After being told in the latest Zoom meeting for this subject not to overthink things, I have been trying to take this to heart – however, my brain has had other plans in store.
I am not a big dreamer when I sleep, but last night there was a doozy to remember.
Picture this – in the midst of Sydney lockdown 2021, dreaming of things to come.
A sumptuous Christmas spread has been lovingly prepared, decorations out, food at the perfect temperature, everything ready to go… almost
gailf548 from New York State, USA, CC BY 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons
The only problem is I have one more job to do: every item on the table needs a label… with a Dewey Decimal Number!
While I think this dream may lead me to change the last thing I read before falling asleep in the evening, it has also raised some other ponderings.
When I think of my life as a student beyond finishing year 12, I have had the privilege of being been a Uni student twice before commencing my Masters this year; firstly with my initial Bachelors degree directly after school finished and then a Graduate Diploma over ten years later. In those periods of study there was pressure on me, both external and internal. Pressure to pass the courses, pressure to learn the necessary skills to become the best teacher I could be, pressure to get the best grades I could, pressure to secure a job using my teaching degrees, pressure not to let my family down (perceived thoughts of a teen who had recently lost her father, not actual pressure from the family). The pressure now is different, how do I raise a family, teach and study to the best of my ability?
It is in moments like last night that I can see the pressure I am under now and reflect upon what pressure the students that I teach are also under. Particularly in these COVID times: the pressure to complete work without a teacher there to guide you in the moment, the pressure to maintain friendships when you don’t know when you will see friends again except on a screen, the pressure to do their best in one of the most stressful times of their lives. This pressure is on all, from Preschool to Year 12 and I was reminded today what a toll this can take.
Pressure is not released by a phrase such as ‘don’t overthink it’, but in many different support methods. My personal goal is now, how can I as a teacher and future teacher-librarian relieve the pressure that is upon the youth of today? How can I make this difference in the lives of our precious future?
This is not something which I can answer tonight, but it must forever more be at the forefront of my professional career.
(Now to find some reading material for different dreams tonight!)
Hi Kathleen,
Such a perfect opportunity for reflection… and to reveal reflective practice. There are so few opportunities to remind ourselves of what it is truly like to put ourselves under pressure in a learning context, and difficult assessment tasks attached to a significant body of new knowledge is certainly the opportunity for nightmares.
Last evening I was assisting my son’s girlfriend to complete a uni assignment for her International Studies course. She is required to build a dataset to compare major countries using data from websites like the World Bank, NATO etc. The assignment then required her to use that data to analyse an hypothesis. She needed assistance to build the dataset, visually represent it, and analyse factors to explain it… information fluency applied, in this case, to the percentage of GDP spent on the military of the US and China. While she very much appreciated the assistance of her own personal teacher librarian, this opportunity to help her with this assignment once again reminded me that we develop a set of skills in this degree that are essential for students of this generation and their world of work. The other thing was the access to data… and once again I realised the power of the Internet, that we can dive into that data with confidence because of the confidence we gain in this degree. Being a teacher librarian is a future focused role and at no previous time in history is that role more important for our students than it is now.
Our passion sometimes spills over into our dream world… but that’s the sign of a teacher librarian who will make a difference.
All the best, Deb Hogg