Mario Update

Mario visited the library today with his class. The students had three tasks to complete. 1) Check out, renew, return books, making sure to have three books for the next week. 2) Complete vocabulary activity from class the previous day. 3) Post on student blogs and/or visit the Skirball Center's website to preview exhibits for an upcoming field trip. During this independent work time, the teacher conferenced one-on-one with students to review their reading progress so far this year and to make goals for the remainder of 8th grade. I helped kids choose books to read.

I was walking by Mario's reading conference when I heard the teacher say, "Congratulations, Mario. You are at the top of this class when it comes to reading!" Mario is up to 28 books this year. Upon hearing this, I ducked into one of the rooms where I keep a secret stash of books, to see what I might have in the way of prizes.

You see, there are a lot of books floating around this school that are not titles I can add to the library collection. Every once in a while, an English Department Chair, a Literacy Coach, or some coordinator gets the bright idea to order hundreds of copies of a single title. This is usually part of a grand plan to have a whole grade read the same novel, or maybe the entire school. This is not a bad plan, per se, except for the fact that in most cases, the person ordering the books has not read much YA literature. So s/he relies on some outside source (vendors, most likely) to select the books and, in the end, many of them go unused. These are not bad books, of course. Well, sometimes they are bad books. Most of the time, however, they are simply books we already have in the library. Sometimes they are dated. Sometimes they are not the best books by a great author. Sometimes they are the third in a series for which we cannot offer the first or second titles. These books make up my secret stash. Prize books. Giveaways. Help the kids build a personal library, I say.

I chose six books and presented them to Mario with a flourish, telling him that I had a second stash if none I chose were of interest. Ten minutes later he approached the counter and gives back 2, saying the others look great.
"Miss, I've been collecting books from your free cart [where we place books to give away because of age/wear] and now I have a big stack. I'm going to ask my mom if she'll get me a bookcase!"
Remember - 8th grade boy. Tall, cute, funny. Wants a bookcase. I swoon.
I tell Mario that the only place in my house without a bookcase is the bathroom (to show my approval of his plan) and he replies:
"Miss! What if they do like in Fahrenheit [he means Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury, which all of our 8th graders were forced to read this year....by the Literacy Coach. I have a million extra copies]? What if they bust into your house at night to get your books?" He walks away cracking up at his literature-based joke.
I call out "They'd better not even try it!"
He returns to the counter to ask, "Miss, did you say there are more books I could have?"
So I show Mario the second secret stash, where he remains for a long time, making careful choices. His teacher tells me later that another boy asked Mario why he didn't just take them all. Mario replied that he didn't want to be greedy. The teacher said he said it in a way that implied, "Duh, I wouldn't want to be a hog, you moron!".
I got a big thank you and a smile as he left. I think I'll enjoy imagining his bookshelf for a long time. What color will it be? Will there be things on it besides books? Will he rearrange his books by size, author, title, color? As someone who has contemplated the infinite possibilities a single bookshelf can offer, I really hope that Mario's mother says yes to his request. What a kid.

The Cat is So Wise, It's No Wonder

The priorities of middle school readers are quite clear. It's comics and horror that they want. Give them slime! Give them boogers! Give them fangs and drool and mutant growths and funny cats and they are happy forever. Here is a list of the most-borrowed-books from this middle school library since July of this year, in order of popularity. How many have you read?

Goosebumps: Don't Go to Sleep
The 4th Garfield Treasury
Double Trouble (a Mary Kate and Ashley Olsen book, if you can believe that)
Garfiled Eats His Heart Out
Garfielf Weighs In
Garfield at Large
The Simpsons Holiday Humdinger
Face to Face with the Lizard
Duel with Daredevil
Spiderman and Captain America
Garfield Makes it Big
Scream School
Scooby Doo: Surf's Up!
Krusty Krab Adventures (a Spongebob Squarepants book)
The Amazing Spiderman
Among the Imposters (the only real novel on this list, this book is the 2nd in a fantastic dystopian fiction series)
Cuckoo Clock of Doom
Stay Out of the Basement
Welcome to Camp Nightmare
Say Cheese and Die - Again!
Sonrie y muerte - otra vez!
Attack of the Jack-o-Lanterns
Killers of the Dawn (ok, this is a real novel too, part of the Cirque du Freak vampire series)
Night of the Living Dummy III
Junie B Jones is Almost a Flower Girl
Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (why this one?)
Draw 50 Aliens, UFOs, and Galazy Ghouls

There you have it. Middle school in a nutshell. What more can I say?

