Ahhhh! Grad School

Terror, that's what I feel when I think about my Culmination Experience class. When I first learned of this culminating experience my plan was to do a practicum, I'd spend 150 hours working in a library gaining first hand experience and I'd be able to add a little extra padding to my resume. It was the greatest idea ever, but then I got a full time job. I love my job, and I love that I was lucky enough to find a job in my field that allowed me to support myself, before I was even done with Grad School. it was like a gift from the gods or something, however this does present a problem for this culminating experience class. Most of the libraries in my area have the same hours that my library has (with the exception of one or two that are open for like an extra hour). I have two days off a week, one of which is Sunday, and none of the libraries in my area are open Sunday, therefor according to my calculations, it would take me like five months of working one day a week to gain the amount of hours that I need, not only that I'd be exhausted working six days a week and I also have another class to take that semester (you know with the tests, and papers and such).

 What to do, what to do. I think I'm going to be reintroducing Monster drinks into my life next semester. Let the games begin.

On the hunt

Not too long ago I started a Teen Advisory Group here at the library just to see what kind of turn out I would have, and I was curious to know how many kids would be interested. I had about eight kids come and they were so involved. They had great ideas and seemed really enthusiastic. They participated in Teen Tech Week and I even have them monitoring the family movies that we show twice a month.

All of this is great, however they want to do, I need to find ways to keep them engaged and involved otherwise I'm afraid I'll lose them. I'd love to do something like after school story time and have some of the teens run that (under supervision of course), or some kind of consistent weekly program for them to monitor and brain storm ideas for but I don't know what to do. I've been blog hopping and pinteresting but I'm coming up short. I'm glad that the kids like this program enough to want to meet more often and involve themselves I just don't know how. Another issue is, if I start planning larger more involved programs and none of my TAG members show up, then what do I do? I feel like because the group is still so new, that I'm in a precarious position.

I guess I should get back to the drawing board and try to come up with some ideas.

*Sigh*

Alright, so I'm not sure how to go about expressing my...feelings (yeah we'll go with that word) about how parents view the youth room here so I'll just ramble and hope I feel better when I'm done.

So I'm a Youth Assistant Librarian, the floor that I work on caters to children between the ages of birth (It's always so weird to say that but we do often have newborns up here), to seventeen... because after that technically you're an adult. Because this is the youth floor, also known as the Graham Room, we have materials here for older teens, some how a lot of parents forget that and I'm often challenged on weather or not certain materials should be here.

I recently had a man hand me the Battleship DVD. He looks at it and says that he found it in the wall with the other DVD and asked if it should be up here, I said yes. he paused and asked "it should?" and I again said yes, then he sort of rolled his eyes and proceeded to check it out. I'm to the point where I'm so tired of explaining it. This is the youth room not the children's room. This floor is for people who haven't yet reached voting age. We're going to have materials such as Battleship, Ghost Rider, Sherlock Holmes, and the Social Network. We're going to have books such as Twilight, Staying Fat for Sarah Byrnes, Uglies, Divergent and more. It's always been that way here and will continue to be so.

I think the problem is that there is an unequal ratio of children to YA materials. *Sigh* I'm not sure what to do except get use to it. I think my biggest issue is the reaction to the fact that yes we do have movies rated PG-13, if you don't want your child to watch it, then don't check out the movie. Simple, problem solved.

Oh well, I'll put it behind me and move on I guess, but it is slightly annoying.

Appreciation

So I'm going to take a second to say that I love my job. I love it because of moments like the one I'm having right now.

I'm sitting at work checking in books from C-Car and a girl that comes into the library often grabbes one of the little chairs, scootes it up to the circulation desk (which is very long and mostly storage for our two printers) in a place where she wont be in the way of patrons and pulled out her Geometry book to do homework. When I ask her if she's going to need help, she says "no, I just wanted to sit by you" then smiled and turned to her book.

Again, I repeat, I love my job.

Thank you, thank you, thank you.

I would like to thank the people who put together the Hub reading challenge because I love it. I just finished reading Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secret of the Universe by Benjamin Alire Saenz and the book was amazing.

(I'm not the greatest at book reviews but here goes.)

