Having a strong religious foundation was my parents’ top priority when I was growing up. They were college-educated and supplemented my academic education at home. I picked up my huge vocabulary from them, but I didn’t know that K-12 schools had libraries, much less librarians.
The first time I entered a school library that wasn’t at a university was after I had been hired as an English teacher in a high school. I distinctly remember walking in, in awe, and asking, “What is this place and how do I work here?” That made the librarian chuckle, but it planted the seed for the next branch of my career.
Since I know the distinct disadvantages of missing out on having a library and librarians, I am especially conscientious of the experience my students have. There was no one in my life as a kid to ask me to think outside the box. The first time I learned I could disagree with a text, I was in college. That’s way too late. So the most important thing I keep in mind as a librarian is that I am trying to make my students think creatively and encourage them to problem solve rather than searching online or asking for the answer. It’s important to me to encourage as many students as I can to think creatively, disagree with texts, and challenge the way things have always been done. Otherwise, I’m complicit in letting young citizens fall into a mindset that makes them more likely to fall for authoritarianism.
Sometimes it feels like high school librarians are the childless aunties and uncles of the teaching world. I have more freedom than the teachers in my school to challenge students on how they think, and what kind of impact they want to leave on the world. We reinforce what the teachers have been saying — your opinion matters, your voice matters, you are allowed to disagree — then watch as comprehension dawns on teens’ faces. Sometimes, they need a different adult to say it in a slightly different way for it to click. It’s not as “cool” or “relevant” coming from the boring old teacher the kids see day in and day out. That freedom feels more urgent every day. A student who can disagree with a text, who can question what they’ve been handed, is a student who is harder to manipulate.
Recommending books is another way I can impact students’ lives in a way mine never was. It’s my job to be up to date on what’s trending, to read alongside the students, to shine a light on the authors who don’t usually get much attention in the classroom. The normal people in a kid’s life — parents, coaches, the teachers they see every day — tend to recommend what they already know. I get to go further. I get to recommend graphic novels and romance, genres often dismissed by academia. I get to expose students to more women writers, writers of color, neurodivergent writers, works in translation, LGBTQ+ writers, and more. I have the privilege of introducing students to their next favorite author, someone whom they may have never heard of before. Then, I get to be the person who tells them about that author’s extensive backlist.
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I think about the librarian I never had — the person who might have handed me a book by an author who thought like me, who might have told me I was allowed to push back, who might have cracked open the world a little earlier than college did. I can’t go back and be that person for younger me, but I can be that person for every student who walks through my library doors. That’s not a small thing. In a world that is increasingly telling young people what to think, a librarian who hands a kid the right book at the right moment is a radical act.