How long did you teach here?
24 non-consecutive years.
Were you doing anything else within that time?
Yeah. So it was 87 to 95 and then 95 to 06. In between I worked as a receptionist at OSU and I taught five years at San Diego Christian High School and then we moved to Connecticut for three years. I don't think that's going to add up there, but did other stuff in between. And then I came back to LB in 06.
Did you teach at any other school before you taught here?
Yes. I had five years in Salem Public Schools at McNary and then at what is now Parrish Middle School. It was Parrish Junior High at that time. And then I took 12 years and raised kids.
What made you choose to stick to Linn Benton when you came back?
Because I felt like I'd done my best work here.
What kind of work?
Teaching. Writing classes I did. When I came back I actually had a few lit classes. But I liked working with adults, and the real flexibility that I had for time.
What do you like about working with adults?
Well, you relate to them on more of a peer level rather than an adult to kid level. Adult to kid is your K-12 thing. And that's fine. I did it for 10 years Non-consecutively. But I really liked working more on the peer to peer level. Because sometimes I had students who were as young as 16, and many times students who were older than I was at the time.
But one thing I liked about that is sometimes the older adults would come back to school after 20, 30 years of being out and they're scared to death of the younger students. Because “Oh! They know so much and I don't!” And the younger ones are kind of intimidated by the older ones because they look at them as parent figures. And then smoosh them together in a class and have them work together. It was really fun to watch both groups relax and get to know each other.
What made you decide to switch to working in the library?
I am a library aide. I complain about this, but my middle son took 40% of the grandchildren and moved to Lisbon, Portugal, and I needed a travel budget. So I went to the LB website and said, oh, library aide? Yeah, I can probably do that. So here I am.
What part of being a library aide do you enjoy the most?
Teaching students how to use the stuff, the stacks. Often they will have no idea, and our library is organized by the Library of Congress, and most of these school libraries, K-12, and public libraries are Dewey Decimal System. So it's a little bit different.
It's a way of organizing, but students will come in here and their eyes glaze over. So I will help them write down the call number and say, okay, do you want to have an adventure in the stacks, or would you like me to help you? And sometimes they'll say, oh, an adventure, and they'll go off, and five minutes later they come back with their books. And sometimes I go out to the stacks with them, show them how to look, and then they find it. And again, big grins. So that's fun. I like that.
What responsibilities of being a library aide do you think outsiders would never think of?
We've got a lot more in this building than books. And not all of it stems from COVID time. Some of it's from before that. But we also have headphones, various sorts of calculators that we check out. We have charging cords for all kinds of phones, laptops, whatnot. We check out laptops for a day, a week, or a term. We have hotspots available. Some of that predates COVID, but I think it was made more robust during that time when so many students didn't have computers. So the library could loan them out.
I've had students who lived at the end of Nowhere Lane out in Junction City, and at that point, that was before we had hotspots available for them to use. Or they had to do all their computer stuff on campus because they didn't have it at home. So some of that, the equipment got more robust during COVID. And some people tend to like the online stuff. I prefer in-person.
I remember when I was in your class, you told us to look for 20 sources on the paper so we could find the right ones just from the internet alone. It was really fun to hunt for that.
Oh yeah, because if you don't get 20, you don't have enough.
What part of being a library aide do you enjoy the most?
Working with students. That's easy. Books are great. I love books. One of my first interview questions was, so tell us about working in a library. I've never worked in a library, but I love libraries.
What did you enjoy most about teaching here?
I'll go back to something my mother said once. She says, you can't not teach, can you? So it was a place where I could do what I like to do with adults. Interestingly, I'm seeing something similar in one of my young granddaughters. There's a teacher deep inside that girl. And she can't help it.
What's your favorite memory of teaching in your career?
I don't think I can nail it down to one specific thing, but the project that you mentioned about finding different opinions on a topic and then seeing how people argue it, that was one of my absolute favorite things to do. Because on Zoom it was different because I gave you topics. In classrooms it was totally different. And because people worked together in small groups, they came up with their topics and sometimes they had to massage them.
On Zoom I figured the only way that anybody was going to ever get anything done was if I chose the topics and limited them because we didn't have in-class time where we could massage the topic.
So that project in classrooms with groups was my absolute favorite and I loved doing it every single time. Because it was so fun. People could take the same topic, sometimes I'd have two groups in a class doing the same topic and not come up with the same articles. Occasionally there'd be one, but there's a lot out there. And yet they could come up with the same sorts of things about how people argued the topic.
See that was the other thing about that one. I don't care what you think about the electoral college. No room for your opinion is what you had in the instructions. Yeah, no, that's not part of the thing. I don't care what you think about it. I want to know, can you see how people are arguing this issue?
And you could tell the true understanding by finding different articles but the same general consensus?
Yep. That is fun. And I learned a lot because obviously the students would choose things that I wasn't necessarily interested in. I wouldn't go poking around looking for it. But because the students did and because of what they found, it's like wow, that's pretty interesting.
