Scene One, Take Five: I Work Smarter AND Harder and I Still Need More Time to Do My Job

Scene One: The Positive

I've been a school librarian for two weeks now (with students; I did a ton of work over the summer), and greatly appreciate that I'm able to pull from my bank of prior teaching experiences in this new role.  Case in point: one-hundred-and-sixty-two slides equal a week's worth of digital library instructional content for grades K-6. Thank goodness I was a kindergarten teacher for twenty-five years, used to not being a perpetual talking head at the front of the room, and a remote learning teacher last year, who quickly became adept at using technology to create slides, create and/or select video content and make it all visually appealing.

  

That's "Brad Lee," our school mascot- nice of him to help me, right?

Creating slides is how I put myself in two places at once for the past nine or ten years of teaching in the kindergarten classroom, and last year as the teacher my students primarily saw on their iPad screens each day.  I created or found storytime content, established center activity rotations, and was able to work with students one-on-one.  If a student missed school for part of the day or several days during the week, he or she could still enjoy storytime or other curricular content at home thanks to the recorded videos of myself that I saved. 

This year, I'm creating video content and a six-week rotation of centers (one set of centers for K-3, another for 4-6), so that I can call students over to help them search for and check out books while their classmates remain engaged in other activities. Students can enjoy storytime while my barcode scanner boop-beeps at the circulation desk or in the hallway on my book collection cart, though I do wish I was able to sit and read from a storytime chair with them seated on our wonderful carpets. Having to sit in socially distanced cohorts requires the use of tables spaced six feet apart for now.  Even if we weren't dealing with a pandemic, working without a library assistant or parent volunteer would make it impossible for me to get books checked in and out, help students and teach my library standards.  Having on-screen me and real me is the creative solution that for now seems to be working best.

Boop-beep.  Seriously, my scanner boop-beeps.

There are trade-offs of course. While the videos don't support spontaneous interactions (I can pause them for discussion), the students do get the chance to see my face and full range of expression while I read. As it turns out, my expressive reading puts a toll on my voice when I try to project through a mask across a huge room with students spread out: prerecording myself this weekend will allow me time to heal next week, so I can continue to nurse chai as needed.  It's just a screenshot below- you don't want to hear my scratchy voice, trust me.

Why over a hundred-and-fifty slides?  Because I've put them in instructional order for the week instead of the day.  I don't want to have to open up six different slide shows and have a bajillion tabs open on the SMARTBoard.  The number of slides is also large because I've differentiated between primary and secondary classes. While K-3 will see this slide featuring photos of their center materials, grades 4-6 will have to read the descriptions of their activities:

Our international families were able to join us again this year and of course, there are many other students who would also benefit from visual cues as we learn our library routines.

Thankfully, this first set of instructional slides can easily be copied and adjusted for the rest of the year. Once I'm used to the pattern of our ABCDE specials, I'll likely divide the slides into smaller sets.  For now, I still need to see it all to build the muscle memory of my new schedule and adjust my internal clock.  I'll update my Bitmoji monthly or for special events, and create more video content that I'll upload to my Google Drive. If I'm out sick, the slideset can easily be scrolled through by a sub with every day of the week and every class for each day appearing in the order in which students come to visit.

~End Scene, and Curtain~

Intermission (pass the coffee, will you?)

Scene Two:  The Plea

Now if only my digital know-how could help me buy more time during the day for the much-needed book repairs, shelf reading, in-processing of new materials, reshelving of quarantined books, and a boatload of other tasks that all NEED to be done in order to best support our learners.  It takes me a half-hour to clean two carts (six shelves) of books that must then sit for three days before going back onto shelves, but with a daily prep of only fifty minutes, and it taking me ten minutes to fully disinfect tables, chairs, couches, beanbags, and high-contact surfaces after my last class each afternoon, I'm left with ten whole minutes to try to manage the other tasks that are must-dos, not "may-dos" for the effective and efficient management of the resources that students and staff are putting to good use for not only intervention but enrichment needs... which is why I was at school today, Saturday, from 8:15 a.m. until 4:15 p.m., shelving and lesson planning.

What are the other essentials that aren't happening yet?

... not to mention providing time for speedy readers to return books early and check out more to tide them over until their next library visit, which I am managing to do two or three afternoons per week during, ~cough cough~, that ten-minute period of time during my prep when I'm also cleaning the library.

With a fifty-minute prep five times a week, and an additional fifty-minute prep once a week, I'm still thirteen hours SHORT each week.

Easy book repairs take one or two minutes per book (reapplying barcodes or colored tape; mending torn pages; erasing pencil marks, etc.) while larger repairs (pages separated from book spines; recovering of books; full relabeling; adding protective covers and labels) can easily take five to ten minutes each.  Postponing book repairs isn't feasible, since it's the high-demand books that suffer more wear and tear of course.  I SHOULD shelf-read for at least half an hour every day because of how out of sorts all of the books are, and upon closer inspection, there are definitely books whose usefulness has come to an end, so I need to weed them.  The recording of one of this week's story excerpts and book talks for fifth and sixth-grade students took twelve minutes, while the uploading of it took four minutes before the video could be added to the slides. I'll be creating at least two videos per week. Skimming book reviews in order to select the best ones for lessons takes time, too. Shelving two carts of books per day will take me at least forty-five minutes, and I haven't even spoken to the book fair representative by phone yet.  That chat won't be fewer than five minutes long and doesn't include actually setting up for and running either an on-site or online fair itself.  Book fairs are how our library earns funds to purchase new and/or replacement books for students.

Every single day I'm needing two hours and forty-five minutes of additional management time.  I suspect if I were given it, I would feel like I was simply breaking even, which would still be an improvement.  An effective volunteer or aide could shave an hour and fifteen minutes off of my burden by cleaning books, shelf reading, and taking care of the minor repairs daily, at which point the extra unpaid hour that I put into work before 8:00 a.m. (I'm at work by 6:30 a.m. every day, many days earlier than that) could get our library close, sooooooooo close to the rhythm and pace of a well-oiled machine... a machine that benefits all patrons, no matter their test score or years of teaching experience.  

Or close to transitioning into an effective learning commons rather than simply a book storage room.  The commons would be an environment that supports the social-emotional needs and development of every learner, needs that have become glaringly pronounced during this pandemic.  It would be a sanctuary where theories can be explored, reading strategies can be put into practice, ideas can be shared, and the unique questions and interests of students can be asked and nourished instead of sidelined.  It would be a safe setting where self-directed learning works in concert with assignments and collaborative tasks created by teachers. 

So here's my plea:

Help me make it happen.  

Give me the time necessary to be an effective rather than token library media specialist so that I can grow the library program into a resource and asset that will best serve what our diverse students and their teachers need.

Our learners deserve it, their families expect it, and our society desperately needs it.

*****

Read more:

Why School Librarians Matter: What Years of Research Tell Us

NIOSH's Quality of Worklife Questionnaire