Today was my first day volunteering at the library of Mountlake Terrace Elementary School. (Here's a picture of the paper cranes in the library. That is the least interesting corner of the library that they could have photographed. There are barely any books visible.) It's in southern Snohomish County, which is a ways away. (Seattle is in King County. See this highway map of the Seattle area; Mountlake Terrace is just on the map. I live within about a 15-minute bus ride of UW.) It took me about an hour and fifteen minutes to get there this morning, including walking time to the bus stop. Luckily, I got a ride home.
It was a good day. I got there just as a fifth-grade class was leaving, so I checked out books to the students. I shelved books, picked off AR labels from books, alphabetized all the Amelia Bedelia books, affixed bar code labels to new books, and played an instrumental role in reader's advisory to one first-grader. I was shelving, and he was poking around the shelves. This is as much as I understood of our verbal exchange, because he wasn't taking care to speak very audibly:
- I: What are you looking for?
- He: A good book.
- I: What do you consider good?
- He: I dunno, good books. I like Captain Underpants because it's funny.
At this point I decided I needed to call for reinforcements. After all, I remember hardly anything of what I read when I was that age, and I was never a first-grade boy. I got the librarian to come over, and the kid ended up getting a Captain Underpants book, which made me regret that I hadn't had more confidence in myself and in my ears.
I hope I get to do more of that sort of thing rather than just shelving books and such. The work will get very old very quickly if I only get to interact with the Users when I'm behind the circulation desk.
Oh, and all this Accelerated Reading (AR) stuff. Basically this company called Renaissance Learning
assigns numbers to books according to the size of the book, the words, and the ideas. The numbers correspond to basically where a kid should be at the beginning of each grade, so 4.0 is the reading level of a typical kid at the beginning of the fourth grade. Of course I think that's all bollocks, and David (the librarian) says fourth-graders range all the way from 2 to 8. I guess it does give some rough indication of whether a kid would be able to handle a certain book, and it also makes it easier to give reader's advisory if the kid says s/he is at 4.3 or whatever. The real problem is that some of the teachers at this school use the system restrictively, so that kids can only read books that are supposedly on their level! Sheesh. I've always read whatever I wanted to read, and it seems to have served me well enough. Oh well, standards are bollocks. Let's give everybody individual tutors.