Tag: Education & Learning

Bank Street Bookstore for Children’s Books

Logo for Bank Street BookstoreThe Bank Street Bookstore for Children’s Books at the Bank Street College of Education has an extensive collection of hand-selected quality books and games for sale. When you are looking for research material, just want to read a good book, or need a gift for a child or an adult, this is the place. Many cities do not have independent children’s bookstores and the selections at other bookstores or large retail stores tend to be quick sale books or those that are related to TV programs or movies.

What makes the Bank Street Bookstore website really special is the wonderful list of 125+ subjects in the left side menu. Unless you have a book in  mind, browsing a website can be a daunting experience. If you are looking for examples in a subject area on which you are writing, this is a fast and easy way to find examples.

With no ideas or looking for ideas, you can quickly find a range of topics such as:

  • Autographed Books, New and Notable, Gifts for Grownups, Gift Cards
  • By age group, Board Books, Toddlers & Threes, Picture Books, Novels for ages 8-10, 10-12, etc.
  • Activity Books
  • Adoption
  • African American Characters
  • The Arctic
  • Armchair Detective
  • Autism/Asperger’s Syndrome
  • Biographies
  • Birds
  • Bread
  • Butterflies
  • Chapter Book Series
  • Clouds
  • Gardening
  • Holidays
  • Math Stories
  • New Sibling
  • Ocean
  • Peace and Tolerance
  • Teasing and Bullying
  • Travel Games and Adventures
  • Writing

Location

Broadway and 112th Street (southwest corner)
New York, New York 10025

Online: Bank Street Bookstore Website

Other Resources Include:

About Bank Street College of Education

Bank Street is a private graduate school offering master’s degree programs in education. It was founded in 1916 on Bank Street in Greenwich Village by Lucy Sprague Mitchell as the Bureau of Educational Experiments. The initial focus was on the study of child development and education. In 1918 it opened a nursery school which is now the School for Children. Bank Street began to train teachers, eventually becoming the Bank Street College of Education. In the 1960s, the Bank Street faculty played an important role in creating the federal Head Start program.

By the 1970s the college had outgrown its location and moved uptown to Broadway and 112th Street.

Academic Technology

When computer’s arrived at the college where I was teaching, the typists were supposed to type on the computer and print onto forms. But the people designing the forms had no concept of how the printers printed—the spacing was wrong and the text was never aligned.

Typists had to type the body of the document in the computer, print it on the form, then put it in the typewriter to fill in the data at the top. This was so time consuming that it was easier to just type the whole document, ignoring the computer. The Academic VP who commanded the design of academic forms, had no understanding of typing or printing and her Assistant VP had no understanding of filling out forms so nothing happened, neither believing it was a problem. This situation went on for years, more than doubling the requirement for clerical staff.

The faculty were then given computers and expected to “keyboard” their own student evaluations but none of them had typewriters. They would do the body of the document, put it on a disk, and take it to a typist to print out and type in the top. This resulted in much confusion about which body went with which top. The typists decided to do themselves again. The faculty used their computers for their personal work and hand wrote student evaluations. This went on for years.

Then the acquisitions department in a rented warehouse on the other side of town, with no contact with academic staff and little with administrative staff, decided it was time to stop buying or repairing typewriters. Computers were cheaper and more efficient. Each department would be allowed to have one for extreme situations where one was required.

As the typewriters began to break down and the academic paper work to pile up, the problem was finally addressed, with the refusal to repair office equipment clearly in charge of the academic process.

A version of this post was written in response to a discussion on the Systems Thinking Forum at Linked-In on personal Aha! moments, 10 July 2010.