The other day, as I stood in my office at the Cony school library, I saw a seventh grader waltz by.

He was so happy to be in the library, he was doing a little dance.

Librarians live for moments like those.

Students in middle and high school, don’t always get excited about books and learning. But when they do, it’s a glorious sight to behold.

I happened to be doing orientations with freshmen that day. The middle-school student was on his lunch break. His elementary-school library was physically small; the Cony library is spacious, even when filled with a freshman class as well as high school students who had come in from study hall. I smiled; he was dancing because he had room to do so.

I wasn’t surprised by his joy. As the district librarian, I regularly spend time in the elementary schools and I knew that this student loves to read. If I taught a library class, he was the first student to want to share his thoughts. I hoped he would be able to hang on to his zeal. All indications so far are “go.”

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The freshmen, alas, were reluctant to show any enthusiasm. I understood. They had been at the top of the ladder in eighth grade, and now were starting out again at the bottom. Coolness, or the lack thereof, was a precious commodity.

As we waited for all of the students in one class to arrive, a young man asked me what we would be doing.

“A scavenger hunt,” I said. “It’s quite challenging. It’s a high school-level scavenger hunt.”

“I don’t like scavenger hunts.”

“I think it will be fun.”

He thought about it. “Are we going to be going around the building?”

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“No, but you will be walking around the library. And you can work in a team.”

“Oh, I like that.”

He immediately invited the boy next to him to join him, and both were quite impressed to hear there would be a prize for the top-achieving teams: a coffee and doughnuts event in the library’s workroom at a later date.

They were the first ones done.

The hunt required students to find certain types of books, to look for the editorial in that day’s Kennebec Journal, and to search the online databases of the Digital Maine Library. I thought one team had been impressively diligent about completing the activity because they spent so much time with it, but they confessed that they had been distracted by the database Ben’s Guide to U.S. Government for Kids. Coming from these students, I knew they weren’t joking.

I did an imaginary fist pump. I love it when students are distracted by civics lessons.

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Some students checked out books they encountered in their travels around the library; others took advantage of the opportunity to look at all the new books on display and found some to their liking.

Like stereotypical teenagers, they left a cloud of things behind, two laptops among them. I was interested to see several cookbooks, magazines and books of poetry on the tables the students had recently vacated. Those were items they had been assigned to search for. They had found them interesting enough to cart them across the room and look at them after they had completed the hunt.

Since no one was looking: real fist pump.

Librarians don’t have to work hard to get first graders interested in anything. Earlier in the week, at an elementary school, one boy was over the moon because he found a nonfiction picture book about soldiers. He wanted to tell me all about it, and, of course, I was a more than willing listener.

This encouraged 10 other first graders to show me the books they were checking out. Believe it or not, I was able to find something to say about each of them.

“I love Mo Willems!”

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“Starfish are the best. Have you ever found one on the beach?”

I was stymied about the book about teeth, until I remembered that they are a big deal to 6-year-olds, who regularly lose them.

Back at Cony, meanwhile, the dancing seventh-grader found two books he wanted to take out. Of course. Then he brought a third to the circulation desk. I said, “You can only take out two in seventh grade at first … in a few weeks you can take four.”

I heard how stupid that sounded. If any rule was meant to be broken, it was that one.

I checked out the third book — and had another librarian moment.

Liz Soares welcomes e-mail at lizzie621@icloud.com


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