It’s been a full month since the official first day at my new job, and we’ve had the kids at school for three weeks. And, as you might expect, in that time I’ve learned some things.

There’s a 40-minute recess period before lunch and I have the library open during that time. Kids are welcome to come in, check out books, sit and read, or draw. In the first two weeks, I felt slammed during that time. There will often be a LOT of kids in the library. Maybe eventually I’ll actually count but all I know is it feels like maybe as many as 30 at a time. And inevitably 8 - 10 of these kids will require my help at once: to find a book, to check out a book, to suggest a book that we purchase. I am so glad they’re there, so happy that so many kids (there are about 130 at the school and I would guess at least a third of them come through at some point in lunch recess) are excited about reading. Of course I want to help them all! But it was overwhelming and exhausting.

So I started thinking about how we can make it so that the help I’m giving has the most impact.

The most obvious place to start was to teach even the youngest kids (1st graders) how to check out books themselves. Many of them have learned, and there are usually at least a few other kids who already know how that are happy to help. This frees me up a lot more to help with finding and choosing books.

We were having super long lines at checkout, and kids were getting back to lunch late, so I ended up dedicating two computers to checkout. In the early days, hardly anyone was using the catalog. Now we’re getting long lines at the catalog computer, so I may need to reconsider this set up. It is possible for me to have them set up for kids to do both, but that will require slightly more training.

Next, I realized that kids didn’t know how to use the catalog to find the physical location of the library, because the initial screen that pops up gives a call number but because our library is genrefied, the kids need to know both the call number and the location. So once I learned how to find that information in the catalog, I developed a brief lesson to share what I learned. That seems to be working well; kids are now able to find locate most things in the catalog on their own.

My goal is to make these sort of administrative tasks as independent of me as possible. Because the real joy in my job happens when a kid says, as one did this week, “I really like books like Guts, Drama, Ghosts, and El Deafo. Do you know any others like that?” Things are so busy at lunch recess I had to say, “Give me a day to work on it.” But the next day I had a big stack of other books for her to try. This is called readers’ advisory, and it’s one of my favorite parts of library work.

Another of my favorite parts is supporting instruction, which I did for the first time this week. Our younger students will be learning about North America this week including animals, people, and maps/land features. The teachers working on the animals lessons asked me to pull some resources together for them. So I spent a couple hours on that, getting a big stack of books together and building them a collection of ebooks on the ebook service we use, as well as recommending iNaturalist for photos of the animals out in the world.

I could only do that, though, because the teachers happened to catch me on a day when I didn’t have any students in for circulation.

The key thing to note is that I work 50% time. And the way that 50% is scheduled, about 2 of the 5 hours I work on a given day are dedicated to front-facing, direct student support. Another hour or two are dedicated to administrative tasks like getting books checked back in.

This only leaves an hour or two a day for the deep work of readers’ advisory, instructional support and collaboration, and collection management. (I haven’t even really gotten started with collection management yet; I’ve been thinking about it, but not doing it.)

I do have high school TAs who can help with shelving and checking in, but when they’re available and when I need to have books ready to go back out to kids or free up space (they’re allowed a maximum of 10 books checked out at a time) aren’t always the same.

So. I’m trying to create systems to help me make more time for the deep work.