Hey there!
My name is Allie Power and I am currently 26. I’ve worked as a teacher for the past 5 and a bit years. I’m trained as a high school English, English as an Additional Language or Dialect (EAL/D) and Language teacher. The language I studied at university is Japanese. I have been working as an EAL/D teacher in an area of Sydney with a high refugee population. It was rewarding work and I loved the staff and students I worked with.
Despite studying Japanese for over a decade, I only made my first trip there in January of this year (before the virus). I loved every second of it. Unfortunately, I haven’t been teaching Japanese for the past 5 years so I lost the level of fluency I once had at university.
This made my Japan trip that much more special. I finally had the opportunity to practice around native speakers. I made every second count! I also experienced snow for the first time in my life and then a day later learned to ski.
My holiday ended and I came back to work as an EAL/D teacher. Life went back to normal (for the most part). Then things started to go downhill. My grandfather (whom I considered a father figure) passed away and my health took a turn for the worst. I started rethinking my life.
Where does being a librarian fit into all of this? My love of books and libraries.
I began as a struggling reader with a stubborn attitude towards learning. However, some influential people stepped in and things changed. I became a bookworm. Libraries became my safe haven; my happy place.
My mum says walking into a Bunnings Warehouse is heaven for her; libraries are heaven for me.
I remember maybe a year or two ago joking with a colleague, “I would love to work in the school library.”
They replied, “I can see that for you. I think you’d be great at it.”
It’s now midway through 2020 and I need a change of pace. I’m not exactly sure how it came about but the idea of studying to become a librarian was floating around in my head. A few leaps of faith later and I am enrolling in the course at CSU. I was told it could take a fortnight for my application to be processed. I put it out of my mind. That evening I received a text stating I had been approved.
My pipe dream was now coming to fruition.
“What am I going to do? This is actually real.” I thought.
There’s only one thing for me to do, I decided. Start walking into my future.