Category Archives: Trailblazing

The Great Library Purge of 2013

When my son was at a small Montessori school for elementary, I volunteered to help with the student store and field trips. During that time I also spent 5 years as a committee member and board member of The Parenting Center in Ft. Worth. When my son started middle school my term on the board was expiring, and I was ready to spend my volunteer time in a different way.

I decided to volunteer in the library at his middle school a couple of times per month. It takes me about the same time as the twice monthly agency meetings did, except I spend much less of my time driving and much more directly serving.

Volunteering in a school library is very different from organizing young kids who are planning and running a snack store or helping keep up with a group of children at a tree farm or a museum. And it uses a totally different part of my mind than what I used as a board member and committee chair. Thank goodness!

Usually at the library I do part of a project that involves organizing, arranging, labeling, or inventorying books or magazines or videos. Sometimes I run the laminator to plastic coat materials teachers have made for use in the classroom. Sometimes the librarian asks me for my opinion on a project she’s creating. Nothing is very challenging, and when my shift is over my part is done and I know what I’ve accomplished.

It’s usually calm, simple, and low-stress, even when the line to check out books backs up and I have to move the kids through quickly. But today was different. Today was the first time I have had a difficult assignment .

Since the school library exists for instructional support, one of the main measures of quality is the average copyright date on the reference books. Reference books in a school should be as up-to-date as possible. It’s a very different standard from a library that has an archiving responsibility.

My job today was to go through a section of reference books and pull off the shelf any that had a copyright date before 2000. The mythology book from the Joseph Campbell Institute was tough to pull. I mean, mythology is thousands of years old so it doesn’t change in a few years.

Pulling the huge Roget’s Thesauruses bothered me, too, even though there were newer versions left on the shelf. Pulling the dictionaries was rough, too, in spite of there being several “updated” versions to replace them. I sighed pretty deeply as I pulled the book of idioms, especially since there wasn’t a newer version.

The librarian came back from lunch, saw the stack, and had the same reaction I had. Her eyes opened wide. That many? The thesauruses?? The dictionaries??? We were both twitchy fingered Gollums not wanting to let go of our precious word books.

We both know that online reference catalogs are replacing printed reference books, and that they stay much more up-to-date. We talk often about the trend of digital publishing replacing physical books, especially in K-12 education. But we love books, and we especially love books about words. We’re word nerds.

I’m also a mythology nerd, thanks to my love of Jungian psychology. As the librarian was looking through the books I had pulled, she saw me gazing wistfully at the book from the Joseph Campbell Institute.

Turns out the books pulled from the shelves are offered to teachers to see if they want them as resources in their classrooms, and then they’re offered to other people. The mythology curriculum is for 6th grade, and 6th grade is at an intermediate school now instead of the middle school, so none of the teachers needed it for instruction.

I called dibs!

Worker Bee

This surprised me at first. I coach and train people with themes like “don’t follow the herd” and “free yourself from the hive mind.” I mainly work with people who are leaders or are becoming leaders, stepping up to take charge so they can bring their ideas to life. Adaptable, flexible, and creative are abilities I want to keep improving in myself and help other people develop and improve.

So when I first realized I was a worker bee, and I liked it, I was surprised.

This year is my third year on the board of directors of a non-profit agency in my area, and my fifth volunteering as a committee member. As this commitment started winding down (I’m letting it wind down because it’s far enough away that meeting for an hour and a half takes up to four hours of my time with travel) I looked for a different volunteer opportunity.

My younger son started middle school this year so I decided to look for an opportunity there. It’s also his first year in public school, after spending his elementary years in a wonderful Montessori school. It’s a huge adjustment for him. The public school structure and format are completely new to him, the school is enormous compared to his two-room elementary, and, well, it’s middle school.

It’s a big adjustment for me, because I knew the administrator and the business manager and my son’s teacher very well. The Montessori cycle keeps a child in the same class for three years, and with some changes as the school downsized my son had additional years with one teacher.

I also knew two of the teachers in the youngest classroom because they had worked for us at the preschool my family owned. The Spanish teacher, who was also the art teacher, became a good friend, as well. They are like extended family. No, forget that! They are like the extended family I wish I had. They are special people who have been a huge part of my son’s early life and left an impact on both our lives. Heck, a lot of them are even friends with my mother since she volunteered and substituted at the Montessori school.

At the Montessori school I volunteered with “student store,” as I recount in Demystifying Marketing. I went on field trips. I even helped teach creative writing for a few months one year.

So when my son left his second home, the wonderful Montessori school, and headed off to the gargantuan new school in the brand new building with six hundred other students, we both lost an important part of our lives. I wanted to have some kind of connection to his new school, even though it couldn’t possibly be the same. And I was looking for a volunteer opportunity with little driving involved.

When the volunteer opportunities were listed “library” seemed like a manageable commitment so I checked it. At the orientation I signed up for a couple of shifts to give it a go.

I found out I like it. I can choose to volunteer once a week to once a month. I can even take a month off if I need to. I go in for two hours and fifteen minutes, and the total drive time round trip is twenty minutes or less. It’s a new library in a new building so sometimes I help organize shelves. Sometimes I help label shelves. Sometimes I put returned books back on the shelves, and sometimes I put the books back in the correct order.

I also laminate and cut out laminated pieces. Yes, they trust me with the machine with the heating coil and the heavy rollers!

Sometimes I check out books when students come to the library, and sometimes I check books in.

None of this is very difficult. Most of it takes little thought. I do a simple organizing task or laminate and cut out a stack of printed pieces. I don’t have to figure out much. I don’t have to solve challenging problems.

And I like it!

For the two hours and fifteen minutes, I have a list of things to do. By the time I leave, either I have finished a project or two, or completed one section of a larger project. The work is mainly about putting things in order. Books go in order on the shelves, labels are printed to direct people to the right shelf, cards for math class are covered in hot plastic and trimmed to be useful materials. I don’t have to figure out what to do or how to do it. I just follow a list.

I definitely wouldn’t want to do that every day. I would go nuts if most of my work were this way. But for a couple of hours two or three times a month, it’s a peaceful respite. I think it might be similar to walking a meditative labyrinth.

At the end of my time a task is done, order is restored in one corner of the universe, and entropy is resisted once again.

And I leave refreshed and ready to tackle some prickly challenges with my adaptability, flexibility, and creativity, in true Trailblazer style.