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Jamie Gregory
30 Plays2 years ago
On this episode of National Board Conversations we take a trip to South Carolina to chat with Jamie Gregory. She’s a National Board Certified Teacher from Greenville, SC. We talk to Jamie about the importance of school librarians. She recently wrote a blog for us discussing the importance of advocating for your school librarians, and offers some tools to help with advocating for your school one!
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Transcript
00:00:00
Speaker
What's up everyone?
Guest Introduction: Jamie Gregory
00:00:01
Speaker
On this episode of National Board Conversations, we take a trip to South Carolina to chat with Jamie Gregory. She's a National Board Certified Teacher from Greenville, South Carolina.
Advocating for School Librarians
00:00:09
Speaker
We talked to Jamie about the importance of school librarians. He recently wrote a blog for us discussing the importance of advocating for your school librarian and offer some helpful tools to help you with advocating for your own. It was a really fun talk and without wasting more of your time, here's my conversation with Jamie. Hey Jamie, how you doing today?
00:00:28
Speaker
Hi, I'm great, thanks. Oh, thanks for taking the time to talk to me. I'm happy to talk to you. So can you give us a brief introduction to yourself, what's your current role, your job, and where you at? Sure. So I am currently a high school librarian in an independent school in the upstate of South Carolina, in Greenville, South Carolina. My first eight years in education, I was actually a classroom teacher. I taught English and French, mostly English.
00:00:57
Speaker
And then this is my ninth year as a school librarian. And it's my second year in the school where I'm at right now. Oh, wow. That's pretty cool. Speak two languages. Do you speak any other languages? No, and I really don't lead with the French thing because it's been so long.
00:01:21
Speaker
I've heard it, I've heard it. So can you share why you ended up going into becoming a teacher and getting into education?
Jamie's Journey into Education
00:01:28
Speaker
Yes, I'm one of those people who always wanted to be a teacher. I played school since, as long as I can remember, when I was teeny tiny, I had a chalkboard. I had a little grade book. I had everything. Oh, so you were just all about it. Yeah, I was all about it from the beginning.
00:01:49
Speaker
So why did you end the pursuing board certification?
Board Certification Benefits
00:01:53
Speaker
Well, there's a lot of people in South Carolina who have the certification because at the beginning of the whole process, many years ago in my state, it was a $10,000 stipend on top of your regular salary. And so that's probably why a lot of people in South Carolina at least have pursued it, if not achieved. And of course it was the 10 year certification. And at one point the district where I was
00:02:22
Speaker
would pay for the application fee. So just throughout my years in public education, I just knew so many people who went through it and achieved.
00:02:32
Speaker
And it was just something that I would kind of think about off and on again, but then I got into thinking about becoming a school librarian. And so I pursued a master's of library and information science, and I knew I couldn't do both. So once I was done with that and had been working as a school librarian, then I just kind of thought, okay, I'm going to do this now. So it was just kind of a matter of just taking the plunge.
Advocacy Tools for Librarians
00:02:56
Speaker
Nice. So how did going through that, how did going through board certification help with your role as a teacher and a librarian?
00:03:03
Speaker
It's actually, I think, one of the most useful things a school librarian can do to advocate for their role in education. Because you're not just saying, oh, I buy books or oh, I play on book contests and things like that. Like you're actually showing proof, evidence that you are an instructional partner in a school. So it's a very powerful advocacy tool, I think.
00:03:30
Speaker
Yeah, and the piece you wrote for us on our blog talks about librarians advocating for themselves. Do you have any other suggestions or strategies that librarians could use to advocate for themselves? Well, basically what all of us try to do every single day is collaborate with other teachers. We don't want to just sit in our own little bubble.
00:03:52
Speaker
and plan things to do on our own. So we're always trying to work with other people. And I know a lot of us are always trying to tell other people what we've done to collaborate with teachers that's worked, what they like, what helps them. So that's definitely a very big piece of it. Another thing that can work is asking to sit in on meetings with administrators.
00:04:17
Speaker
And if you just offer ideas to them, they often, it's not like they come from a bad place and don't want to work with you. They just truly don't know what you can bring to the table. So offering to sit in on meetings really helps. So that's very helpful.
Challenges in Librarianship
00:04:35
Speaker
What do you think led to the decline in librarians across the country? I mean, there's been a problem, again, across the country and across the world. What do you think led to the decline of that?
00:04:46
Speaker
I think part of it is, especially after COVID, a lack of funding. That's always an issue in lots of places even before COVID. And again, a misunderstanding of the profession. 20, 30 years ago,
00:05:06
Speaker
maybe that you could just have been anybody and they would put you in a school library. So if people have the misconception that, oh, well, we can just have someone sit in that library if all they're doing is checking out books, well, anybody can do that. Then that can lead to a lot of jobs being eliminated, the positions being eliminated. So definitely a misconception of what it is that we do
00:05:34
Speaker
And you know the lack of funding can kind of tie into administrators seeing value in you in your position in the school if they see how much of an instructional partner, you are, then they won't want to let that money go.
