Library Magazines

The school librarian sent out a reminder today that it’s the time of year to consider renewing periodicals for another year. She asserted in her letter that many of the periodicals are never used.

Among the three on the chopping block are The New York Times (for around $400 a year), the Economist (about $120/year) and the New Scientist (about $125/year). A lot of the other titles are scientific or literary or news titles.

The proposed replacements include Teen Vogue, Wired, Popular Photography, Sound and Vision, and similar right-brain, teen-oriented titles.

I’m not opposed to the new titles, really. Some of them are substantive. Others are intended to appeal to our growing teen girl population.

But to me, it’s also an indication that books and magazines are fading from our school’s public consciousness. I used to photocopy two or three articles a week for my classes. Now I put the first few paragraphs of a story on the class wiki, and a link to the article on the website. It’s free, in a sense, to both school and library: the library isn’t paying for the subscription to the magazine and the school isn’t paying for the paper or the wear&tear on the photocopier.

But this isn’t a sustainable model, either. Without subscribers to the paper copies, the websites may cease to exist. A whole generation of kids are falling out of news-reading habits because the teachers used to the old means of gathering news don’t understand the new models. And the magazines are vanishing from the shelves.

Thirteen years ago when I started teaching, the ten eighth graders probably got fifteen or sixteen magazines a week— sports illustrated, mostly, but Newsweek and Time, and even the New Yorker (Once a sister subscribed her brother to Playgirl as vengeance for some Christmas-vacation practical joke).

Now there are none. And my experience of student awareness of the news is that it has gone away. It’s all Facebook and social media and Skype and cellphones. It’s a profound lack of curiosity about the world outside the extant-expanding social networks they’re forming.

I take some comfort in knowing that my own political, economic and technical awareness didn’t really start until High School. Maybe there’s still hope for my kids.

But I wonder if my old school will replace the magazine racks soon with a line of computer terminals.

The Perils of Real Sex-Ed

One of the joys/perils of working at a boarding school is that kids will ask you — often — for sex advice. It’s something that stirs their curiosity — and other body parts — quite frequently. And they’re still spouting bad information to each other, years and years after I learned that many of these playground adages were false. We do our teens in America a disservice by not providing good sexual information in a consistent way.

But when, as an adult, in a dormitory late at night, I get asked questions about sex… hooo boy. How does one balance one’s responsibilities to the parents and to the school — those want to be the ones who provide the information, and then don’t — with one’s responsibilities to the students (and their future sexual partners)?

At the beginning of the year, I tend to err on the side of caution, and remember my responsibilities to the school and parents more closely and carefully. As I learn the students’ attitudes and build a ‘case file’ on each of them, I tend to open up more, and provide snippets of data in an appropriate way. Once, for a very complex kid from a very repressive culture coming out as queer, I bought a book as a graduation present.

There has to be a better way.

As a school chaplain, I suppose I should be in favor of abstinence programs of various sorts. But I’m not, really. For one, from what I’ve seen, they substitute fear for information, and this is never a good thing. For another, they portray one very narrow and (frankly) theological point of view about sex. And finally, in their rush to talk about how wonderful marriage is, they neglect to teach the communications and intimacy skills that married couples need in order to stay married happily and successfully. Which (for better or worse) should include frank talk about sex.

That all is the easy part — saying it should be different. But when one kid asks a question, and you answer frankly… and then host of other kids start appearing to ask their questions… well.

I can’t imagine requiring anyone to accept that as part of their official job description.