I was going to save mine from yesterday, but I forgot. And now it’s gone. ² I can’t share today’s because maybe you’ve not played today yet. But if you’re playing Wordle – take a look at your board from today. Is it a poem?

If it is, wait until tomorrow (because spoilers!) and share a picture of the grid.

1. She showed it to me for another reason and that’s when I realized that she’d written a poem. A good one.
2. I like that about Wordle, too.

One of the many hot potatoes of library service is library fines. Over the last several years, I had the opportunity to dig deep into what fines do, how a library collects them, and what fines don’t do at all.

On the surface, it would seem that a fine for a late book would change behavior, or encourage someone to behave “better” and return things on time.

Turns out though, like with plenty of other stuff, library fines don’t change behavior in the ways you might wish they did. A while back, the Colorado State Library commissioned a study on the impact of fines and fees. Several other states have done this, too. Fines and fees discourage people from coming to the library at all. They dissuade vulnerable populations from using resources that are designed for them.

But they don’t really encourage people to bring back materials any faster.

When we move to drop fees, there’s always someone who raises the concern that fines and fees teach people how to be better people. It’s necessary, these folks might say, to teach kids a lesson about personal responsibility.

Nah. This isn’t the place or the time to do so. Dropping late fees (and minimizing other charges for the library experience) is one thing we can do to, quite simply, create a better public literacy fabric for those most in need of one.

Drop your late fees, libraries. Do it now. Do it today. While you’re at it, forgive someone who lost a book once. Maybe twice even. Odds are the book wasn’t brand new and maybe no one else wanted to read it, anyway.

Reduce the friction necessary to help someone fall deeply in love with the world of knowledge and information.

At our library, the data we had told us that less, far less, than 1 percent of our patrons were the folks who abused the privilege of using the library. They owed us more than $100 in fees – not because their books were late, but because they took stuff and never brought it back. In some – BUT NOT ALL – of those cases, the folks were nefarious actors. They took the library materials not to use them, but to resell them, or to hide them from others, or some reason other than they were curious. ²

There’s no lesson to teach there that a fine or fee is going to impart. We often do terrible things to vulnerable folks when we think we can be teaching a lesson of some kind. ³

Introducing a child to the universe of ideas and the worlds of wonder isn’t free. There are costs of doing business. One is that books wear out. Materials are sometimes lost. A good book, a really good book, might take longer to read than we’d like it to.

We do not benefit as a society by penalizing the most vulnerable children in ways that teach them to avoid the library. We should be doing everything in our collective power to do the opposite.

Books are not treasures, in and of themselves. ⁴ Book rich environments are the treasures. Access to information is the magic. Specific copies of Harry Potter? Not so much. That fellow who has the next one on hold? Another day or two of waiting won’t destroy his love of reading. Smacking a kid with the righteous stick of Teach You A Lesson just might.

I’ve never met a librarian that wants to be the reason a kid stops reading. But I’ve met plenty who thought they were doing good in the Teaching of a Lesson. I’ve been that guy sometimes.

I, and they, are wrong to do so.

At our library, and at plenty of others where librarians have stopped collecting fines and fees for late stuff, we didn’t see a change in behavior when the fines and fees were dropped. Books weren’t suddenly kept for forever. It didn’t happen. 99 percent of our patrons are kind and responsible and trying their best.

There wasn’t actually a lesson to teach.

So, library and non-library friends – help me help everyone help libraries, in schools, in towns, and anywhere else stop collecting fees that are about being punitive and moralistic.

And don’t fret so much when kids grab a graphic novel. Or listen to an audio book. Or want to watch a movie from the library. But that’s another post.

1. It didn’t hurt that my book club just read Susan Orleans’ The Library Book, and so I had all the twirls about the greatness of libraries in my head at the time.
2. And we should never set policy for everybody considering the least of us. We should write policies that assume we’re all good and fine and thoughtful people.
3. Think about work requirements for public assistance and other ideas that seem smart but are really just mean and far beneath us as a country.
4. I know. I know. Some of your most precious possessions are special books. I get it. But I’m talking about books in general. Shared books. Books for everybody.

