Welcome to Stay Curious, my foray into blogging about, as the tagline says, books, critical thinking and librarianship, and whatever else comes to mind as worthy of blogging about.

Why? Well, I’d like to think that maybe, at least a few people might read this and benefit from it. And if nothing else, it gives me somewhere to put stuff that’s in my brain.

Why books and librarianship? Because I’m a librarian. Why critical thinking? Because I’m a librarian. People have the misconception that being a librarian entails little more than shelving books, shushing people, and maybe reading books in between bouts of the two. That’s… a little simplistic.

The fact is, being a qualified librarian requires a fair amount of education – as in, Masters Degree level of education. My own degree is not the coveted MLIS (Master of Library and Information Studies) but rather a Master of School Library Studies — focused more specifically upon being a librarian/educator. That doesn’t diminish the work put into the degree, it simply means that while the coursework is mostly pretty parallel, mine has much more emphasis on education and teaching and working as a school librarian.

Obviously, if you’re earning an MA, that entails a lot more than “how to shelve a book.” And a lot of it has to do with information literacy – how to find and vet information. There is a reason why many public libraries have a reference desk. I’ve worked for a public library as well, and at the reference desk I answered questions as “simple” and varied as figuring out what the title was of a book a patron was trying to find, to fairly in-depth delves into the current happenings with the British Royal Family.

And critical thinking goes hand in hand with that. Part of evaluating information is knowing how to look at it critically and decide if it’s a valid source, what the source’s biases are, etc.

And as an educator, I want to teach people. I want to give them the skills they need to examine their own thinking, and to find information, and, yes, maybe find a good book along the way. I’m a secondary level librarian, so most of the books I’ll be looking at are going to be middle grades-to Young Adult-level in nature. But I might throw in the odd picture book, early chapter book, or adult book. You never know.

That’s it for now, I just wanted to get something down in writing, as that’s a major first step in this sort of venture. And while this first post is a little stream-of-consciousness and not polished or particularly edited, hopefully it gives an idea of what I hope to achieve with this blog, and as I have time to tweak it, it may become a little more elaborate than what you see here.

In any case, welcome, and I hope you’ll stick around for awhile to see what happens next.