Guess who was not prepared for how hard it would be to juggle a job and home life?
My new digs. (Photo: Shala Howell)
This girl.
As you may have noticed, I have not been posting much here at Caterpickles lately. My job is amazing, and I love working with both middle schoolers and books, but I do have a tendency to use up all my words at work. But y’all have been remarkably faithful about continuing to visit my little blog, so since we have a day off today, I thought I’d spent at least part of it telling you how things have been going.
Happy Veteran’s Day, by the way.
Many of the teachers tell me that this year is pretty weird. I don’t really have context for that, but I can tell you that the library is operating a little differently this year.
We added a new Holds Shelf
If your public library is like my public library, this is not going to seem like an innovation to you. After all, public libraries have allowed patrons to reserve books online and come pick them up at their convenience for years.
But it never made sense to implement it at my middle school, because the kids could come in whenever they wanted. About a hundred kids pass through the Fletcher Library every day. We get plenty of foot traffic, and in the Before Times, it worked perfectly well to have the kids come fetch their own book.
Then COVID happened.
Last year, because the school was closed to in-person learning for most of the year, the kids got pretty used to reserving their books online and picking them up during curbside pickup on Wednesday morning. The librarians spent a lot of time training the kids to do this last year. When school resumed in person this year, we considered going back to life as usual.
But then some of our best readers told us they really liked the convenience of curbside pickup, because they don’t always have time to browse for books during the school day.
And it really had been quite a lot of work to teach them to use our website. In the end, rather than toss all that work aside, we decided to create a new Hold Shelf in our library, similar to the one the public library uses.
The kids request books online, I fetch the books from the stacks, reserve them in the system, pop them on the shelf, and email the students to come pick them up. Most of the kids are pretty good about checking their email, but some never do, so I also post a sign at the door on Thursdays to remind kids to pick up their books before the weekend.
The main difference between the way the Hold Shelf works this year and the way curbside pickup worked last year is that the students need to remember to check the books out before they leave the library. (Last year, the books were checked out for them.) But since the checkout desk is between the Hold Shelf and the door, it’s not too hard to catch them on their way out.
Since implementing the Hold Shelf, I’ve talked to a few kids who don’t feel comfortable taking books home at all because of COVID. Although our school has been lucky so far, some of these kids are hyper-aware that they could be required to go into quarantine at any time for reasons completely out of their control. The last thing they want to do is be responsible for a library book. They just don’t have the emotional bandwidth for it. They’d like to read, though, and they’d like to be able to read books that take more than 15 minutes at lunch to finish.
So they tell me what books they want, and instead of checking them out, I reserve the books for them and keep them on the Hold Shelf. When they come into the library at break and at lunch, they retrieve their book from the shelf, read it, and return it to the Hold Shelf for the next time. When they’re done, they pop the book in the return bin and I remove the hold.
It wasn’t my original intention in setting up the Hold Shelf, but it works pretty well. I know where to find their books, and they don’t have to worry that some other student will check the book out before they are done with it.
And it keeps me from losing books when kids do things like this:
Or this…
Look, just because *you* never look at the nonfiction section doesn’t mean *I* never do.
Fun fact: It was by asking the kid who hid Thunder from the Sea why he was hiding books in the nonfiction section that I figured out that I needed to use the Hold Shelf to keep books for kids who didn’t feel comfortable taking them home. Instead of being an annoyance, he’s now one of my best customers.
Opening up the Hold Shelf to kids to use to stash their books in between bouts of reading in the library seems to have calmed this sort of behavior down.
We also offer socially acceptable fidgets
We open our doors at lunch to students who want to come fetch books, read quietly, sit and play games, or just hang out in clusters with friends.
There is a lot of anxiety bubbling out of the average student who walks through our doors. I don’t know how it compares to previous years, but almost every middle schooler I deal with feels like they are just a few cracks away from breaking.
Of the 70-odd students who come to the library every day at lunch, at least 10 bring some sort of fidget with them. Others repurpose stuff they find in the library like the pencils on our supply table, checkers from our Connect 4 games, and our perpetually incomplete packs of playing cards into fidgets to keep their hands occupied at lunch. Still others bring Rubik’s Cubes from home.
After a while, I noticed that the kids with the Rubik’s Cubes would always be surrounded by other kids staring longingly at their Rubik’s Cubes and asking if they could have a turn. Sometimes the answer was yes. But sometimes there was friction.
We had a couple of Rubik’s Cubes lying around our house that we weren’t using, so I decided to bring them in and add them to the Games Shelf. They were immensely popular and lasted about two days before they wandered out of the library.
I was telling my brother about this, and he pointed out that I worked in a library. Just because we don’t bother to check out the other games on our Games Shelf didn’t mean we couldn’t check out the Rubik’s Cubes.
He convinced me to give it another try. So when a generous donor gave us a collection of 12 Rubik’s Cubes, I created a sign out sheet to track who borrowed them and when. Every day when the cubes roll out, I ask one of our student helpers to take the names and track whether the cubes actually come back. It’s working like a charm so far. Something about making kids write down their name makes them much better about bringing the cubes back when the bell rings.
Some of the kids who check out the cubes actually solve them. Others use them to learn how to solve them (my checkout station includes three simple solution guides a student found for me online). Still others use them to make pretty patterns. And then there are the final set, who just want something to hold and keep their hands busy during lunch. In other words, they’re being used as socially acceptable fidgets.
We’ve only had one break so far, but fortunately, another student had already volunteered to be my Cube Repairman. I messaged him the day it happened, and he stopped by after school to fix it for me.
I could go on, but…
There’s a lot more I could tell you, but hopefully this gives you a tiny taste of what life is like for me these days. Come to my library for the books if you like, but if you’d rather not, you could just play games, draw, flip through magazines, help make the library better, catch up on homework, or chat with your friends. We aren’t that into the Silence in the Library thing here at Fletcher. That said, if you’d rather run or climb, I will ask you to take a break outside.
See you around the stacks.
CATERPICKLES 
6 Responses to “Guess who was not prepared for how hard it would be to juggle a job and home life?”
Sounds like you are having fun at work. Best kind of job to have!
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I feel so lucky to be able to do this job right now.
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[…] interest in a curbside dropoff and pickup like service once we were back in person. So I introduced a new Hold Shelf like the one offered by our local public library for students who preferred to — or only had time to — use our library that way. When it […]
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[…] In Kelsey Bogan’s Dynamic Shelving post, she talks about how any flat surface is a display surface waiting to happen. It just so happens that we have a lovely set of windows in the back corner of our nonfiction section that have a line of very short bookshelves under them. You may remember them from an earlier post, when I used them to model our collection of Rubik’… […]
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[…] a career freelance writer who started working in a public middle school library in August 2021, only to fall in love with library work. I’m here to learn how to be a more effective […]
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[…] Shala Howell, a career freelance writer who started working in a public middle school library in August 2021, only to fall in love with library work and decide to pursue an MLIS at the advanced age of “Has […]
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