School Library Volunteer

Last week I went to my former school and volunteered for two hours in the library.  It was an absolute blast! Shelving library books is oddly satisfying.

I started out taping over bar codes to protect them. Then I got to check in books and shelve them on the temporary cart.  It was more complicated than I had thought.  There are a lot more categories than just fiction and non-fiction.

When the library opened for business later, I got the chance to see the students.  Some of them I were students I had taught and some were new to the school.  They were all polite and excited to be in the library.  By this time I had started taking books off the cart and putting them onto the actual shelves.  But whenever I saw a student ready to go, I would come back and bring up their record to check them out.

There are two ways to get a student record.  They can give you their library number or you can type in their name and search the database that way.  As it is early in the school year, many of them can't quite remember their number.  It's not a big deal when it is a new student as you wouldn't be expected to know who they are, but it gets tricky and embarrassing when you should know the student's name, because you taught them just last year.

And so when I couldn't recall one young student's name that had been in my class, I asked him to spell his name for me.  He looked at me quite seriously and spelled, "L, E, E."

What a bad memory I have!