Opening Session - David Mas Masumoto

From the initial "Leave no peach behind" quip, through the myriad of images invoked through gentle yet animated readings and stories told, to the lingering taste of precious peach jam, David Mas Masumoto was an absolute delight as the keynote speaker of the Opening Session.

"What is perfection?" Mas asked, reflecting both on the relentless drive for dry test scores that leaves too many real children behind, and the continual push for blemishless fruit that too often leaves flavor behind. It was a grounded observation, befitting him as a farmer/author/artist, and us as an audience, librarian farmers and cultivators of readers and thinkers (at least so we hope!).

"What is information?" was another well-posed question, for which he had an answer that I found myself repeatedly returning to throughout the weekend and these days thereafter. He posits that information is really a story. That facts and things learned really only transform themselves into information when they become linked with an emotion, a memory, and become a bit of a story that then resides within the person. This is what renders it useful, which is really what information is about--something that is useful enough to keep around to be used again at another time.

I found this interpretation of the significance of information, especially in our "information age", very insightful as well as poetic. I immediately thought about historical fiction, and how much more we retain when facts are rendered via a story, especially one with dialogue, rather than straight prose. But I thought also of emotions that are laced into deep scientific study, learning a martial art, or acquiring a new language. All of this knowledge is stengthened when there is a story that matters to the learner about why they are learning it, or that a story evolves out of the learning.

When Mas left us with the aroma and flavor of his organic peach jam, cleverly hidden in small jars throughout the conference room, he cinched the experience into our memories. The information I came away with? That coming together as school librarians, as gardeners of ideas and knowledge and growth, is a wonderful chapter in an ongoing story, and the role of each character is important. Though not new information, it is a critical component, and always worth revisiting, especially in such a delightful manner.