So, first this book is not what you may think from reading the title. My original though was it would involve the historical versions Aristotle and Dante, but not so much. Aristotle, Ari, and Dante are two teenage boys who live in new Mexico and meet one summer at the swimming pool. Ari is on, what seems to be, a never ending mission  to understand himself, and the secrets his family are keeping from him. Although his relationship with his mother is, at times, that of friendship (their witty banter is always fantastic), Ari's relationship with his father borders on nonexistent. Ari's father was in Vietnam, his father never speaks of his times there, and in fact, rarely speaks at all. Ari has two sisters who are years older than he, so they don't have much of a relationship, and Ari has a brother who's been incarcerated since Ari was four but no one will tell him why. Aristotle is the narrator of the story and I think that was a great idea on the authors part. It allows us to see the change and growth not only in Ari as he makes his first friend in Dante, and builds a relationship with his father, and learns his family secrets, but we also see the growth in Ari's father. Both father and son are incredibly similar in action and manner, so it's great to see the person changes and growths in both of them.

Dante is Ari's total opposite. He knows who he is, although he too, keeps some of it hidden at times, for the most part, however, Dante isn't afraid to yell from the rooftops and defend what he believes (like his hatred of shoes). At one point in the story Aristotle says that on the outside he's like his father, silent and mysterious, but on the inside he wants to be like Dante. He wants to be able to walk up to his father and give him a kiss on the cheek hello, or tell people exactly what he's thinking. Because we as readers know that Ari wants to be more like Dante it's interesting to watch them both interact,

I don't want to give away the plot because I think everyone on the planet should read this book, but I will say the ending almost drove me to tears and it took me two days to organize enough of my thoughts to put all of this down on paper... well not exactly paper but close enough.

So everyone, go out and get this book and love it as much as I did :)

Free Read Teen Book Club

Alright, so again I mention, we're trying to build this department, we need a higher attendance record for programs, so I thought of a new idea for the Teen Book Club, the kids read whatever books their choose, then discuss them with other members present at the club.

I came up with this idea because sometimes when I mentioned the group to some of the teens who came into the library, they didn't want to come to the book club because they didn't like the book choice, or they though it was below their reading level, or the genre didn't appeal to them. It was always something. So I though that if we did some type of free read, then we'd get more kids because they could read whatever they wanted. I tried this for the first time last week and it worked out pretty well.

I brought four book to talk about (why I read them, what I liked about them, brief synopsis) and the other kids who came each brought one. By the time we ended the meeting, I was asked to put three of the four books I'd presented on hold, and one teen wanted to start the book series that another teen had talked about. I really think something like this could turn our teen book club around.

Below are the books I presented. 

    

NY Times best sellers this week!

1. Perks of Being a Wallflower by: Stephen Chbosky
2. The Fault in our Stars by: John Green
3. I Hunt Killers by: Barry Lyga
4. Divergent by: Veronica Roth
5. Looking for Alaska by: John Green
6. The Prince by: Kiera Cass
7. Insurgent by: Veronica Roth
8. Paper Towns by: John Green
9. The Book Thief by: Markus Zusak
10. Prodigy- Marie Lu

So kudos to I Hunt Killers and The Prince for making it to the list amidst all these titles that we've seen before.

Straight from goodreads.com here are the summaries for the two new additions (even though they aren't new books exactly. I Hunt Killers was release April 2012, but The Prince is a novella from a The Selection series that was released on the 5th of this month).

What if the world's worst serial killer...was your dad?

Jasper "Jazz" Dent is a likable teenager. A charmer, one might say.

But he's also the son of the world's most infamous serial killer, and for Dear Old Dad, Take Your Son to Work Day was year-round. Jazz has witnessed crime scenes the way cops wish they could—from the criminal's point of view.

And now bodies are piling up in Lobo's Nod.

In an effort to clear his name, Jazz joins the police in a hunt for a new serial killer. But Jazz has a secret—could he be more like his father than anyone knows? (goodreads.com)

 
Before thirty-five girls were chosen to compete in the Selection...

Before Aspen broke America's heart...

There was another girl in Prince Maxon's life...

Don't miss this thrilling 128-page original novella set in the world of the New York Times bestselling novel The Selection. Also features a teaser to The Elite, Kiera Cass's hotly anticipated sequel to The Selection. (goodreads.com)