Recently, contemplating a potential move, I asked my twelve-yr-old what was crucial to him in a home. He only had one requirement: "within walking distance of a good library." His definition of a good library did include a lovely selection of books, but he was also concerned that the library should offer activities. "Libraries are for making," he said, quoting the blurb on the cover of our library's activity calendar and referring to the Maker movement.
Our library offers a youth program called STEMpunk every Wednesday night, after dinner. STEM stands for Science, Technology, Engineering and Math and is a big honking deal in the world of education right now, with a large amount of grant money available and lesson plans exploding all over Pinterest.
My children just love it. The firstborn sets the tone, maybe; mine was obsessed with physical science and anything related from the earliest of ages (his first word was not "Mama" but "wheel") and so we have always had interesting STEM stuff going on in our house for the other siblings to be inspired by. Because my children are all such suckers for anything STEMish, nearly every Wednesday for more than a year, not including summer, this twelve-yr-old and his siblings have trekked from our neighborhood down between the Hudson River and the Governor's Mansion, across Empire State Plaza, into downtown Albany to visit the children's room at the public library there.
The walk itself is inspiring and I think it was on these walks that I decided city aesthetics can be just as astounding as those of an ancient mountain vista. Often we walk through rallies just leaving from their day beseeching the state government, and sometimes there are concerts or festivals by the water. Today on the walk over, it was unusually warm, and we saw a young man painting en plein air.
Wednesday night STEMpunk at the library is such a staple of my boys' sense of their calendar that they have turned down extracurriculars that conflict, convinced friends from other counties to attend, and scheduled their one other weekly activity to take place in the same room just before STEMpunk starts.
My household is responsible for the attendance of every child in this picture except one (but my kids have made friends with him after seeing him at STEMpunk so frequently). And that's not half of the children we have brought to this event, across the months.
Our library offers a youth program called STEMpunk every Wednesday night, after dinner. STEM stands for Science, Technology, Engineering and Math and is a big honking deal in the world of education right now, with a large amount of grant money available and lesson plans exploding all over Pinterest.
My children just love it. The firstborn sets the tone, maybe; mine was obsessed with physical science and anything related from the earliest of ages (his first word was not "Mama" but "wheel") and so we have always had interesting STEM stuff going on in our house for the other siblings to be inspired by. Because my children are all such suckers for anything STEMish, nearly every Wednesday for more than a year, not including summer, this twelve-yr-old and his siblings have trekked from our neighborhood down between the Hudson River and the Governor's Mansion, across Empire State Plaza, into downtown Albany to visit the children's room at the public library there.
The walk itself is inspiring and I think it was on these walks that I decided city aesthetics can be just as astounding as those of an ancient mountain vista. Often we walk through rallies just leaving from their day beseeching the state government, and sometimes there are concerts or festivals by the water. Today on the walk over, it was unusually warm, and we saw a young man painting en plein air.
Wednesday night STEMpunk at the library is such a staple of my boys' sense of their calendar that they have turned down extracurriculars that conflict, convinced friends from other counties to attend, and scheduled their one other weekly activity to take place in the same room just before STEMpunk starts.
My household is responsible for the attendance of every child in this picture except one (but my kids have made friends with him after seeing him at STEMpunk so frequently). And that's not half of the children we have brought to this event, across the months.
Every week I leave grateful for the librarians who are willing to let my children invade their space to make mistakes, take chances, and get messy, modeling for them that yes, that is the way science really is. Though I was glad every time I heard a librarian say, "What would happen if . . . " and "Can you really . . . ?" and "Whoa, how did you that?" or, "I'm not sure if that will work. Test it!", I'm not sure I knew quite how good we had it with these librarians until there was a substitute in one day and I overheard her scolding one child for doing an admittedly questionable project he had been taught to do there by a regularly STEMpunky librarian on another day. We can't have unpredictability in the library, was the stand-in's attitude, and while I understand -- I deeply grok that hyper anxious need for order when you have a herd of other people's kids under your watch -- science is all unpredictability, and so is childhood. When you get science and youth together, the best way it can go is for someone to goof off and others to riff off that, because then you get to see them all pursuing discovery by their noses like a team of foxhounds catching a whiff of the unexpected. If, when making hovercars from household supplies, you can't make space for the off-the-cuff experiment of a ten-yr-old with questionable judgement, then you might as well be calling it a lesson in standardized testing because all you're teaching is how to follow directions. Science is about how to follow questions and we are so blessed that our librarians know the difference.
We all trundled home a bit early tonight, after the children had a good time constructing hover cars from balloons, CDs and wooden spools, adding and removing elements to see what changes that caused. We had saag paneer waiting for us in the crockpot, and a Tolkien read-aloud waiting on the bookshelf, and I was tired after my accidental all-nighter babysitting the pottery kiln. It wasn't our most awesome or exciting STEMpunk ever, just plain good.
But on the way home, and again over dinner, nine-yr-old T insisted proudly that all librarians are sorcerers. They stand at the gates of infinite knowledge, right, doing amazing things?
We all trundled home a bit early tonight, after the children had a good time constructing hover cars from balloons, CDs and wooden spools, adding and removing elements to see what changes that caused. We had saag paneer waiting for us in the crockpot, and a Tolkien read-aloud waiting on the bookshelf, and I was tired after my accidental all-nighter babysitting the pottery kiln. It wasn't our most awesome or exciting STEMpunk ever, just plain good.
But on the way home, and again over dinner, nine-yr-old T insisted proudly that all librarians are sorcerers. They stand at the gates of infinite knowledge, right, doing amazing things?