This is so surreal.  I have finished my first year as a librarian!  I remember when I first started, things were so chaotic.  The library was a complete mess-nobody knew what we had, and nobody even knew where I should start.  That’s one thing about my job that I can honestly say.  There’s nobody in that school that knows what the heck I’m supposed to do except ME.  If I have a problem, nobody can help me fix it except outside sources, and that makes it difficult.  I am oftentimes asked questions by teachers about certain things, such as technology and Accelerated Reader, and I don’t know the answers.  So I either dig down and figure it out, or I call someone and ask.  But I can honestly say that this year it’s been an immense learning experience.  I feel like next year, I won’t have so many questions.  Every year I’ll be stronger, until I am UBER LIBRARIAN! Haha.  No, but seriously, my job gives me a strong feeling in my heart.  I feel like I can really help people at my school with things.  Of course there’s people that I love to help, like Amber.  I love helping her, I am so protective of her and always want to help her.  But even those other people that ask me questions that I don’t have time to answer…I still get some kind of self-gratification out of being able to successfully answer one of their questions and have them feel some kind of release because they don’t have to sit and wonder the answer to their questions anymore.  When I graduated with my masters it is funny that I thought I had gotten my degree in the wrong profession.  I didn’t even think I wanted to be a teacher anymore after what I went through teaching 3rd grade for that semester.  I had so many negative people around me convincing me that I wasn’t a good teacher.  Or a good person, for that matter.  When I got back to Louisiana I was just following the motions going to school to get my library degree, all the while thinking that I’d probably just go back to school and get another degree in another field.  I felt like I had completely gone the wrong way in my degree process.  But when I graduated from my master’s program, I started teaching Kindergarten, and I truly loved it.  So much that the summer after I taught Kindergarten I felt like I had made the wrong move when Mrs. Shamlin asked me to be the Librarian this year.   I felt like I really just wanted to teach Kindergarten.  I was good at it, and I had people tell me that.  Even our Reading Coach, who is one of the world’s biggest bitches, tell me that that I had it down.  I even had successful reading centers, and with Kindergarten that’s crazy.  It was as if I had been born again.  I was better at teaching BABIES than I was at teaching 3rd graders!!!  They weren’t even half as competent as those 3rd graders, but I could keep them under control and not even have to get out of control that much.  Then during the last week of school I was told that I had to be the Librarian the next year.  All summer long I kept thinking that was not the good idea for me.  My friend had taught Kindergarten next to me and had left me TONS of great stuff that I could use with my kids, and was even planning on me just moving into her room the next year to get to use all of that great stuff-it was truly the opportunity of a lifetime.

But I took the library job.  The first semester was nuts.  I was learning new technologies and new software that I’d never even HEARD of.  Our library software, Destiny, that I have to use to do reports, cataloging, checkin/checkout, etc.  I am the only person in the school who knows how to use it because there were no computers in the library to do catalog searches.  Now I have SIX!  So next year I’m teaching the teachers and the students how to look up things in the catalog and find them.  I’m pumped about that.  Anyway, learning Accelerated Reader and trying to figure out how to award these children on such a limited budget, but I threw two GREAT parties!  Or at least…I try to think they were great!  Nevertheless, the reward process is going to be different next year and I’m going to go over the software once again this summer-there are still many things that I don’t know about Accelerated Reader or how to use it.  But I will know! By next year I’ll be a 100% AR Aficionado.   And that’ll be great.  Every summer there’s one more thing I need to learn how to use.   And this year it’s AR.  There were points in the first semester that I battled severe depression.  I would be absent for a week at a time, and the whole time I’d be sitting at home questioning whether or not I was even going to go back to work at Riveroaks.  There was one point where I even called the public library, submitted my application, even got called for an interview.  I was so close to getting another job.  I couldn’t manage to control those children, I really couldn’t.  I was not used to having 4th and 5th graders in the library, and I didn’t know what to do with them.  I wasn’t used to not having something specific that I was supposed to be teaching them, and doing library checkout was not my sole job back then.  Now it actually will be for next year, hopefully.  I am going to teach some Information Resources, but that will not be my primary job!  Anyway, the 4th graders just about drove me into the ground.  It would get so out of control in there, seriously.  There would be kids walking around doing whatever the heck they wanted to do, talking, etc.  There was one day that our principal walked by and I told her that if she didn’t come in there I was going to just lose it.  So she came in and I went to the bathroom and just cried.  I didn’t come back in there until that class was gone.  The 4th grade this year was miserable.  It makes me nervous about them being 5th graders next year.  Fortunately, I truly feel like I made progress with my techniques in the final semester and now I have a grip on them in the library.  It requires different strategies with different ages, but I like rewarding more than I do disciplining.  That seems to work with these children.  A lot of them are so numb to getting punished that they don’t give a damn if you “change their card.”  But hearing that you know they can do better and you want to see it is motivation for them to act good.  Then there are those that will just always get sat away from the group and not do the activity we are doing.  And that’s ok.  Long story short, I think that I’ve grown in my profession.  It seems like this last part of the year has FLOWN by, and I am looking forward to my second year as a librarian.  For the longest time I couldn’t break that half year because I always graduated in the December class and would work for 6 months, then bounce, but now I’ve got a YEAR’s worth of experience PLUS my half year in Kindergarten.  So now what?! LOL  Next year I’ll be a second year librarian-no more 1st year librarian’s training, no more not knowing what the heck I’m doing half the time.  Now maybe I can be someone else’s mentor instead of having to have one.  My supervisor said that she’s excited about being able to see what I do with myself, and that I’m doing a superb job.  She said that I am, and that I have what it takes to be a great librarian.  That means a lot from me considering she was one herself.  I hope to follow in her footsteps…who knows, maybe I can eventually go and do her job as Supervisor.  Wouldn’t want to do it for a while, but who knows?

I am just glad that I made such good friends, lifelong friends, this year.  Like Amber-who is in my wedding!  I am going to miss a lot of these students who are so sweet and were always there, and now they won’t be.  My 5th grade boys and my 5th grade helpers, I’ll truly miss them next year.  I cried a little when they were leaving, but it really hit me when I got home last night and I had a good cry.  Some of the toughest boys in our grade were hugging me and sad yesterday when I left-I think they needed a firm, but mothering figure, and I am glad that I could give them that.  I saw kids change their behavior in the library (hopefully somewhat in the classroom too) when they were able to start being my library helpers.  Just a note to never count out the ones who act like they don’t want to help-because they do…they just don’t want to have to ASK.  I had one who just started hanging around, then they started flocking like sheep to the library-it was their hangout, their escape.  And I love that.  I will miss it dearly and hope I can develop a rapport like that with these next students to come.  Signing off for the summer…no more school talk for two months! Wahoo!!!