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[This year's December Days are categorized! Specifically: "Things I should have learned in library school, had (I/they) been paying attention. But I can make that out of just about anything you'd like to know about library school or the library profession, so if you have suggestions, I'll happily take them.]
A couple years ago, one of my school visit librarians complained about my "classroom management" skills - essentially that I had been unable to keep a lid on the excitement of the students while trying to get them pumped up about doing the summer reading program while they had been off trying to do last-minute inventory in the library and their teachers were having a planning period.
Schools: Don't leave me alone with the children without one of their teachers or librarians around to ride herd on them. I'm the guest, and even if I know the ways that you ask for quiet and so forth from the students, they're less likely to take me seriously about it without the librarian present or their teacher there to communicate exactly who was being ill-behaved and to produce consequences. Plus, it's my job to get them excited while getting through my presentation.
Elsewhere, there is always a contingent of people in the library who are offended at the idea that we allow children, and especially teenagers, inside the library and permit them to converse with each other while they are there, because "libraries are supposed to be quiet" (possibly prefaced by "when we were in the library," which is an attempt to get sympathy from me that will backfire, because I don't like a silent library. Not helping things are the layouts of many of our locations, which weren't designed with the idea that teenagers want to use the library and have a space to themselves, by carving out a teen space right next to, or taking a chunk from, what was the quiet reading space. Most libraries were built before teen services became an actual thing, and therefore have not been designed with the idea that children and teens are going to be conversant and loud, so the sound that comes from those spaces echoes its way across the library, further intruding upon the utopian ideals that people have about silence in the library.
Naturally, whenever someone wants to complain about the fact that there are other people in the library who do not share their vision of what the libray is like, they come to us. Most frequently, it's "those teenagers are being too loud" or "those teenagers are using language that is inappropriate for my child to hear / that I don't want to hear." Good teen services says that teenagers have a right to be in the library as well, and teen brain research and development says that adolescence and early adulthood is the time when a person's brain is focused on externalities, like finding friends and meeting new people and being concerned about what others think about them. It's also a time where teenagers are flexing their newfound independence powers by using language and exploring topics that were forbidden to them as children when within earshot of the grownups in their lives.
It's also good services to deal with everyone equally and consistently, regardless of which staff member is approached. Which is not necessarily a thing that happens when it comes to complaints about the teens, because behavior complaints can trigger parental reactions in some staffers, sympathy about those dang kids in others, and "the library will never be that silent place in your imagination, deal" in me for many of those complaints, even if things are getting loud in the teen area. It's difficult to garner a consistent response across staffers, because our own tolerances are different.
My location is helping to solve the problem by buying and installing a sound monitor in the teen area, so that we have an objective criterion to point to and say "this impartial machine says you're being too loud. Knock it off." Which, as it turns out, is far more sensitive to sound near it than it is to sound farther away from it, so a normal conversation at the tables nearby can set it off, and some amount of noise coming from the other end won't. And, for the longest time, the settings were set on it such that it fired off a warning, in my opinion, at far to low a threshold for sound, so when the groups of teens would come in, and converse normally with each other, they would be setting off the warnings of things being too loud constantly. It's only recently that I've been able to say that it should be set at a reasonable level all the time, because I answered the question confidently when it was posed at a staff meeting. As expected, the warning now fires off much less frequently, and only when it's getting to a reasonably loud volume in the area.
That still doesn't stop the complaints about language usage, of course. And I think that the teenagers get a specific call-out on language usage that grown-ups in other areas of their lives don't, because people also have a mythic idea that teenagers aren't supposed to know those words, much less have the audacity to use them within the hearing of a grownup or child. Yeah, those words that have been essentially pervasive in their culture since they were children, or at least old enough to start listening to unedited popular music and to watch films and programs that use those words. But because we're adults and they're not, the assumption is that they should be deferential to us based solely on the fact that we're adults and they're not.
Fuck that noise.
We're the library. We treat everyone who comes in as a valued person with information (and other) needs, and we do our best to provide for information and entertainment needs with our resources, whether you're eight, eighteen, or eighty. And yes, sometimes those needs are going to come into conflict, but no, that doesn't mean that we're automatically going to side with the person making the complaint based on the fantastic world in their head.
At least, that's the theory. About as far as I've managed to get the staff to budge on it is to be a little more tolerant and lenient about when we go over to talk to the teenagers about the noise levels. There are still several people on staff who appear to treat our teenagers as problems waiting to happen instead of valued customers. (That could be a difference in communication styles, where heir directness comes off as dismissive and rude to me. I don't think it's all that, though.)
Library school focused a lot on people-to-systems interactions, and on the ways that people interact with systems. Not as much on how one might have to do crowd control - at least, people who weren't on the school libraries track, that is. Library school has its own mythic idea of the library, and that idea rarely intersects with the reality of what it's like out in the field.