One that was kind of fun, it just kind of hit my brain. At the end I had a kind of a debrief for the whole class. And one class came, one group came back and said, we didn't find two sides, we found three. What were those? Well, it had to do, if I'm thinking it right, it had to do with changing sports teams' names from Braves, Tomahawks, whatever. There were those who wanted to keep it, those who said you must change it, and then you had the native groups who said whatever they said. I can't remember, but there were three, not just two, not just oh we've got to keep it or no you've got to change it. It's like, did anybody ask us?
What do you wish the incoming generation of students would have a better understanding of?
Maybe nuance, which is just what we talked about, that there aren't just two ideas, that maybe there's three or a continuum. Because I think a lot of what younger students will see is, oh, well, I think this, and therefore somebody who thinks differently should be banished. You know, really? You know, maybe talk to each other a little bit, you might be closer on something than you think you are.
And to understand that there's nuance, and talking to somebody doesn't mean that you necessarily agree with them. You don't have to beat each other up. Yes. One person likes tamales, the other one likes saute. I mean, why not like both?
What resources do you see most underutilized by students?
Well, I don't know personally what they're using on online services because I'm not dealing with that. I know that there are some instructors, Robert Harrison in one, who's got stuff out here in the stacks and his students are using them all the time. That I do, probably the books would be underutilized. But then, like, say for the Writing 122 class that you took, books aren't going to help us much because of what we're doing. And we've got 10 weeks to do it. We don't have time to, you know, have 42 books. It's enough to try to find 20 articles that are 500, 800 words long.
Yeah, I did really love the book you picked for your class, the writing instructions one, especially the section on decorum, which you can't find those tips anywhere else. Those instructions don't exist on the internet. I still go back to that book.
Good, good, good. There you go.
What's your favorite resource at the LBCC library?
Favorite resource? Oh, good grief. Well, what do I use most now? I use the stacks, the books. But I'm also a patron at Albany Public, so there's that.
But the other thing that I found is really fun is that we're part of the Linn County Libraries Consortium. So all of the Linn County libraries are all with us. So the other, I mean, we can use them. I mean, if you're a student, you can use them. Or if you're a patron at, say, Albany Public.
So let's say that, okay, so the other day I wanted a book that I knew was at Albany Public, but I didn't have time during their open hours when I could go get it. So I put a hold on it while I was at home through my Albany Public account and had it delivered here.
So then I picked it up, and then, of course, I had to check it out as though it were an Albany Public book. But that's fine. We can do that. And if I want, I can just return it back there, or I can return it here. It doesn't matter. It'll get back there. We have people all the time who use that service, and that is really cool.
Yeah, I had no idea about that.
So when you're on the library website, you can choose where you want to look for it from. If you want to look for it just from LB Library, you can check that. Or if you want the consortium, you can go that. Now, those are going to be more perhaps general knowledge books. I mean, I've gotten cookbooks and stuff from Sweet Home. So that is a really good service, just keep it in mind.
Do you have any ideas that could help make the incoming generation of students more avid readers?
Oh, if they learned how to read when they were in first grade. It's interesting because I look at my own kids, and they're all adults with their own children, some of whom are adults. The eldest was reading Tolkien independently when he was 10. The middle one, and I don't really understand how this worked, but of course he could read, but he had trouble tracking along a line. So he would read along and then backtrack and read along and backtrack. And so that always hindered his reading. When he was working on his master's degree, he finally figured out how it worked best for him: kind of skim the reading, go to class, and then go back and read in depth. So that helped him
.
My youngest, he was read to from infancy. Obviously he read all the way through his time here and he has two associate's degrees that he keeps saying, why can't I turn it in for a bachelor's? But he will do most of his reading online rather than in a book. But that's personal preference, and it's also lifestyle. He takes his kids to the bookstore. And they'll do bookstore runs, and they'll come home with that.
How do you hope to impact the lives of the students you taught and those you've assisted in the library?
Well, sometimes just talking to somebody like you a couple, two, three years afterwards is helpful to know that, okay, that worked. It worked there. Would it work again? So those kinds of things keep doing what worked.
In the library, well, again, teaching them how to use the source, the resources, how to show them how to use the stacks, read the website, how to, I don't know, help them to be empowered to use the library on their own. One of the student health guys and I were talking this morning about how many students coming in don't know how to do stuff and they don't know how to figure it out on their own. Yeah. It's like they've had this little umbrella over them their whole lives. “Help me, I couldn't possibly do it myself.” Yeah, you could.
Pam McLagan, “Pam”
Occupation: Library aide #2
Age: Adult
Hometown: born and raised in Corvallis, went to high school Estacada
Family: Married 55 years, raised three boys, adopted a 29 year old daughter (Phd student at osu) and ten grandchildren between 6 and 20 years old.
Education: Masters degree in interdisciplinary studies
Years at LBCC: 24 teaching, 2 years as library aid.
Before teaching at LBCC:
Classes he teaches at LBCC: Literature, Fiction, Writing 115, 121, 122, 123, 214, 227
Other Interests: Quilting, gardening in ten minute bursts
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