It's Ada Lovelace Day!

Ada Lovelace

(photo from Wikimedia Commons)

It's Ada Lovelace Day, an international blogging celebration of women in the sciences and technology that is named for the person often considered to be the world's first computer programmer (see Wikipedia article).

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For my contribution to the celebration, I would like to recognize Sonja Gonzalez, who is currently Director of Technology for the Oyster River School District in New Hampshire. This district was recognized by Offspring magazine as one of the 100 top school districts in the U.S.

Sonja Gonzalez, going places

When I worked with Sonja, we were in a much smaller and less recognized rural K-8 school in Fremont, New Hampshire. She was Director of Technology; I was the School Library Media Specialist.

I want to tell you about what a difference Sonja made to the staff and students there.

Sonja did what an ideal technology director should do--she kept up with the latest changes in her field and used whatever means she could to funnel those new technologies into our hands. As every teacher knows, having the technology (say, laptops for all of your students) is meaningless if you don't know what to do with it. Sonja taught us how to use equipment and software to make better learning experiences for our students. She led workshops, made learning opportunities available to us both on- and off-campus, and was a model user of technology herself.

She tirelessly researched grants and wrote applications for funding, greatly expanding the possibilities in a school where money was always scarce. By the time she left, classrooms had computer workstations, access to portable laptop labs, and a greatly improved stationery computer lab.

Every teacher knew how to use technology to enhance their teaching and simplify the record-keeping chores that take up so much time in a teacher's day.

It was because of Sonja that I was able to "fly" a fourth grade class to Shibuya, Japan via Google Earth, as an introduction to a book set there (see The Librarian as Travel Agent). Sonja also introduced me to blogging, and here I am, 2 blogs and over 1200 posts later! (She also introduced quite a few of us staffers to the art of making sushi during a memorable how-to luncheon held in the library, but that is probably a story for another time).

For all that she did for me, and for our school, faculty, and students, I would like to send her a big

Thank you, Sonja!

You are really making a difference!

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I would love to hear about women in science and technology who have made a difference in your life. Just leave a comment on this post.

Read more about Ada Lovelace Day and find other bloggers taking part in the celebration.

The Last of the Baby Blankets

While living in Clovis, New Mexico for the last couple of years, I attended weekly knitting sessions with a wonderful group of women. Although I always called it a "knitting group," everyone but me was actually an accomplished crocheter and I was often the lone knitter.

I loved being with those women, who represented literally hundreds of years of living experiences.

One tiny woman had raised her several children on a ranch with her cowboy husband, baking big batches of fresh bread every day in the oven of a wood stove and working out in the fields; another had joined the military when she was only 19 and had traveled the world; another was from Germany and had relatives who had terrible experiences during World War II. One of the sweetest people there had suffered a debilitating stroke in her early twenties, but had gone on to raise her large family after learning to walk and talk again. Another woman was an accomplished target shooter and ham radio operator; and another, now confined to a wheelchair, had wonderful stories to tell about the freedom of her childhood days when she dressed in overalls and ran wild and barefoot on the prairie with her many brothers and sisters. Still another had lived a difficult life of abuse and, after many months, was able to share her experiences with us.

As a New Englander, I found much of their language colorful and unfamiliar. They would laugh at me as I madly scribbled down notes while they patiently explained the meaning of one phrase or another ("Whopper-jawed?" "Out of pocket?" "Splittin' the sheets?")*

Once, just for fun, I asked how many of them had personally killed a snake. More than half of them had done so. Then, on a whim, I asked how many of them had eaten rattlesnake. Almost everyone at the table raised a hand.

I guess there is just something about sitting together, working to make blankets as gifts for newborns, that made each of us open up. We all grew to know each other; sharing our histories and our experiences and our funny stories and, yes, our tragedies.

As will naturally happen in groups of older people, as time passed one chair or another would one morning be sitting empty. We would grieve together for our missing friends and would keep their memories alive by retelling their stories.

I have listened and I have laughed and cried with these women, and sometimes I have had to leave the room and do some deep breathing when they started talking about the latest "truth" they had heard on talk radio. But, even though our beliefs were miles apart, we shared a bond of friendship.

I learned a lot about kindness and tolerance out there on the prairie, where the views were limitless and the sky reached right down to the ground.

This is the last baby blanket I knit with the group. The pattern is Old Shale, one that has appeared on this blog many times before.

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*See Say What? for definitions