So what is the hot new commodity at Sacred Heart Parish School? It’s not Pokemon cards, it’s not baseball cards or stickers or anything so mundane. No way. It’s old library book cards.
Remember when you were in school and you wanted to check out a book? You signed your name on a card and the librarian filed it by due date. Yes, those cards.
I volunteer in the library at my son’s school. We are in the process of automating, that is, moving from the little cards to bar codes. So we’ve been throwing out a lot of those little cards. We threw out about 6000 of these little cards in the last year.
All of a sudden the kids are collecting them. One of the fourth graders found some in the trash and was sorting them when her friends started asking her for them. Then they started coming in and asking for them, so we started saving them and giving them away. We try to parcel them out fairly and evenly so as to avoid chaos.
They are trading them like baseball cards. Some kids are collecting cards from books by a certain author like Beverly Cleary. Some kids want Harry Potter book cards. Others are looking for cards from books on specific subjects like football or WWII. Helen Keller’s biography book card has been hot. One girl traded a Harry Potter and a couple other cards for Hellen Keller today. Some kids are trying to collect cards from books they have checked out themselves.
Cards are also valued by color and number of times the book has been checked out. The blue cards are the oldest (pre-1998) and therefore the most valuable. After 1998 we had white or cream colored cards. After color consideration, the more times it’s been checked out, the more valuable.
Anyway, I really felt I must share this with you all.
Wow. Hopefully this will lead to the kids actually gasp reading some of the books whence came these cards. But even in and of itself, this is a very intriguing phenomenon from a sociological standpoint. It shows that the tendency of human societies to form an economic structure is independent of the resources available to that society. It would be nice to go even further, and conclude that said tendency is an inherent quality of all human societies, but we cannot discount the fact that the larger society the schoolchildren are embedded in may have already planted the idea of an economic structure in their heads.
When I was in high school, they announced they were going to tear down my old grade school the following year.
For no particular reason, I went to my grade school during the summer and the principal was there and let me walk down memory lane.
I went to my sixth grade classroom and was looking through their library (each classroom had their own books) and saw an old book in the corner I remembered reading. It must not have been all that popular as, to my amazement, there was a library card that still had my name on it!
I “stole” the card. It is long since lost, but I think your school missed a great opportunity to contact old alumni and offer to sell the cards to the highest bidder, and use the money to buy new books!
Still, it is cool that the kids at least realized the value of the cards.