Community High School

Nat Powell

??!http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1173/1402061227_cbcbaff58b_m.jpg! %Community’s new media specialist, Nat Powell, hangs out in the library with our own Richard Glaze. Photos by Allison Correll%??
On his first day as a media specialist at Community, Nat Powell attached a projector to his laptop and parked it in front of the library’s computers. Typing up an assignment, he asked each member of his newly assembled forum to send him an email containing his or her name, interests, and how their first day of school went. A nearby bulletin board was already covered in slips of paper listing adjectives meant to fill in the blank, “Forum is…” scrawled across its top. As Powell combs through his inbox after the students had left, he explains that the assignment was meant to get everyone’s email addresses in order to communicate with them during the year, but in an interesting way.

Having received the Master’s degree in Library Sciences required for employment as a librarian as recently as 2006, Powell has entered the field relatively late in his life. Much of the current Library Sciences curriculum focuses on mastery of the Web, teaching future media specialists how to work with material that “looks reliable, but isn’t,” such as unverified Wikipedia articles or Googled papers of self-proclaimed scholars.

“A lot of people know how to use it in the sense that they can get to [the information],” Powell says, but they can’t necessarily tell whether it is correct or not.

Powell was born and raised in Portsmouth, Virginia, which he illustrates by pulling up a map of Virginia on Google, noting that the popular search engine is quick and easy to use if you can determine the reliability of the sources it turns up. Nearby on the map is an icon of Colonial Williamsburg, which he follows the link to. Powell describes taking nearly perennial fields trips there all throughout grade school. He had been interested in books from an early age, but when he went off to college in North Carolina, he decided to study economics, with the intent of getting a job in accounting or finance. He has not, however, used any of his knowledge of market dynamics since. Planning to get the finance job afterwards, Powell joined the Air Force as a commissioned officer in 1968. He had hoped they would meet his request for a job in managing Air Force accounting, but instead they assigned him to be a ground controller, then an electronics officer.

“They probably threw a ball up in the air and based their decision on where it landed,” Powell said.

After training in Mississippi and other US air force bases for several years, Powell volunteered to go to Viet Nam. “That’s where I was able to use the skills that I had learned,” he said. In 1971 he was stationed at the Bien Hoa Air Base, where he guided B-52 bombers to their intended targets using a now-outdating technique of locking them onto radar, noting the target’s location, taking into account factors such as wind speed and the type of bomb in use, guiding the bomber into position, and telling them when to drop their load. Powell pulls up a map of Viet Nam via search engine and indicates the location of Bien Hoa, twenty miles east of Saigon. He links to a picture of modern-day Ho Chi Minh City (formerly Saigon), which shows supermarket chains and luxury shopping malls. “It’s changed a lot,” he says. “It used to be really Third World.”

Powell left Viet Nam after one year and remained in the Air Force as an electronics officer until he retired in 1988. He started taking classes at the University of Minnesota soon afterward, studying education for his bachelor’s degree. Always having liked teaching, Powell had gained experience instructing his subordinates in the Air Force. He came to the University of Michigan when he graduated, where he studied Library Sciences. After finishing graduate school, he began substitute teaching in the Ann Arbor Public Schools, eventually becoming a media specialist at Bryant Elementary School. He wanted to work with more mature students, and so decided to apply for a job at a high school, choosing Community partially because of the smaller size of its media center. “I can run my own library,” he says, with the goal of making it “a place where people can come to read and relax,” and which can “support the curriculum of the school.”

Powell enjoys browsing through YouTube and reading pretty much any genre of book, having recently finished “The Prey,” a murder mystery by Allison Brennan. He declined to Google it.