![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
In what is coincidentally now a series of posts --okay, two in a row-- about Influential Teachers I Have Had, today I want to eulogize my favorite professor from Library School, Dr. Margaret Mary Kimmel.
As you can see from that obituary, she was quite an influential person at large, let alone to her students. She brought her good friend Margaret K. McElderry in to talk to our class once. Not to mention organizing whole peace rallies at the SIS building with her good friend Fred Rogers. What strikes me as curious about this obituary though is that this piece of sentence-- "Friends knew Ms. Kimmel as an incredible storyteller"-- is the only mention in the whole article of what I remember most strongly about her!
She worked magic with the spoken word. She wasn't loud. She didn't do voices. She certainly didn't act physically all over the stage, confined as she was to her scooter most of the time. She just had a way of pulling words together that made you want to listen. I remember one time... well, that was what she said, in fact. All she said was, "In fact, ONE time, years ago, I-- well, never mind that now, it's too far off-topic," and the entire class let out their breaths at once. That was the most I ever NOTICED how palpable the magic got when she told stories, just because it was cut off so suddenly. She roped us so thoroughly in just by STARTING to tell a story.
Naturally, "Storytelling" was one of the classes I actually TOOK from her. Whether I'm any good at it myself is... well, not even debatable. I'm not-- not out loud, not without the written word to fall back on. But that class sure made me APPRECIATE storytelling. She sent us to the Three Rivers Storytelling Festival, which was the Greatest Thing I'd Ever Seen and I swore I'd go to it every year from then on, even though somehow I haven't actually managed to since. Why don't more people seek out plain old storytellers? The closest most people get are stand-up comics. But then, even some stand-up comics are actually just funny storytellers. I saw Bill Cosby live in college, and I noticed that with him-- he wasn't telling JOKES. He was telling STORIES. It adds a depth to it.
My first library job once I had the MLIS was as a long-term sub in an elementary school library. There were three students scheduled for "all-day Kindergarten" (while most of the kindergarteners did a half-day) who had an empty period in the middle of the day, when the "specials" teachers rotated taking them and basically just letting them hang out in their rooms. The times they came to the library they mostly colored and watched PBS, which happened to be showing Mister Rogers' Neighborhood at that time. And one day I heard a different familiar voice coming from the TV. "LOOK GUYS!" I squealed to the unsuspecting kindergarteners. "See that lady talking to Mister Rogers? That's MY teacher! She taught me how to be a librarian!" The kids were neither all that shocked nor impressed by this, and proceeded to continue their coloring. But I was enrapt at least.
As you can see from that obituary, she was quite an influential person at large, let alone to her students. She brought her good friend Margaret K. McElderry in to talk to our class once. Not to mention organizing whole peace rallies at the SIS building with her good friend Fred Rogers. What strikes me as curious about this obituary though is that this piece of sentence-- "Friends knew Ms. Kimmel as an incredible storyteller"-- is the only mention in the whole article of what I remember most strongly about her!
She worked magic with the spoken word. She wasn't loud. She didn't do voices. She certainly didn't act physically all over the stage, confined as she was to her scooter most of the time. She just had a way of pulling words together that made you want to listen. I remember one time... well, that was what she said, in fact. All she said was, "In fact, ONE time, years ago, I-- well, never mind that now, it's too far off-topic," and the entire class let out their breaths at once. That was the most I ever NOTICED how palpable the magic got when she told stories, just because it was cut off so suddenly. She roped us so thoroughly in just by STARTING to tell a story.
Naturally, "Storytelling" was one of the classes I actually TOOK from her. Whether I'm any good at it myself is... well, not even debatable. I'm not-- not out loud, not without the written word to fall back on. But that class sure made me APPRECIATE storytelling. She sent us to the Three Rivers Storytelling Festival, which was the Greatest Thing I'd Ever Seen and I swore I'd go to it every year from then on, even though somehow I haven't actually managed to since. Why don't more people seek out plain old storytellers? The closest most people get are stand-up comics. But then, even some stand-up comics are actually just funny storytellers. I saw Bill Cosby live in college, and I noticed that with him-- he wasn't telling JOKES. He was telling STORIES. It adds a depth to it.
My first library job once I had the MLIS was as a long-term sub in an elementary school library. There were three students scheduled for "all-day Kindergarten" (while most of the kindergarteners did a half-day) who had an empty period in the middle of the day, when the "specials" teachers rotated taking them and basically just letting them hang out in their rooms. The times they came to the library they mostly colored and watched PBS, which happened to be showing Mister Rogers' Neighborhood at that time. And one day I heard a different familiar voice coming from the TV. "LOOK GUYS!" I squealed to the unsuspecting kindergarteners. "See that lady talking to Mister Rogers? That's MY teacher! She taught me how to be a librarian!" The kids were neither all that shocked nor impressed by this, and proceeded to continue their coloring. But I was enrapt at least.
