Friday was my last day. And what a fiasco it was!
I am worried. I hope that my retirement “sunset” metaphor doesn’t apply to the future of libraries.
Last days are almost always bitter-sweet as you can imagine. My first school year was 1970-1971, and my last school year was 2010-2011. FORTY years – thirty of them at Gananda. You can imagine the changes I have seen. Alas! On my last day it appears that others have seen no change at all. Here is how my day went.
8:00 – Last Faculty Meeting. Challenges for next year. Celebrations for this year. Good-byes to folks who are leaving. This was all lovely.
8:30 – 12:45 – Tying up loose ends and feeling very sad. My assistant’s last day was yesterday, so am feeling very lonely. DISCLAIMER: Lest you feel too sorry for me, I had a WONDERFUL retirement party on June 11. My colleagues are great, and appreciate my efforts. But anyone is bound to be sad on their last day after so many years.
11:45 – 11:55 – Carry the last of my personal effects out to car.
11:58 – One last look around my library (my baby), and I am off to my car with a tear or two in my eyes. I am in charge of the trail-hike for our Wellness Day that we always have on our last day. Seems like a good way to “march” happily off into the sunset of my retirement…
12:00 Noon – I pull out of the parking lot, feeling a bit sad and lonely. OK. A LOT sad and lonely. Where the HELL is the marching band and the crowds of adoring fans?
12:10 – I pull into the MacDonald’s drive-through, having stopped the sobbing and hiccuping long enough to order lunch.
12:11 – I realize that I have lost my wallet and have no money to pay for lunch. PANIC!!!
12:15 – I arrive at the hiking trail and shove the sign-in form at one of the participants, promising that I will be back to pick it up ASAP.
12:15 – 12:30 – Race home, miraculously avoiding any police speed traps, and find my wallet where it apparently fell on the floor last night.
12:30 – 12:45 – Race back to the hiking trail, again avoiding justice, throw on my hiking gear, pick up the sign-in papers, and I am finally ready to go.
12:55 – On the trail at last. Now I can relax and reflect back on my career as I stroll off into the sunset.
Well….not quite. It is sprinkling. Oh well. Surely it will stop soon. And it does. I get to enjoy the hike after all. Yay!
1:30 …. I meet some Gananda folks on the trail. One of them I know well. She is a very perceptive person and she tells me she has been thinking about me all day. I give her a hug. She introduces me to her elementary school teacher friends. We chat for awhile. AND THEN IT HAPPENS. In the course of the conversation, one of the elmentary teachers asks that question every librarian gets (usually multiple times) during his/her career. “OH. Do you have to go to SCHOOL to be a librarian?!” No honey, I just have to register a heartbeat. No brain waves required, as long as I can check out a book. It’s in the job description. I didn’t even have the strength to give my usual recitation of my degrees. I simply said “Of course we do” hoping she would feel like a dolt, and then changed the subject.
1:35 – It begins to sprinkle again….only harder this time. So, in spite of my strong desire to leave the group so I can SCREAM, I decide to turn around and get back to the parking lot.
1:40 – it begins to POUR. We start to run. The others are far better runners than I am and they get way ahead. Thankfully, my friend stays with me.
2:00 – By the time we get back we are literally drenched to the skin! We say good-bye and line our car seats with the rain gear we should have worn on the hike in the first place.
2:10 – The rest of my high school buddies are at an end of year party that I’d WANTED to attend. Alas! (or I guess I really should say “Hurray!”) – My hubby and his Mom had surprised me by arranging to see the Mormon Tabernacle Choir in an informal concert for anyone lucky enough to read the little blurb in the paper. I couldn’t say no to that, even in favor of a party. What could possibly be a better way to mark the end of my career than a rousing rendition of the Hallelujah Chorus by – of all groups – the Mormon Tabernacle Choir?!!
2:15 – 3:30 – I meet Bob and his mom at her house in Palmyra. I have to borrow a bathrobe and then put everything I was wearing into the dryer. My hair? …. oh well. I won’t know anyone at the concert anyway.
4:00 – We arrive at the concert. We wait. It is supposed to take place sometime between 4 and 5 pm – as soon as the bus arrives. Next thing we know, folks are all getting up to leave. Apparently, the bus broke down and the concert has been cancelled.
That is what the whole day has been. Why am I surprised? Anyway – we go off and have a nice meal and the day ends eventually.
9:00 pm – I can’t help but reflect. I have thrown myself heart and soul into this profession. And here are the two statements that have book-ended that career:
Fall, 1970 – I am in charge of a mid-sized middle school library. No library aide, so I must do it all myself. I enlist a crew of student helpers with assorted capabilities and disabilities…but lots of enthusiasm. One dear child was SO challenged, that I had to search for jobs that I could either do over myself quickly after she left, or I could actually just toss in the waste basket. No matter how I tried, I could not find a task that she could perform acceptably. But she was a nice little girl and so I did the best I could. At Open House, her mother came in gushing, “Oh Mrs. Henry. I am SO glad that my daughter is a library helper. You know, she is not very bright, so I am hoping that when she grows up she can be a librarian!” Well, how does one respond to THAT, I ask you?!! So, realizing that probably the apple did not fall far from the tree, I simply smiled and said I was glad that her daughter enjoyed helping.
June 24, 2011 – My last day of a 40 year career and I run into yet another person who says, “OH. Do you have to go to SCHOOL to be a librarian?!”
HUGE Sigh….
