Library Day in the Life – Round 8 – Monday

This is the first instalment of a week’s blogging about what I do day-to-day as Learning Resource Centre Manager at a UK secondary school. You can find today’s tweets here.

Today began with a slight flurry of snow, which sadly didn’t settle, on my walk to work. I arrived, as usual, at 8:00am and spent about 10 minutes reading emails and setting the library up for the day by turning on printers, putting out the newspaper and tidying shelves and chairs.

My first main task was to introduce some of the younger students to the Readathon scheme that I am going to run to coincide with the half-term holiday, a Scholastic book fair and World Book Day. In brief, Readathon involves students setting themselves a reading target and earning sponsor money for achieving it. The money earned is split 80% to children’s charities, 20% to the school for new books. I spent about 45 minutes jotting down the key points that I wanted to get across. At 9:00 am two classes – one Y7, one Y8, 50 students in total – arrived and sat waiting patiently for my speech. With hindsight, I should’ve done more planning, as I found myself losing track and forgetting details and I think they could probably tell I was getting flustered. During my MA I reflected that I should prepare better for presentations; obviously I haven’t heeded that advice well enough yet.

The rest of the day went more smoothly and to plan. The LRC was much quieter today than it has been for the past 2-3 weeks, most probably because the sixth formers have finished their exams and are no longer using the LRC as a place to cram. Other tasks today included:

• Writing a letter to Year 7 and 8 tutors introducing them to Readathon and asking for a list of students who express an interest.
• Helping a Year 7 student to find and borrow a copy of Watership Down.
• Cataloguing and covering the first issue of TIME magazine I have received since starting a new subscription. I was initially a bit unsure about subscribing, but at £20 for a year I thought the risk was very small. I also thought I’d give it a hard, plastic cover, but the mess I made leads me to think that was unwise.
• Putting together a display board for National Libraries Day. Last week I asked staff for some soundbites on why they value libraries and library-related anecdotes. I had a decent response and this week I’m putting them on show in colourful speech bubbles.
• Cataloguing some new fiction books. In recent weeks I agreed to order two boxes of publisher-selected fiction, hence I have had around one hundred books to catalogue, label, cover and shelve, jobs which I have completed gradually when I have found time around other activities.
• Lending out scissors and glue to various students.
• Grabbing a sandwich and apple from the school canteen in the last twenty minutes before the students arrived for their lunch hour.

  National Libraries Day display - a work in progress

My most challenging activity happens each day from 1:20-2:20pm – the students’ lunch hour. As this is my first post I have zero experience of managing the behaviour of up to fifty excitable young teenagers, and I have to say I have found it tough. But with co-operation from the senior teachers, advice from fellow school librarians and a little thought on my part it is now manageable, and I am beginning to enjoy it more. Today I spent a typical hour:

• monitoring computer use (I run a ‘no games’ policy);
• handing out sets of chess, Scrabble and draughts;
• ensuring that coats and bags were off, that chairs weren’t swung on, that the volume remained tolerable, and that students generally conducted themselves properly.

In a future blog post I hope to go into more detail on how I have overcome the challenges of the lunch hour.

I tend to work eight hours each day, so today I left for home at about 4:10pm. Tomorrow I hope to be able to surpass today’s meagre coffee count of two.