A Web of Courage and Courtesy

Susan Brown (mindspring@polk.ga.net), media specialist and Webmaster at the Westside Elementary School in Cedartown, GA, recently found herself in a situation shared by educators across the country. How would she introduce a state-mandated character education program into the curriculum of the school's K-5 classrooms? The program required 10 minutes daily to study good character traits such as honesty, loyalty, compassion, and courtesy.

Diligence at Work: When character education programs are implemented in schools, there is typically a heavy demand on the library to provide books on the subject. However, resources listing relevant titles are hard to find. At Westside, teachers on the Character Education Committee had already designed a teacher's guide. Accordingly, Brown used it as a building block and went to work identifying books for the committee on different character traits. Identifying material for the character-education bibliography was no piece of cake, she says, but, inspired by the program, she persevered.

Creativity in Action: To expand her list, Brown posted a call on LM_NET, the online discussion list, asking for more titles on character-related topics. Her efforts resulted in Westside's "Character Counts!" page, with brief bibliographies for 27 traits, and heavy traffic from teachers, public librarians, and media specialists all scrambling to find character-education books for their own communities.

A Community Project: The "Character Counts!" page has been a success for both the school and the program. "My teachers think it's awesome," says Brown. "Of course they're a real supportive bunch. My assistant principal came to tell me how nice it was, and was interested in knowing how in the world I came up with all those titles."

Finally, in the true spirit of character education, Brown says that the project taught her "that people on the Internet cannot be takers only-they must give back if the Internet is to continue to fulfill its promise."