1. A tweet from Mike Caulfield that reminded me that the people who don’t know are often the ones who believe otherwise:

"Uh, did you realize GASLIGHT was a FILM from the 40s lol"

What do we call this Dunning-Kruger-like pattern where people think the fact they've recently discovered is not widely known when in fact everyone in the Discourse knows it?

— Mike Caulfield (@holden) December 23, 2021

1. A panel in my new favorite comic slammed the point home:

I’m ending the work year officially today. Taking a week off. But I wanted to write a little reminder to myself that, as I start a new role, and continue in some others, I want to make sure I’m helping people challenge and question what they know, rather than get further rooted inside of it. 

I hope you’re up to something like that, too.

As I’ve previously mentioned, my oldest daughter is a singer. And a strummer. And a musician all around. I catch her voice drifting up the vents from the basement where she hangs out into the dining room that’s been my office for the last couple of months every day when she’s taking a break from her classes. Or, more likely, she takes a break from strumming her ukulele ¹ and singing to attend to school.

As a freshman, she was invited to audition for the upperclass jazz choir at her high school. That’s a big deal. The bigger deal is she was one of two freshpeople selected to join the group next year. Then March happened. But we were looking forward to next year’s choir.

I remember the last thing we did as a family, in a public event sort of sense, was to attend Ani’s choir concert. We sat apart – this was in the early days of “social distancing,” a new phrase at the time – and we listened to some delightful singing.

When you’re hoping your children will embrace something you love and care about deeply, like music, you don’t ever approach them directly about it. You look sideways when they ask about piano lessons, or if it’s okay if they borrow your ukulele. And you never, ever admit that you can hear them when they’re singing and strumming in the basement. If you were to acknowledge the interest too strongly, or at all, you might dislodge her interest.

As a singer/songwriter myself, lapsed at present, I know it’s a thing. A big thing. And high school and college choirs, followed by writing and recording and performing my own songs – those were the moments I was most alive. I can remember almost all of them like they’re still happening.

So I’ve watched the fire she’s laid under music as a very proud father.

I read a note last week on a friend’s Facebook page about a study on COVID-19 transmission and choral singing. The short version is that singing does things to the way that spit and air and possible viral loads can be transmitted extra powerfully by the same diaphragmatic breathing and pushing and exerting that comes from a solidly belted note.

The takeaway from the piece is that choirs, as live groups of performing musicians that others would come to see are likely a dead thing. At least for the next few years as we adjust to the new of whatever we’re in right now.

And it took a few minutes. I was sharing the “can you believe it” with Ani’s mother as we both sort of realized that it wasn’t just singing together at church that was affected.

It was the voice in the basement, the one that drifts up from the vent in the morning when I’m working in the dining room office.

The way I spent my time in high school, the way she was wanting to spend hers in high school, might not be an option. I refuse to accept that right now. But I also know it might be gone.

She’s got three years of high school left. It’s going to happen fast. Faster than clinical tests and whatever warp speed foolishness our current administration has to offer her.

So we’re all healthy and everything’s relatively fine here. But now I’ve got to figure out how to make choral singing work over a network connection. It’s not work I asked for, but it’s something we’re going to have to figure out.

Because, dammit, the music is really quite something.

1. Technically, mine, but she plays it, so I’m ceding ownership.

The singing starts after breakfast, or after breakfast for a high school freshman stuck at home during the Spring of her first year at high school. Some days, I know the song, but plenty of others I don’t. I suspect some of them are of her own creation. As a musician myself, or a lapsed one, at least, I hope that’s the case. While I am initially annoyed by the interruption to my attempt to get into a working mode, I’m always struck by the strength of the voice. Even on the vulnerable notes.

I’ve been paying a great deal of attention to the soundscape of my home and family these last couple of days. Five people engaged in school and work and life (perhaps life should’ve led that list) mark an awful lot of noises, few of which are complimentary.