I have lived with this disrespect for our profession for decades. God bless you all that follow on from here. I hope you can change the ingrained stereotype in the future. I tried. Really I did. But even now, when we are so involved with teaching students information and technology skills – it is STILL there. Go forth and fight the good fight. Right now I am tired. I will bounce back, and hopefully find a way to continue the good fight in retirement.
I swear, my gravestone will say:
“Yes – I had to go to school for this. And if your school does not have a certified teacher-librarian with a masters degree, then you should SUE that school for malpractice!”
I cried when I read this. After 35 years of different careers I finally found my passion. YES I went to school for it! I see the value I add every day. Unfortunately it is not valued and I have been layed off 4 of the last five years. I’m now looking at going back to a previous profession and leaving my passion behind. It makes me very sad.
Many thanks for all you have done for everyone on LM-NET and for all your students. I have been a librarian for 35 years, the last 23 in schools. The public libraries are in circumstances as bad as ours. My big overriding concern is what happens to our country when there are not informed citizens voting and making their concerns known, when few people know how to look deeply into issues?
I guess I have been out of step. I have always thought librarians were the smartest people. They could find books that I absolutely loved, and they actually knew the stories in those books. How did they ever read so many books? And librarians knew where to find out absolutely anything. Long before “google” became a verb, somehow the librarian found the answers. I wanted to actually BE a librarian, but became an English teacher as the next best thing. How I loved to take my classes to the library and have them return with excitement about a book they had found…..with the help of the librarian who seemed to have read every book in the library and could pair up a book and a student, even a reluctant reader. In my eyes the librarian held the key to a student’s future, and could unlock infinite possibilities. Yes, that takes “going to school”, but it takes far more than that.
Jacquelyn, We are kindred spirits in our concern for deep reading. I love blogging…but am afraid the web 2.0 folks are finding even that too deep. It’s all twitter and quick comments on Facebook now. I enjoy Twitter as well…but it can reinforce the preference for the superficial.
Robin, Such a sad loss for our profession! I pray that the economic situation will improve soon, before school libraries are even more decimated.
Marylu, Thanks so much for commenting on my blog post. I am blessed to have worked with you. You had the greatest way of recognizing and honoring the troubles or upsets in children’s lives, and then helping them to turn their focus from the negative to the positive. I always admired that and am so glad that you were able to continue that after your retirement with a series of children, tutoring them with your tender, yet down-to-earth approach. This is a great time to reflect and treasure the special people who have stayed with me through career and into retirement.
I cannot imagine you not being there in the RACHS library. It just doe not seem right.
Yesterday I was at a family graduation party. Invariably, someone asks how I’m doing and how the job outlook is. One relative standing nearby overheard me telling someone else that NY state only mandates that there is one certified librarian per district and that the librarian must be on the secondary level. She thought that the mandated librarian should be on the lower level because “you can teach the library skills to the younger kids and then they will just know them when they get older.” I was a bit stunned by that one! All I could think of was the tenth grade research project and us not being there and having them fend for themselves. After all-they learned it all by 5th grade!
I just love the quote from the mother! You gotta love it!
Well, Jacquie, have a wonderful retirement.
I’m fortunate in that I have not been asked “that question” in quite a long time. I’m looking forward to my retirement — next year at this time — and that will be after 43 years as a teacher and 39 as a teacher librarian. All in all, a rewarding career which I wouldn’t give up for any other.
Thanks for all you’ve contributed to LM-NET over the years.
Fondly,
Tom Kaun
Hi Jacquie,
What a bittersweet day you had for your last day! Your concerns for the future of librarians sums up the way I have felt this past year. I love my job and really felt I’d finally found myself when I went to SCHOOL to become a librarian. I’ve been doing this for 11 years after a couple of other careers. I work at an education center with all ages of students. I cannot imagine their school careers without a certified librarian to assist with their research, information literacy, technology and just plain finding a good book to read. I have had high hopes that I can spend another 10 years before retiring but it’s not looking good. I’ve also had several seniors ask me if I had to go to school to become a media specialist. They look so dejected to find out that college is involved. And not one degree but two!! I wish you the best in the next phase of your life! Thanks for sharing everything!
Leslie
Wonderful post – I do wonder what’s going to happen to our profession as the trail blazers retire (we just lost one from one district too) and nobody with any sense selects to join it.
It is day #1 for summer school and I am sitting here at your desk. As you can tell…I am very busy, but Mr. P assures me that he will be in later with a class to dig in to research.
It seems so “empty” here. All of the toys are gone! How will I ever keep myself entertained? Hahahaha!
Before I started with the community library I was substituting for the Nye county School District. When I was interviewing with the Beatty HS principal he showed me the library and said that he was going to get a lot of computer and then they wouldn’t need a librarian. Dahh! Who did he think was going to teach the student to use the computers and do research (and find the facts no internet garbage)?
Then I started working at the Public library and after a year became Director. I retired after being Director of the Amargosa Valley Library for 6 years. I credit my education to Jacquie, many computer classes and plan old necessity. I realized my value when after 2 years of retirement I was asked to come back and get the library back in shape as the previous Director didn’t know what she was doing and really made a mess of things (including going $30,000 over budget). I thought I would only be there a short while but ended staying until a whole year and retired again June 30th. We were very fortunate when looking for a new Director because library jobs are so scarce (of coarse they are the first thing schools and governments are cutting) and we found someone who got her degree in April and couldn’t find a job. She is much younger than me and very energetic. I know she will not only carry on with all my hard work but will do even more than I was able to do. We are a very small community and have a contract with the county school district. We provide services for our K-8 school, so things get really busy. I don’t know when the people who manage the $ will realize the importance of libraries and librarians. But it better be soon, before (God forbid)we disappear!