Building Bridges

I had a great opportunity to attend a library media meeting in the district that I am student teaching in. I was full of excitement being in a room of people who were already in the profession I am proud to be part of soon. It was very interesting to see so many kinds of views on various topics. I do want to state that I respected all of their opinions. They have been in this profession longer than me.

With that being said, I was a bit discouraged by some of the Library Media Specialists’ views on how to handle students who have lost or damaged books. There were some who were of the opinion that you should just block their account preventing the student to ever check out a book again. This block can follow them through out their whole academic career. If I am understanding this correctly, a second grader can lose a book and have their account blocked all the way to his senior year of high school. Does anyone else think this is really unfortunate?

I know children books are very expensive and there is never enough money in the budget to pay for them. But are we not missing the whole point of why we are in this profession? Our number one priority is not putting the books first, but the children first. We are not a glorified keeper of the books, but we are here to make sure the kids are reading, learning, thinking and growing as individuals. How are we doing that by saying to them, “Sorry, you have failed to keep up with the book or you have failed to convince your parents to pay for this book, so you may never ever touch another book until you resolve this issue. Why would a kid ever come back to the library or ever think of picking up another book again. The last time they did, they had a really negative experience. I could not blame them. When this happens we might as well lock the library doors and go home.

This might seem a bit harsh, but I feel when librarians adopt this philosophy of librarianship, they are missing their whole purpose of the profession. Are we security guards of the books or are we teachers? Yes, there are going to be kids who are not going to get it right. That is why they are called kids. But this is a valuable teaching opportunity to show them how to be responsible and be good citizens. I know what you’re thinking, “Well Amanda, how many books are we going to lose to teach them this very important lesson? Three, six, twenty-four?” I don’t know. But do we really have the right to stop them from learning or to give up on them? Maybe we need to educate the parents on what we are trying to accomplish or spend more time with that child, so they understand to take better care of the book. Isn’t that our goal? Isn’t that our responsibility? When my life is through on this earth, I don’t want people to say, “Well, as a librarian she had 0% of lost books, but no child ever learned the love of reading.”

In the elementary library that I am currently student teaching at, there is a constant controversial book. But it is not the parents that are challenging it, it is ironically the teachers. Now, I can understand the “uncomfortabliness” of the book. It is a very graphic book about where babies come from in cartoon form. There is even a drawing of mommy and daddy doing the “deed”. But I have a hard time saying it should be out of the library. If I was a parent, I am really not sure how I would react if my child came home with this book, but as a librarian….Well, I can’t really argue it should be banned. With the ever rising rate of teen pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases, this is a great opportunity to open the dialogue with kids before they fall in that trap that our society is constantly luring them in. But what I find interesting about the whole situation is how the teachers are handling their views. Instead of taking the proper and professional steps of challenging a book, they will either hide it in the library or just take it from the library and hide in their classroom to prevent any student from checking it out! The librarian that I am working under is very good at doing some investigation work at figuring out who has it and sneaks the book back. I have even witnessed first hand a teacher take the library book out of a student’s hands after they have checked it out. But this all seems very silly to me. I would expect more from other educators. I am just curious what other may think.