The year has finally ended, with this article posting on the first weekday of what I hope will be a fun, rejuvenative summer break. With the academic year behind us, I wanted to look back on the library, to celebrate its successes and the successes of my students.
Turned Pages
End of Year Stats
991 Total Books
850+ Total Titles
590+ Total Authors
411 Books Added
~20 Books Donated
315 Total Borrows
8.32/10 Avg Student Rating
On August 8th, 2016, I was introduced to my students, approximately 75 young men and women that would generously share my class (and their time) for more than one hundred and thirty hours over the course of the school year. On this same day, these students were introduced to my library, then 580 books strong, a number that would balloon to 991 by the time these students left my classroom and our academic year behind on June 2nd, 2017.
These nearly one thousand books cover a variety of genres. I have novels that will coax you into weeping with sadness or fury. You can be disgusted or overjoyed. There are curiosities and classics. There are stories that were written hundreds of years ago and those published this year, with settings that cover the space between and extend into the far future. These novels are varied in complexity as well, with some of literature's great classics shelved next to schlock horror and parody. There is even some non-fiction narrative and biography snuggled in there to inform, amaze, and terrify.
Highest Rated '16-17
Orson Scott Card - Ender's Game
Neil Shusterman - Unwind Series
John Green - Paper Towns
Cormac McCarthy - The Road
Robert Ludlum - Bourne Identity
George R.R. Martin - A Game of Thrones
John Gardner - Grendal
Marissa Meyer - Cinder
arren Shan - Larten Crepsley & Cirque du Freak Series
Paul Beatty - The Sellout
The library is not impressive for its variety or volume only. Part of what makes this library work is a system using Google Sheets that allows me to place my books into a searchable database. The entry for each book identifies it by any of more than twenty genres and more than thirty interest areas; by publication date; by the author's gender, ethnicity, and orientation; by ratings from the millions of readers on Goodreads.com and the hundreds of students that have borrowed from this library. This database has been a passion project for me for two years now, but as the library expanded it has only been possible to maintain with the help of two now-graduated seniors, Simon and Imam. These two aides came in and added new books or new categorical information nearly every day for the length of the year, and to them I am indebted. The end result of all of these labors is a library that can help students find the book they want. Want a book about high school, but within an escapist fantasy? I can find it. Want a hero's journey written by or about a character who looks like you, who feels like you, who struggles with identity like you? I can help.
While I am proud of our library, I am even more proud of my students. This year, my students borrowed 315 books from the Lydon Library! Some of these were passed between students without them ever being reshelved; instead, they were immediately checked out by the next person. Of some books I have multiple copies, and a few of these were borrowed simultaneously. Our books were shared, enjoyed, and discussed. In total, of those 315 checked out, 252 were ultimately completed before being returned. That is an 80% completion rate, which is phenomenal! I have, throughout the year, encouraged students to abandon books that don't work for them. (Sometimes we are reading the right book at the wrong time or the wrong book for any time, and we do ourselves a disservice by enslaving ourselves to the completion of these texts where completion isn't compulsory.)
My Students Read
What's most interesting is that most of these abandoned books were set aside in the earlier part of the year. In the first months of our year, approximately 7 out of every 20 books were being abandoned, but by the final months of the year only 4 of every 20 were being left incomplete. This means that in the course of the academic year, students became better stewards of their own reading, learning to find the right book, to make the time to finish it, and to move on to something new! Additionally, books borrowed in the end of the year tended to be rated just a little higher, suggesting that not only were the latter-year books being finished more consistently, but they were more rewarding to their readers as well.
But my books were not the only books students were reading. In total, my students reported reading and completing more than 430 books, amounting to nearly 8 books per student on average. This is an astounding feat, and represents more than 150,000 pages read over the course of the academic year. It cannot be said that my students are not readers. My students read!
Even with all of this reading, in the three years of the Lydon Library, there are still new books not yet explored - in no small part due to how rapidly I'm adding new titles. Currently, 477 books have never been borrowed by a student. How many, among these, are gems waiting for a curious reader, someone to explore a new setting, discover a challenge, character, or world that needs to be passed to the next reader, to be discussed? I'm excited at the prospect, and I hope that this library always offers an oasis of exploration for students eager to be the first to thumb a crisp (or even slightly worn) page.
New Books!
These books pushed the library over 1,000! Onto the next thousand...
And new books are being added all the time. In fact, because being nine books shy of an even one-thousand was mildly infuriating, I payed a visit to Grassroots books just this past weekend. With the new additions, the library will be twenty books past that milestone once shelved and databased.
Making the Library Work
It is important to me that this library provides students with easy, regular access to and experimentation with books, and for this reason I have never expected any money to keep it up. That isn't changing. Over the course of a year, I do tend to lose some books, however. The first year of the library I lost ten books, the second year I lost about 13, and I'm happy to report that our recently concluded year only resulted in a loss of five. Some of these books will - belatedly - find themselves returned, a couple tend to be replaced with donations, but a few just disappeared. I expect this. While it is unfortunate that those books are lost to future students, my hope is that the students who took them home finished and enjoyed them (and maybe even shared them with their friends).
That doesn't make replacing books any cheaper. If every book in my library cost as much as the cheapest local used paperback (about $1.99), my room would still contain more than a couple thousand dollars worth of books. Thankfully, I have been fortunate to have friends and family that help support the library, to keep it growing. My mom browses thrift stores regularly, my dad has provided me with some gift certificates to make purchases, and I have even had some truly excellent human beings as students who wanted to share books by donating from their own home libraries (a couple even bought brand new books, and one purchased for me an entire series - thanks Destinee!). The remainder come from me, either from my own personal library at home or bought for the benefit of my students.
All of this is about ensuring that my students - past, present, and future - can explore the world through literature. If this is something that you value, there is an easy way that you can keep it going.
The link above will direct you to Amazon.com. If you bookmark and use that link or click the button to visit Amazon before you shop, every purchase you make will throw a few cents into the library. It isn't much, but just by using that link to do your regular Amazon shopping, you can help the Lydon Library provide more books and a better experience to students. If possible, encourage your families and friends to use this link too! In time, I intend to grow my library to include better quality (not falling apart) shelves, a selection of digital books, and even eReaders. These contributions also make maintaining my existing library and acquiring books that students want much easier too.
If you would like to make a more direct contribution, you can click on the link below to view and purchase books from my Library Wish List. This is principally a list I use to track books that I hope to acquire myself, but if you would like to donate directly to the library, this is one way of doing so. I would also gladly accept any books from your home libraries, should they be overflowing (and I hope that they are).
If you have found a book that spoke to you, that took you away into a new life, a new place, or a new series of previously unimagined events, helping to ensure others can experience the same is a great gift. I appreciate your help.
I hope you do not mind me requesting this assistance. I wait until the end of the year because I do not want a barrier to my students' access to this library, real or imagined. Instead, I hope that after a year of reading voraciously, there is an appreciation for the 2016-17 library that will compel students, parents, faculty, friends, family, and our larger community to help keep the pages turning.
Thanks, and happy reading.
-Mr. Lydon