April 7, 2025
By Elizabeth Cutler, Grants Manager
Listen to this week’s Hooray For Monday podcast for the audio version of this newsletter.
When I turned ten years old, one of the things I was most excited about was a tiny brown envelope.
That’s right: on par with being a double-digit age and starting fifth grade, I was eager to finally get a “grown up” library card at Radnor Memorial Library, in suburban Pennsylvania where I grew up. For understandable reasons, the library gave younger children less-permanent cards. They were printed on perforated cardstock, designed to be replaced often for young readers who might misplace them once or a hundred times.
But when we turned ten, we could get an adult library card that was plastic (so you know it’s really permanent) that came in a perfectly card-sized little brown envelope. I saw cards withdrawn from those little brown envelopes every time I went to the library and eagerly anticipated what I had turned into a rather dramatic rite of passage in my young mind.
At the time, I just knew that I loved reading and the library. Looking back, I know that I felt the magic of a public library that I can now put into words. This National Library Week, I’m especially aware that libraries serve a unique function in society: hubs of reading, literacy, and knowledge that are also havens for children and families in need; people seeking vital career skills and public health access; and more. And as many others have observed, they are one of the few remaining places where we can go without the expectation of spending money. Libraries are special, and Inspired Teaching has had a front-row seat to just how special the DC Public Libraries are right here in our home city.
For many years, we’ve been grateful to work closely with DCPL both as a space where we hold our teacher trainings and youth programs, and as a repository for the oral histories our Real World History students create each year. Starting in 2020 we established a permanent collection in DCPL’s DigDC of the interviews the students conduct with elders who came to the city through the Great Migration. As my colleague Cosby Hunt frequently notes, these history-makers will not be with us indefinitely, but thanks to this collection, their voices will endure.
Through our frequent use of these beautiful spaces, we have also developed a deep appreciation for the many things our libraries provide that go beyond books. The computer labs give access to technology, the reading rooms offer blankets if you’re cold, the cafe at MLK Library provides jobs for those previously or currently unhoused, and this is to say nothing of the incredible art and culture exhibits, performances, and resources that seem always to be changing and shining a light on previously uncelebrated parts of our city.
The Negro Motorist Green Book and last year’s Undesign the Red Line are just two examples of such exhibits that, again, are free – making them extraordinary nodes of access to learning and intellectual exploration beyond the books on their (many!) shelves. And speaking of learning beyond books, did you know that a DC library card grants you access to LinkedIn Learning, streaming up to 30 films a month through Kanopy, and reading more than 7,000 publications worldwide – all without even setting foot in a physical library location? (I did not know about the last one until writing this issue of Hooray For Monday!)
When the Inspired Teaching team uses library meeting rooms for events and youth programs, library staff help set up the space and address any technical issues with their excellent sound systems and projection equipment. They help with temperature adjustments and, when meals are provided, set up the food stations. They are always responsive and enthusiastic about us being there, for which we are endlessly grateful.
When ten-year old me was anxiously anticipating my “grown up” library card, I could not have known what it really meant in the greater scheme of my own life and the incredible world of libraries in general. I just knew that the library I grew up with felt special and magical—and now so do the public libraries in the city where I’ve chosen to live as an adult, Washington, DC.
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Hooray For Monday is an award-winning weekly publication of Center for Inspired Teaching, a social change nonprofit organization that champions the power of curiosity and is dedicated to transforming the school experience from compliance-based to engagement-based. Inspired Teaching provides transformative, improvisation-based professional learning for teachers that is 100% engaging – intellectually, emotionally, and physically.
