No Librarian
I'm sitting here at Saturday school, which is held in the school library, and I'm sickened by the mess surrounding me: piles of unshelved books. The return box is full. There are piles of books on the counters. There is a cart full of books to be shelved. A quick glance at the shelves shows that the books are completely disorganized.
There are no displays set up to attract the kids to books: no Great Fall Reads or Horror that Will Make Your Skin Crawl or Apache Culture, etc. There are only blank bulletin boards, empty shelves, disorganization, and unshelved books. It makes me sick. A librarian is a key component in any literacy program, right? Especially at the middle school level. A lot of kids leave elementary school with a fondness for reading that gets squashed by a lack of literacy programs at the junior high level. If our kids leave here without at least one favorite author, we've totally failed them. As they grow older, a love for reading becomes harder and harder to instill. And what I would like to investigate and figure out is: How does a Title I school with supposedly enough money for things like computers and a librarian have neither? What's going on in our district office?
Here's the brilliant plan for the library: They want to hire parents to come in here to color code and shelve the books based not on alphabetical order or any kind of Dewey Decimal system, but rather, based on reading level. That way, we teachers will have an easier time doing the non-existent librarian's job of shelving the books, which we're of course not going to get paid for. Because then all we'll have to do is stick them on the shelf with the other blue or green or aqua books.
So will we have a fiction and non-fiction section?
How will we teach the kids how to do research?
And how will we ever find anything?
And how are the parents going to know what grade level the book is?
I can't wait to see how this plan goes. I'll definitely be reporting back on this one.
Oh, and why don't I volunteer my time and help out? Well, while I definitely want to bring my reading class down here to create a display, I'd like to point out some of my responsibilities this year: 7th grade reading teacher (22 students), 7th grade language arts teacher, 8th grade language arts teacher, yearbook supervisor, newsletter supervisor, school press secretary, weekly duty, leadership team, school improvement team, Saturday school coordinator, correlate committee member, and after-school tutor. I'm not trying to complain: I'm just pointing out the reason why turnover is so high in our district. I'm just offering the consequences of having a superintendent who believes in running our district like a money-making business: the good teachers get stretched and pulled and used up until they're totally burned after two years. Same old story, same old song and dance.
There are no displays set up to attract the kids to books: no Great Fall Reads or Horror that Will Make Your Skin Crawl or Apache Culture, etc. There are only blank bulletin boards, empty shelves, disorganization, and unshelved books. It makes me sick. A librarian is a key component in any literacy program, right? Especially at the middle school level. A lot of kids leave elementary school with a fondness for reading that gets squashed by a lack of literacy programs at the junior high level. If our kids leave here without at least one favorite author, we've totally failed them. As they grow older, a love for reading becomes harder and harder to instill. And what I would like to investigate and figure out is: How does a Title I school with supposedly enough money for things like computers and a librarian have neither? What's going on in our district office?
Here's the brilliant plan for the library: They want to hire parents to come in here to color code and shelve the books based not on alphabetical order or any kind of Dewey Decimal system, but rather, based on reading level. That way, we teachers will have an easier time doing the non-existent librarian's job of shelving the books, which we're of course not going to get paid for. Because then all we'll have to do is stick them on the shelf with the other blue or green or aqua books.
So will we have a fiction and non-fiction section?
How will we teach the kids how to do research?
And how will we ever find anything?
And how are the parents going to know what grade level the book is?
I can't wait to see how this plan goes. I'll definitely be reporting back on this one.
Oh, and why don't I volunteer my time and help out? Well, while I definitely want to bring my reading class down here to create a display, I'd like to point out some of my responsibilities this year: 7th grade reading teacher (22 students), 7th grade language arts teacher, 8th grade language arts teacher, yearbook supervisor, newsletter supervisor, school press secretary, weekly duty, leadership team, school improvement team, Saturday school coordinator, correlate committee member, and after-school tutor. I'm not trying to complain: I'm just pointing out the reason why turnover is so high in our district. I'm just offering the consequences of having a superintendent who believes in running our district like a money-making business: the good teachers get stretched and pulled and used up until they're totally burned after two years. Same old story, same old song and dance.
posted by Jessica at 9:14 AM
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