This is the Nazi Library

I think it must have been Ann Klotz’s quite lovely post that did it. It’s about her office and her work as a head of schooI and I read it yesterday. 

“Mine is a wonderful, complicated, fascinating job,” she writes in her reflections on her days and on the fourteen years of a headship.

You can read My Office, Myself here 

And then last night I dreamt I had to go back and be a head of school, just for a day.

In my dream I am on the floor helping with some maple blocks in the kindergarten. We are building a small city with farm animals on the top. Someone is reading a story. I am called away by an announcement about a possible dead baby in a rag bundle being passed along in the assembly hall. I must try and retrieve the bundle and find out what on earth is going on. There is a bundle being passed hand over head down the seated rows but it’s passed to the far end and disappears out of sight.

Meanwhile a prospective parent with small children in tow has taken it upon herself to wander round the building. “What is behind this door,” she asks pointing to a door set up some steps several feet above the floor.

It opens and a girl appears and says,” This is the nazi library.” And goes back in closing the door behind her.

“I‘ll take care of it,”  I tell the woman and climb the steps and open the door. Inside is a nicely appointed library with long glossy wooden tables with green shaded reading lamps. And it’s full of children poring happily over large coffee table books of pictures of Nuremberg rallies. And off in the corner is a small group harmonizing a Nazi anthem. “We are practicing for the talent show,” they tell me.

I make my way to the librarian’s desk on the far side of the room desk where a very young and small librarian with bright red lipstick tells me that libraries are for the free exchange of ideas and smirks at me. I clear the room of the students and launch into full administrator outrage thinking of what I will say to the board chair and how I will communicate to families about the sudden departure of the librarian.

And now it’s dismissal time and the rag bundle may be being smuggled out the building so I stand at the door ready to check backpacks ….

But there are many doors ….

Maybe it wasn’t Ann’s post. Maybe I have been reading too much about the misadministration in Washington D.C. But do read Ann’s story. It won’t give you nightmares.