The other sounds ebb and flow throughout the day – peaking at mealtimes. This is likely due to the fact that my WFH office is kitchen adjacent – on the other side of the pocket door that separates our dining room from the kitchen ¹.

Were I currently conducting an ethnographic study on my family, and perhaps I am, as I seem to be collecting at least some evidence, I would relish my desk perch, as it’s in our kitchen where our children are sharing their most honest selves with each other. Discussing recipes, events of the day, latest found memes and frustrations with school. Bits of songs – both real and parodied – are on audio display as well.

Upstairs, I catch snippets of the courses and conferences and meetings my wife, a high school English teacher, is conducting. I’d love to be a student in her class.

Quinn was given a task by her music teacher to practice the cup song. Yes, that one. She works next to Teagan, who needs silence for her work. So brokering that compromise led to the creation of a studio for Quinn on the front porch – a limited strategy that will fail later this week ² when Spring snow returns to Colorado. But every day is a new day. I’ll deal with that one then.

Were I an ethnographer presently, I’d be curious to unpack the data, but, since I’m actually a library administrator, I alternate between moments of delight, wonder, and profound annoyance. Who need to run the blender that much? Why are all the burps so loud? Why are there burps at all? Is there really a disagreement about every pot to clean and who will make the mac and cheese?

The same voice that burps the loudest is one of the prettiest singing voices I’ve ever heard. But that singing doesn’t come from the kitchen – it drifts up through the basement vents and, with the right resonance, the floorboards beneath my feet. Usually after breakfast. But sometimes other times. Occasionally, the strumming of a ukulele makes an auditory appearance. You can’t force someone to take up music. But when they do, you can certainly beam with pride.

So much right now to see and hear and do. If only we can remember to look and listen and act.

I’m struggling to remember to do all three.

1. Whenever I close the pocket door, I see the giant nail-sized hole in said door anew. Seems as though at least one former resident of this house put a nail through the wall while the pocket door was tucked away in its pocket. And, you know, forgot. I giggle a bit when I imagine this happening.
2. Actually, it fell earlier today, as I was informed that the porch is too “polleny” and there are spiders in the corners. If the Chromebook gets too polleny, she can’t use it for school.

I’m writing this afternoon from my dining room table. It’s the place that I frequently steal for a quick home office morning when I work away from my office or not on the road. For the last two weeks, as we’ve been changing and rechanging and finally closing the physical library where my office is/was/will be again someday, I’ve been making temporary office camp here. Since Friday, it’s been my permanent home (office).

In front of me are a can of compressed air and some silicon lubricant, a wrench and a screwdriver, as this is not just my office but also my workspace for all the home improvement projects I’ve stumbled into over the last week. There are some tax items to deal with, and a small stack of books I’m hoping to get to.

I’m keeping busy with things that used to seem less important but now can help to fill the day. Some of them are essential -but I’m not always sure how important the thing I’m working on is at the moment I’m working on it. Clarity often comes after.

Weekends, the time we use to take breaks from work, are time for more work, and the lines between home life and work life are as permeable as they’ve ever been as my family and I work to figure out what our stay at home time looks like.

We’ve been fortunate. Incredibly fortunate. Both my wife and I’s jobs have changed, not dissolved into thin air. She’s living the day to day of teaching in a time of COVID-19 while I support others to do so and a library figuring out what our library is when it’s not a physical place for people and stuff.

My children have each taken up their various learning experiences. As a family we’ve mapped schedules and planted flags in and around our work spaces. We’ve held a couple of family meetings to reshuffle responsibilities around the house because, for now, we’re all around the house.

I take deeper breaths when I run our weekly errands. Grocery stores and hardware stores and trips for odds and ends of our new routines. We’ve built a gym and an entertainment center in our basement, and we schedule access to those spaces, too, when they’re not doubling or tripling as classrooms or the place-where-the-current-puzzle-is.

