A Giant Pile of Books

Friday afternoon, a teacher came into the library and genially asked, "Do kids even check out books anymore, or do you mainly just deal with computers?"

She was surprised when I told her that kids checked out books all the time.

I had a classroom library when I was teaching.  I sponsored the creative writing club at my school; since this tiny rural high school didn't have any sort of extracurricular arts activities (no drama club, only a marginal class-time-only chorus), my club became the official hang-out every Thursday afternoon for my "nerd-herd," as I (affectionately) called them.  Every kid who wasn't into sports but wanted to be involved in school, who needed a place to belong -- we had that in my classroom.  Really, looking back on it, it was pretty magical.  Kids who love to write?  It goes without saying they also love to read.

And read they did.

Voraciously.

Were they reading D.H. Lawrence or James Joyce?  Of course not.  But, in a youth culture of "I'd rather just see the movie," it was so refreshing to see a group of kids who would geek out at the release of a book, who would go through the YA trade paperbacks in my classroom like they were candy, who would examine the latest movie adaptation under the harshest light because the book had been so beloved. 

I have loved to read YA books for years.  Recently, it has become more or less okay for adults to enjoy YA books too (thanks for that, J.K. Rowling) because they tend to have a combination that "grown-up" books often lack: they're easy to read, and also often pretty darn good.  The characters are engaging, the dialogue doesn't insult your intelligence, the themes can be sneakily complex, and the plot never slows to the point of boredom.  One of the best things about reading YA books as a teacher was getting to recommend them to kids. 

The library didn't always have the books I wanted to recommend, though, and so I would spend many weekends (and at least as many dollars) perusing bargain bins and used bookstores for sturdy, cheap copies of The Maze Runner or The  Hunger Games or The Lovely Bones or Eragon. 

The first year, I kept a list of the titles I had acquired.  Then, books started moving on and off the shelves, and I didn't really keep track of who had returned what or who had left what on their nightstand for two months.  The list got so long I didn't bother anymore.  I had accumulated a rather prodigious collection, and considering that most of the books had cost me less than three dollars, I didn't really care how long it took them to return them, if ever.  The kids were reading.  That was enough.

Did it ever occur to me to donate these books to the school library?

Well, to put it simply, no.  No, it didn't.

Nobody put up a fuss about it, and the kids certainly weren't complaining.  What's more, I somewhat jealously guarded my classroom's status as unofficial mini-library (albeit an incredibly disorganized one).  I loved that my classroom was where they poked their heads in the door to ask, "Got anything new?"  It was such a pleasure to smile and walk over to the bookshelf and say, "I've got something I think you'll love."  Now that I think about it,  those exchanges might be the reason I decided to become a school librarian in the first place. 

I would like to think that teacher-me and librarian-me would get along.  I can definitely see why some librarians would find classroom libraries problematic: if the library is supposed to be the hub of the school, and readers don't really need it to get the books they want because some cheeky teacher has a giant pile of popular books on the back shelf of her classroom, that could create problems.  There's also the problem of what books belong to whom -- my classroom library were not the school's property, but mine.  I never bothered to ask for reimbursement, and instead branded each book's inside cover in Sharpie with my name and classroom number.  And none of this mentions the fact that if one of my books had been deemed questionable by a parent, the school would have been unable to defend me, because the books were my property, not the school's. 

At the same time, though, I really hate the idea of begrudging anyone a book.  In a perfect world, I would be a bit like Kris Kringle in Miracle on 34th Street: Macy's may not have it, but Gimbels does, and it's on sale, too!  Of course, this would probably create all sorts of problems for the teacher with the classroom library, as impatient readers with no concept of "don't interrupt sacred class time" would be knocking on the door whether it was planning period or not.

In the mean time, we have the aforementioned (in the previous post) book request form, available online (advertised with QR codes, which have become something with which I am obsessed...more on that later) and on a clipboard attached to the fiction shelf.  And as for the classroom libraries, as long as kids are still coming to the library, what I don't know can't hurt me.