Please … if next year I start talking about teaching summer school again … if I say, "I'll be in a library, it will be fun" … do me a favor and ask me if I'm out of my mind. I just finished my 3rd straight day of working in a 97˚ library. Humidity was at 56%. I've been uncomfortable, but I make a point of staying hydrated and moving as little as possible. The kids however, are miserable which does nothing for their behavior. To me it's veered over into the realm of ludicrous. For the kids it seems criminal.
Which brings me to another point about our summer school program: MMSD thinks it's a good idea to take all of the kids who were not "proficient" in reading by spring -- who for whatever reason, were not particularly engaged in or struggled with learning during the school year -- and give them more of the same (aka MOTS) for 6 weeks in buildings without air conditioning. Recipe for success? No, I don't think so either.
It's particularly sad for me when so many kids come to the library and can't find anything to read. The most popular books are Sponge Bob, Spiderman, Pokémon, and Diary of a Wimpy Kid. There are limited numbers of those books and when they are all checked out, the kids are frequently at a loss. They frequently go and search for them in the online catalog, as if the act of typing the desired book will conjure it up. They can't hear me when I say "It's not here," and they frequently get angry.
I do what a good librarian is supposed to do. I've been going to the shelves and pulling a lot of books that I know they will never look at otherwise. I give book talks. I pay attention to what they're interested in, and try to find similar titles. I look for movie tie-ins. Occasionally it works. Tintin books were flying off the shelves today, after 5 weeks of plugging them. My first class was all over Neil Gaimann and checked out Coraline, The Wolves in the Wall, and The Graveyard Book -- and proceeded to lay down on the floor and actually read them! With few exceptions my next four classes were testy and unwilling to try anything. (Maybe it was the 97˚.)
I drove home, musing on the whole summer school experience, feeling kind of frustrated. Then I remembered a situation from yesterday. I had one kid -- an upcoming 2nd grader -- who was mad that I was out of Pokémon books. After 20 minutes of a slow motion tantrum (him, not me) I finally got him to tell me that he wanted a book about "hot air" (Appropriate, right?) which I took to mean hot air balloons. We went to nonfiction. No, he didn't want that book or that one either. No, not that one. (As you can imagine, the selection is somewhat limited.) He's frustrated. I'm frustrated. He finally says, "I'll SHOW you what I want!" and goes and gets the book that I had set aside as a read aloud for the next class: Balloons Over Broadway: The True Story of the Puppeteer of Macy's Parade. (A WONDERFUL picture book biography of Tony Sarg.)
I tightened my bun, sucked in my girdled abdomen, pushed my glasses further down on my nose and hissed, "No, you can't have that one. I'm reading it aloud!" Just kidding. I said, "You want THAT ONE? COOL!!" and let him take it. There are lots of books in the library, I could always find something else to read.
I think that the educator Susan Ohanian was correct when she observed that teachers ultimately teach themselves, or to put it another way, it's a lot about the relationship that you build with kids. Why should they listen to me when I say a book is good? They don't know me. They're only just starting to know their summer school teachers.
Well, 6 hot days remaining.
