Why
Why do we (School Librarians) do what we do?
Too often I have seen teachers become Librarians in the same school and all of a sudden be relegated to second-class status by their teacher colleagues. We fight censorship with selection, principles, and policy. We stretch a dollar farther than anyone else on campus. We usually understand budgeting better than the principal. We are masters of managing the scarcity of resources. We know what to teach and how to teach yet we are not respected as teachers. We do bus duty instead of Library duty. We do lunch duty instead of lunch. We deal with the minutia of putting labels on books and scanning a barcode while others think we read all day. We sit down for the first time in hours after handling 3 classes of wiggly kindergarteners or wiggly seniors and the principal (or superintendent) walks in and asks where are the students. We listen to all the teachers’ woes. We listen to all the parents’ woes. We spend hours learning a new use for technology only to have the technology not work in front of eager students and a skeptical teacher. Our integrity is partially dependent on that technology over which we have no control and the OPAC which tells the student he still has a book checked out because the student got the process backwards and shelved the book instead of turning it in or another student found a book he liked and hide it behind other books to save it for himself which makes our OPAC look like it does not know where the books are. And on and on and on…..
So why do we do it?
We do it because there is no purer way to learn than for our students (or staff) to have a curiosity and then to go to the Library and have the organized knowledge of the universe divulge secrets to our students with our help.
Have a great day!