00:05:49
Speaker
And you in your piece you discussed all the lessons and things, or some of the lessons and things you've done together to make sure your value at your school. You know you currently a journalism teacher, something near and dear to my heart as a journalism major in college.
Importance of Media Literacy
00:06:03
Speaker
Can you talk about the role, can you talk about the importance of media literacy in today's day and age, especially with all the misinformation going on out there.
00:06:13
Speaker
Yeah, that's such a loaded question. It's definitely something I think that school librarians have always tried to touch on as we collaborate with teachers and students. But of course, you know, with the rise of technology and social media, it's just become more and more of an immediate need. And I think part of the problem is that people often think
00:06:35
Speaker
media literacy. I think they they misunderstand the word media. We just mean information that's not in print format but people hear media and think news media and of course that has been misinterpreted so badly in the past few years but even even before then. So I think part of it is just telling people no this is what we mean by media literacy just can students interpret images they see in in
00:07:04
Speaker
or images, film, music, ads, whatever. And so a lot of us try to do a lot of lessons like that. Also, I pull my journalism students and the results aren't surprising. They get everything from anything that is not print, right? Information. That's the world we live in, right? Yeah. And that's fine. I tell them, I'm like, that's totally fine. That's what you do. And that's kind of what we're
00:07:34
Speaker
creating now that kind of world. So we can't just talk about books in print format. That's not teaching them anything that they could actually use in real life. No, so that's like a debate that goes on is an audiobook actually reading. What do you think? Is an audiobook reading?
00:07:52
Speaker
Absolutely. Absolutely. Yes.
Strategies to Increase Librarian Numbers
00:07:55
Speaker
Yes, because it it's definitely involves a little bit of a different skill set, but it's definitely still reading. Yes. Okay. Okay. So library, your library and we want to get library numbers up across the country. What do you have any ideas what we could do to increase those numbers?
00:08:13
Speaker
I think one useful tactic is for people if just to try to find out whatever area you live in try to find out if your local school districts have certified school librarians in your local schools. And if they don't go to school board meetings i'm i'm hoping to go to a school board meeting next week to talk about book censorship so.
00:08:37
Speaker
Go there, talk and just give some talking points, kind of like the stats I pulled from my blog post, just showing why they're important and why they're needed. That's helpful. Using the local newspapers to write an editorial. Contact your local lawmakers and ask them to sponsor a bill or something like that.
00:09:02
Speaker
Thank you, thank you. All right, so on this show, we like to get to know our MBCTs outside of the classroom a little bit. So I'm gonna ask you three questions to get to know you a little bit more on the personal side.
Personal Insights and Traditions
00:09:13
Speaker
So here we go. First one is what restaurant or home recipe recommendations do you have? What restaurant or what? Home recipe recommendations do you have?
00:09:26
Speaker
Oh, home recipe. Well, we're, my family, we celebrate Christmas and on Christmas day I make a standing rib roast and I'm pretty sure I would get kicked out of my house if we didn't have that. So definitely, there's so many recipes out there for a standing rib roast. My kids love that. I also, I would eat Greek.
00:09:48
Speaker
food every day of my life if I could. So anything Greek. Nice. Greek food. That's interesting. That's not something you hear every day. All right. If you had a lifetime supply of the last thing you bought, what would it be? Well, I think the last time I bought anything, I was on my weekly grocery store trip. So it was probably green grapes. Listen, the lifetime supply of groceries is amazing. Yeah, I think that's what it was. Yeah, especially now. Especially now.
00:10:16
Speaker
All right, last one. What's the worst physical pain you've ever felt? Oh, the worst physical pain? Okay, this is probably cliche, but childbirth, I have two children. I can't relate, but I've heard it's pretty painful. Yeah, they're not, no one's wrong if they say that. Yeah, well, how old are they?
00:10:43
Speaker
Our older son is in college. He's 20 and our other son is an eighth grader. He is 14. Well, thank you Jamie for taking the time to talk for me. This was a lot of fun. I'm glad we could do it.
00:10:59
Speaker
You're welcome. Sorry about my internet. What a fun conversation.
Conclusion and Thanks
00:11:02
Speaker
I want to thank Jamie for taking the time to chat with me. She offers some helpful tips to help you with your school librarian. Be sure to check out her blog. I'll link to it in the show notes. And thank you for taking the time to listen to National Board Conversations. This is Eddie Santiago signing off until next time. Bye, everyone.