A couple years ago, one of my school visit librarians complained about my "classroom management" skills - essentially that I had been unable to keep a lid on the excitement of the students while trying to get them pumped up about doing the summer reading program while they had been off trying to do last-minute inventory in the library and their teachers were having a planning period.
Schools: Don't leave me alone with the children without one of their teachers or librarians around to ride herd on them. I'm the guest, and even if I know the ways that you ask for quiet and so forth from the students, they're less likely to take me seriously about it without the librarian present or their teacher there to communicate exactly who was being ill-behaved and to produce consequences. Plus, it's my job to get them excited while getting through my presentation.
Elsewhere, there is always a contingent of people in the library who are offended at the idea that we allow children, and especially teenagers, inside the library and permit them to converse with each other while they are there, because "libraries are supposed to be quiet" (possibly prefaced by "when we were in the library," which is an attempt to get sympathy from me that will backfire, because I don't like a silent library. Not helping things are the layouts of many of our locations, which weren't designed with the idea that teenagers want to use the library and have a space to themselves, by carving out a teen space right next to, or taking a chunk from, what was the quiet reading space. Most libraries were built before teen services became an actual thing, and therefore have not been designed with the idea that children and teens are going to be conversant and loud, so the sound that comes from those spaces echoes its way across the library, further intruding upon the utopian ideals that people have about silence in the library.
Naturally, whenever someone wants to complain about the fact that there are other people in the library who do not share their vision of what the libray is like, they come to us. Most frequently, it's "those teenagers are being too loud" or "those teenagers are using language that is inappropriate for my child to hear / that I don't want to hear." Good teen services says that teenagers have a right to be in the library as well, and teen brain research and development says that adolescence and early adulthood is the time when a person's brain is focused on externalities, like finding friends and meeting new people and being concerned about what others think about them. It's also a time where teenagers are flexing their newfound independence powers by using language and exploring topics that were forbidden to them as children when within earshot of the grownups in their lives.
It's also good services to deal with everyone equally and consistently, regardless of which staff member is approached. Which is not necessarily a thing that happens when it comes to complaints about the teens, because behavior complaints can trigger parental reactions in some staffers, sympathy about those dang kids in others, and "the library will never be that silent place in your imagination, deal" in me for many of those complaints, even if things are getting loud in the teen area. It's difficult to garner a consistent response across staffers, because our own tolerances are different.
My location is helping to solve the problem by buying and installing a sound monitor in the teen area, so that we have an objective criterion to point to and say "this impartial machine says you're being too loud. Knock it off." Which, as it turns out, is far more sensitive to sound near it than it is to sound farther away from it, so a normal conversation at the tables nearby can set it off, and some amount of noise coming from the other end won't. And, for the longest time, the settings were set on it such that it fired off a warning, in my opinion, at far to low a threshold for sound, so when the groups of teens would come in, and converse normally with each other, they would be setting off the warnings of things being too loud constantly. It's only recently that I've been able to say that it should be set at a reasonable level all the time, because I answered the question confidently when it was posed at a staff meeting. As expected, the warning now fires off much less frequently, and only when it's getting to a reasonably loud volume in the area.
That still doesn't stop the complaints about language usage, of course. And I think that the teenagers get a specific call-out on language usage that grown-ups in other areas of their lives don't, because people also have a mythic idea that teenagers aren't supposed to know those words, much less have the audacity to use them within the hearing of a grownup or child. Yeah, those words that have been essentially pervasive in their culture since they were children, or at least old enough to start listening to unedited popular music and to watch films and programs that use those words. But because we're adults and they're not, the assumption is that they should be deferential to us based solely on the fact that we're adults and they're not.
Fuck that noise.
We're the library. We treat everyone who comes in as a valued person with information (and other) needs, and we do our best to provide for information and entertainment needs with our resources, whether you're eight, eighteen, or eighty. And yes, sometimes those needs are going to come into conflict, but no, that doesn't mean that we're automatically going to side with the person making the complaint based on the fantastic world in their head.
At least, that's the theory. About as far as I've managed to get the staff to budge on it is to be a little more tolerant and lenient about when we go over to talk to the teenagers about the noise levels. There are still several people on staff who appear to treat our teenagers as problems waiting to happen instead of valued customers. (That could be a difference in communication styles, where heir directness comes off as dismissive and rude to me. I don't think it's all that, though.)
Library school focused a lot on people-to-systems interactions, and on the ways that people interact with systems. Not as much on how one might have to do crowd control - at least, people who weren't on the school libraries track, that is. Library school has its own mythic idea of the library, and that idea rarely intersects with the reality of what it's like out in the field.
