Library’s New Teen Room An Active Place

Jenna Carlino plays Scrabble in the teen room.

FALMOUTH- “I wish you had an N or an E,” says Jenna Carlino, a Lawrence School student, as she advises one of her friends playing a game of Scrabble. Across the room, two boys huddle in front of a computer screen, sharing a set of headphones. Fingernails click across keyboards, instant messaging and doing homework at the same time.
A girl sits at a desk with her books open, and looks up as two girls come in, drop their book bags, and flop across the couches. They seem as comfortable as they would be in their living rooms at home. They are in the new teen room at Falmouth Public Library.
Back at the Scrabble game, they are playing something like Scrabble, but it is closer to anarchy.
There are words placed horizontally, vertically, diagonally, and backward. There are words that run together and make incomprehensible clusters of consonants.
At the top of the board, separated from all the other letters, the word “zoo” is dangling off the triple word score, down, backward, and diagonally, like a swinging rope in a monkey house. 
The other words, played in every conceivable direction, could be a random collection of teenage vocabulary, or they could mean something more. They seem to want to mean something more.
To a parent, the words might be a clue to what is really happening inside those teenage brains. The words on the board include car, drive, lie, sex, gun and die.
But the other words on the board seem more innocent: poor, Turks, and oar.
Jessica Lambert, another Lawrence School student, rolls up in a chair and says, “I’m joining.” It is at least halfway through the game, but no one seems to care.
“I’m going to get so many points on this one,” says Krista Hansen, a Falmouth High School student, playing on the opposite side, as she looks around the board for a place to put her new word.
The rules of Scrabble scoring, adding up the numbers on the tiles, and multiplying some by the amount designated on certain spaces, are not being followed. Jenna adds up the numbers from the letter distribution chart on the side of the board, before she realizes she has made a mistake.
Michael Byron, who graduated from Falmouth High School last summer, the friend that Jenna is helping, says, “We’re scoring it the way we’re scoring it.”
That seems good enough for everyone, and the game continues.
Michael places his word, and Krista says, “You’re playing off mine?”
He shrugs and says, “Yeah, dude, whatever.”
“You wanna know what?” adds Jenna. “You should ask me. I never play Scrabble.”
Across the room, from one of the four computer terminals Dominique Sosnowski, a underclassman at Falmouth High School, calls out to everyone, “What does dainty mean?”

Photographs by BRENT RUNYON/ENTERPRISE Students use the new teen room at Falmouth Public Library every day after school lets out.

Dominique is working on her World Civilization homework about Marie Antoinette. She is trying to learn something about Marie Antoinette that she can relate to something in in her own life. So far she has learned that “she’s picky about what she wears. She likes expensive things. She’s a shopper.”
Dominique comes to the teen room after school to study and hang with friends and also to do” nothing.” She comes pretty much every day, she says, and that is better than reading at home. The only thing she would like is more computers.
Donna M. Burgess, the young adult librarian, says that the computers might draw in the teens, but being in the library all the time is rubbing off on the teenagers. One boy, she says, “came up to me and said, ‘Since I’ve been in the teen room I’ve read more books than I have in my entire life.”
Teenagers and libraries might create some obvious problems, but Ms. Burgess says, “Ninety percent of kids really respect the room.”
The library’s no food or drink policy is the biggest point of conflict between the library staff and the teenagers, and there have been a few cases of over-enthusiastic affection.
The fact that the teen room is behind a closed door makes everything run a lot smoother. Also, she says, adults are a lot worse about talking on cellphones in the library. “The kids text a lot.”
“The kids were a godsend this summer,” she says. They filled roles as traffic cops for the crowds of visitors, and also as technical advisors for the adults befuddled by the library’s new computer system.
Ms. Burgess has a lot more planned for the teens.
She just filed the paperwork so she can run movies for the teens. She is also excited about a new technology called Sound Domes that is ready be installed.
The two 32-inch domes will hang from the ceiling and allow teens to listen to their music through speakers without bothering anyone else.
The teen room will host a Chocolate Chip Dessert Bake-Off on Thursday, October 16, from 3 to 4:30 PM in a meeting room downstairs as part of Teen Read Week. A panel of judges, including Dominique, will decide the winner, and prizes will be awarded.
Contact the Falmouth Public Library Reference Department for more information at 508-457-2555, extension 6.