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In the spirit of reunification and the inclusion of teens into the charge of the Library Services to Underserved Children and their Caregivers Committee:

Many years ago, when I was regularly doing outreach to juvenile detention centers as a teen librarian, I arranged a summer schedule with an intake center nearby. The site served teen boys who were waiting for their placements—they might be released to their parents or assigned to a non-secure or secure detention facility. The center was very short-term; the boys were there no more than a week so planning programming meant something that was contained to that hour-long visit but couldn’t be the same week-to-week because there would be some overlap.

That year, the summer reading theme was Get a Clue/You Never Know (I did say this was many years ago!) and as I struggled to come up with an activity for my first visit, I looked at the elementary school booklist my system had prepared. One of the books on the list was Stories to Solve: Folktales from Around the World told by George Shannon (illustrated by Peter Sis). I read through it and picked out some of the riddle stories that I thought the teens might be able to solve and hoped for the best.

It was a small group, five or six teen boys, ages 14 or 15. We met in a semi-outside classroom space at the site. The teens were understandably unimpressed when I arrived and I prepared myself for what was about to be an epic failure.

With the very first story, the boys were enthralled. Even though they didn’t solve the riddles, they loved hearing the stories and the solutions. “Miss, miss, do another one!” they kept saying and I ended up reading almost every story in the book.

I returned to the library and a couple of hours later, my phone rang. It was the site director. She said, “I don’t know what you did, but you made some impression!” She went on to say that she had arrived after I left and as soon as they saw her, the boys started peppering her with the stories, trying to stump her. She was shocked and impressed that they’d paid close enough attention that they remembered the stories and solutions and were still excited enough about them to share them with her. It was one of those rare moments as a librarian when I could actually know the impact I’d had.

I share this story a lot because it is (still) one of my career highlights, but more because it goes to show you never know what might work with teens if you give it a try. By any measure, this was a challenging group—a bunch of teen guys I’d never met, waiting to see what their life was going to be like in the most serious of circumstances, forced to listen to some library lady on a warm summer morning. And I showed up with a book of folktales for kids. But it worked.

Today’s blog post was written by Dr. Vikki C. Terrile, Associate Professor at the School of Information Studies at Queens College, CUNY, on behalf of the Library Services to Underserved Children and Their Caregivers Committee.

The post Sometimes, It Works appeared first on ALSC Blog.