vocation | the barefoot librarian

You’ve probably heard the saying “Choose a Job You Love, and You Will Never Have To Work a Day in Your Life” which is widely attributed to Confucius.

Sometimes when my alarm goes off at 5.30, I might disagree with the above quote, however, most of the time, from 7.30 am when I see the first students roll in, I feel fortunate to have a job I consider a vocation.

Some of the reasons I love my job include the wealth of resources at my disposal, human, digital, and physical. Our Shanghai American School Pudong Elementary School Library caters for students from PreK 3 – 5th grade. I am the sole librarian, and I am lucky enough to have two full time assistants. We have been a team of 3 for nearly 9 years now and have become stronger and smarter with our practice. Currently we have about 350 students, in 22 classes, so, if you’ve done the maths, you’ll see that our class sizes are relatively small, and if you are ready for more mathematical fun, we have well over 25,000 print books which is well above any recommended library quotas I’ve ever seen. Add to that a solid collection of Ipod nano’s (now considered vintage!), Ipads and kindles stocked with e and audio books that students can check out, and you can see we also have a robust digital collection. Oh, and we are spoiled with a growing collection of over 7,000 digital books in our Overdrive collection. I know I know, I am one very lucky librarian.

Job of the day…and I use that term loosely…read these picture books to children. #score #kidlit #saslibrary pic.twitter.com/E2SUiO8orm
— Barefoot Librarian (@kimbrap) October 16, 2017