Other than the breathing, and the gut checks, and the constant reminders to NOT TOUCH MY FACE, I think I’m coping fairly well. The hobby I seem to have adopted as my mind-occupier for this experience is barbecue, a hobby that feels more discovered than intentionally sought. I was always more of a fan than a practitioner.

Three years ago, my parents announced their departure from Colorado and return to South Carolina as a quick heads up and a request to bring things by the house. The biggest thing was my father’s smoker, which I set out to weather until I was told to use it or lose it by the aforementioned teacher in our household.

A first attempt (smoked try tip and pork tenderloins) turned into reading and research on something I understood from a distance but had never bothered to learn. Hickory or mesquite? When to let things alone. How to salt cure a cut. All trivia for me until recently.

When I was a boy, probably nine or ten, my father became a judge on the North Carolina pig pickin’ circuit ¹.  This meant weekends were spent traveling around the state, staying in a cheap motel room on a Friday or Saturday night to spend the following day sampling the wares of serious barbecue people. I’ve eaten all the slaw and tried every variation of pork there is to try.

And I’m finding that, right now, tinkering with and fine tuning my recipe and process are ways of remembering my heritage, occupying my mind, entertaining and feeding my family, and finding escape, if just for a little while, from the news of the virus.

Next to me as I write right now is a bowl of my latest perfection. Yesterday’s 15 hour pulled pork mixed with a slaw of cabbage, a little Duke’s mayonnaise, and an Eastern North Carolina vinegar sauce I’ve been fiddling with these last few smokes. If it isn’t a bowl of memory and safety and nostalgia, I don’t know what is. And a bowl of safety is a welcome comfort.

As I think about what tinkering’s left to do, and what’s going to come after the right now that’s at least a month of staying at home, I can see a future of explaining these recipes to my children, and perhaps to theirs, and one day inviting friends and family back to the house to celebrate together. I’ll work on my sweet tea skills, too, to best prepare for those parties.

Peggy Noonan, in her column from last weekend, wrote, “How fiercely we love people we don’t know we love.” I think this might be true of memories we’ve never bothered to unpack. Or forgot to. Or just didn’t notice or mark as significant. Until my first taste this afternoon, the one that brought back memories and comfort, snapped my memories to the forefront, I had forgotten about plenty of the times with family and friends that we dined together around the remains of a pig. I loved those times, and those people. Still do.

I’m trying to pay close attention to what I love and didn’t realize and to lean into those people and things in ways that help both them and I see things. I’d rather catch love in the moment and work to create moments where that love is acknowledged, if even just a little bit.

I hope you’re noticing your loves, too.

Until next time. Your pal,

Bud the Teacher

1. The clinical Wikipedia definition linked here is a good description of the event, actually. Most of the ones we were involved in were fundraisers for various charities. Giving money never tasted so good.

As I do when I see snow, I tweet such:

Snow.

— Bud Hunt (@budtheteacher) February 3, 2020

I’m not sure why, except as a moment of joy for me, a declaration that I see magic in the world as tiny ice crystals float their way down to earth.

This morning, Katie sent along a memory of our shared experience with snow, a poem I love to read whenever I can to whomever I can: Taylor Mali’s “Undivided Attention.” She followed it up with an essay by Seymour Papert. As she wrote:

https://t.co/bsd9Ln0cEE

I feel this thought from Seymour Papert and Taylor Mali's "teach like first snow falling" are both turning the teeth in eachothers' gears

— Katie Henry (@KatieHenryDays) February 3, 2020

And I went looking for the connection. As I thought, I realized that one, the poem, was about what it meant to embody love in the front of the room, to captivate through magic and wonder. And the other, the essay, was about discovering something one loves, and finding ways to connect that precious thing or idea to other ideas, to use magic and wonder to make sense of the world.

Then I remembered where I had heard that idea before. I wanted to rehear the video, but my old post no longer had the right link. It took a minute, but I found it again:

That entire series of interviews is worth your time. They’re chock full of fine moments like that one.

1. There was a dusting last week, a quick flurry here and there. Apparently, these magical moments of quick snow don’t count.