Living Together in Perfect Harmony

The school year has officially begun, and I am grateful for the swarms of eager students and teachers who have inhabited the library this last week. If it wasn’t for them, I may have become the cranky, reclusive, hypersensitive shrew that surfaced here and there during our long and fruitless inventory. The children have worked as a tonic for me, reinvigorating my sense of purpose and inspiring me to, once again, crack a young adult novel and begin to read.

I find, however, that reading as many books as I can will no longer satisfy my current job requirements. In this second year of my life as a library media teacher, I am beginning to see why the word media is stuck there in the middle. Some of the projects I am currently developing are a library website, a murder mystery podcast, a school-wide wiki, a personal blog (duh), a library blog, and a library student worker wiki. I am actually going to give a workshop on using blogs and wikis in the classroom, which seems like a strange thing for anyone to expect me to do, except for the fact that I think I can actually do it.

When I was 23 and working in a used bookstore in Madison, I didn’t think I would ever even stoop to use a cell phone regularly. I imagined myself living a low-tech existence, because I believed (and strongly!) that books and technology do not mix. That was the foundation for my personal philosophy for almost a decade. If you love books, you couldn’t possibly care less about techno-babble. If you are a tech-dude, then you must not read much more than magazines or crap. I believed it. Not only that, I preached it.

I was a fool. I would like to take this opportunity to publicly (or to the 3 of you who read this) renounce my position as a tech-hating bookworm. It’s taken some time for me to get here, and I’m nowhere near finished, but I can now say that I am becoming friends with the wiki-wacky-web and all that it brings.

You Just Wouldn't Believe

Taking inventory of a collection of 34,000 items is both more and less than I bargained for. I did not expect, for example, that scanning 11,000 fiction titles would only take two panic-free days. I also didn't expect that the next section I would try to scan, Reference - a mere 1800 items, would require nearly the same amount of time. New spine labels for almost everything, some new bar codes, a lot of computer-wrangling to make it all work properly. This part of my job is both tedious and satisfying in the way that trigonometry was. Why the problem exists is a bit of a mystery, but solving it makes you feel like a genius.

Taking inventory required closing the library, which is a real inconvenience in the last weeks of school. Since I've been advertising it for a few months, most students and teachers have taken it pretty well now that it's happened. A few people here and there have called to beg for extensions, but I have been firm and loving in my denials of these requests. Today though, I witnessed a reaction to the closure that I really did not anticipate.

Around ten this morning I was finishing my skim-milk latte and sorting through the remainder of the overdue notices that needed to go out to teachers (still almost 700 items out). In walks a youngish teacher (young woman, has taught for 6+ years I think) that here I will refer to as Ms. Menace. Ms. Menace approaches my assistant at the circulation desk and asks if she can send groups of students to the library to work on a project. My trusty assistant explains that, no, we are closed to that sort of activity. Computers are being repaired, books counted, etc. She tells Ms. Menace to speak with me if she has further questions. I have not heard any of this and Ms. Menace bypasses the table where I am working, going to our teacher workroom to laminate. 15 minutes later she reappears, returns to the counter where my assistant is working and asks why she can't send students to the library. My beloved assistant explains, for a second time, the principles behind being closed and refers her to me. She declines, instead saying (and in the presence of my student workers to boot!) "Well I think that policy is stupid and I want you to tell Mizz Murphy I said so!" She then high-tails it out of there, literally running, laminated whatever tucked under her arm. That part I saw.

I ask these questions:
Why didn't Ms. Menace come speak with me? I was available. I am friendly.
Why did she not know we were to be closed?
Why did she run?

I believe I will never truly know the answer to that last question, but I have my theories about the others.
Another day, another panic attack, another after-school cocktail. So be it.