---

Welcome to my middle school library. It gets a little loud in here, but I think you’ll find what you need.

---

As we begin this renewed blog journey together, I think you should know: I laugh every single day at work. Belly laughs, chuckles, giggles, and occasional snorts. I am certain that, to some, I give the impression that I am a very “unserious” librarian.

There is so much laughter — so much joy — to be found in librarianship.

Sometimes, the laughter in my library is generated by the absolute beautiful weirdness of middle schoolers simply existing in the world. Often, the laughter comes when pausing to acknowledge the absurdity of the balancing act working with this tender but overly worldly age group requires. As standard fare, the laughter comes as a natural extension of a book shared or a class taught. Once, memorably, laughter came in the form of a sparrow who flew in (to our non-windowed library in the center of the school) for a visit and refused to leave in spite of the coaxing and antics of multiple teachers, a calm custodian, an acrobatic assistant principal, and a determined and ingenious coach. Recently, a colleague and I burst into laughter while helping an art teacher remove the blue masking tape she’d been advised to add to books of artwork her young middle schoolers were using for research. No judgment, just laughter at the absurdity of the current state of tension between education and intellectual freedom and wanting students to be knowledgeable and informed while navigating community concerns.

In library school, we learn about collection development, cataloging, information literacy, teaching, research skills, and intellectual freedom. All of it vital to a well functioning library and all of it required to support our students and learning community. None of it as vital as sharing our library joy with our community.

Library joy looks like the kid who dramatically enacts a grand entrance every morning to share their latest highs and lows. It looks like the student who regularly chugs through a full lap of both the fiction and nonfiction stacks, touching nothing and leaving satisfied as though they’ve completed an important inspection. Library joy looks like the sixth grader who discovered that other people have written entire books about their exact brand of weird and practically levitates off the ground when another of these books reveals itself to be in our collection. It also looks like recognizing the occasionally absurd measures our teachers feel compelled to take to care for our students.

It may not be on our curriculum map, but that’s the job.

I spent a lot of years — teaching English, slinging books at the public library, dancing the Hokey Pokey with preschoolers — learning that the rooms where the best things happen are the rooms where people feel free enough to be themselves. Free enough to ask the “dumb” question. Free enough to say I don’t get it or I hate this or wait, is there more? Free enough, occasionally, to collapse dramatically over the circulation desk and declare they will die if they have to read their presentation aloud this afternoon in social studies class.

I have met so many people — good, well-meaning, serious people — who seem to believe that being professional and being joyful are two states in tension with each other. That if you are laughing, you are probably not working hard enough.

Those people have not spent enough time in a middle school library.

This work is serious. Creating space for intellectual freedom is serious. Getting the right book in the right hands at the right moment is serious. Fighting for school policies that support reading choice is serious. Supporting (and not shaming) teachers in their measures to find an appropriate balance of resources for their students is serious. Nurturing a culture for the kid who comes to the library because it is the only place in the building where nobody is going to look at them sideways — that is serious. I do not take it lightly. Any of it.

But I refuse to be grim.

Joy is not the opposite of rigor. It is not the enemy of expertise. Joy is what happens when you love what you’re doing enough to bring your whole self to it. It turns out my whole self thinks sixth graders are hilarious and books are extraordinary, and that having this particular job, in this particular library, in this particular community is a genuine privilege.

So, I laugh every day at work.

I laugh because the kids make me laugh. Because my colleagues make me laugh. Because books make me laugh, and also cry, and also occasionally stop me in my tracks.

I laugh because I’m paying attention. To all of it.

Dog-Eared & Overdue is written by a middle school librarian in northern New York who believes the library should be the best room in the building. Stay curious.