applejee

eagerly awaiting the reveal of what political science 101 concept is she going to stop the plot to teach middle schoolers about. we got bread and circuses we got the extended work on thomas hobbes my money is on haymitch starting this book as an objectivist and having to unlearn that in the face of true struggle

REAL

oh it is definitely not im genuine. i am fully aware that the series is on the younger end of YA and so ms. collins meets the audience where they’re at. love and admire her clear commitment to using her books to teach middle schoolers introductory political theory i think that’s something that should really really be accessible to kids.

Kids are smart enough to realize what the books are about. Adults make fun of them and then say they're about a girl who likes two boys. But Collins has never missed. And her readers know it.

Amazing how I’m a grown adult and I still cannot shake the exact same childhood feeling of thinking im going to “get in trouble”

sometimes a theme recurs in your work without your permission. and sometimes it reaches a threshold where you're like. well now i think this is saying something about me against my will. don't know what though

based off batman year one artist edition

when my brother and i were kids we got in trouble for using the term "dadding" to mean making a promise you have no intent to follow thru on which is a testament to this country's disdain for creative types

Charlie Brown

you wouldn’t last an hour in the asylum where they raised me

i hauve a cold

newbie asked if we're supposed to look out for 'red flags' in interlibrary loan requests in reference to a request a patron had made for a book about cannibalism. she was looking expectantly at me like she was expecting me to be equally aghast at this........girl why would you work at a library if you want to play book police

I'm fascinated to know what kind of world this girl lives in. For what reason are those books in the library at all if not to be checked out and read? Are they there as honeypots for Problematic People™? If you check out a Red Flag Book™, you've fallen into the Evil Person Trap™ and need to be taken in for reeducation, I suppose.

On the other side of this, I love the mental image of a guy who’d really like to get into cannibalism but doesn’t know where to start, so he heads down to his local library for some pointers.

#yeah don’t be weird about what they read — but like um — asking for a book on how to abuse your child is kind of a request that I#dont want to complete and I’m glad to not be there anymore#like I’m a mandatory reporter and have been asked to get a book on how to abuse children — um — conflict of interest no?#and this is not a case of my exaggeration — that book when searched had news articles and lawsuits because children died#it wasn’t in our system so I had to send it to the ILL person and it was their judgement call#but yikes

So I understand having a reaction like that on a gut level (I'm guessing the book was To Train Up a Child, as I've read several news articles about abuse cases in which it was mentioned), but here's the crucial thing that we learn in our very first semester of library school:

You do not know why somebody wants to read a particular book.

Is it possible they wanted to read it for terrible fundamentalist Christian parenting advice? Sure. But it's also possible they read the same news articles about the abuse cases that I did and were simply intrigued about what the book actually said. It's possible they were doing research on fundamentalism or abuse and thought it was an important piece of material to include. It's possible they suspected their own parents used were inspired by the book and wanted to have a better understanding about what happened to them as a child. It's possible they actually wanted How to Train Your Dragon and got the titles confused. You just don't know!

Like, I can't tell you how many times I've had somebody ask for materials on topics that I find unsavoury, only to learn later that said person was doing research on extremism, denial, etc. and very much didn't agree with the materials in question. Hell, sometimes I have students coming in saying "I need help finding scholarly articles on why vaccines are bad/gay marriage shouldn't be legal/Women don't deserve equal pay/etc," only to have it turn out the student is actually making the opposite argument in their paper, but were told by the instructor they need to have one credible opposing source.

The reasons people have for reading things are not cut and dry, and even if somebody is more inclined to have a certain viewpoint, you still can't know with any certainty what they'll actually think of the book once they've read it. They could agree with the premise. They could disagree with it. They could find it boring and not absorb much of the content. They could forget to read the book before it's due back and return it without even cracking the spine.

We cannot presume to know the intentions of our patrons based solely on the content they're requesting. That kind of logic is for cops, not librarians.

penis dashboard kind of night

The average tumblr user is ostensibly in favor of multiculturalism and universal tolerance but also has the bone-deep certainty that there is one Correct set of etiquette to follow in all situations and anyone who doesn't understand and accept it should be viciously mocked like the unpopular kids in a 1980s teen comedy.

"The creator definitely didn't put that much thought into it" well then clearly someone else has to and I think I'm the weirdo for the job