I came into the new school year with some trepidation. In the last week or two of the school holidays, as I was just starting to relax after finishing the coursework for my Master’s degree (YAY!), my social media feed seemed bombarded with images and posts of other teacher librarians getting ready for the year. From the creative soul weaving a whale to hang on display in her library to the different variations on library advocacy welcome back packs for staff, and the pictures of beautiful library display areas I was a bit dizzy with the array of quality preparations that were underway across the land. And I was left feeling incompetent and unprepared.
I negotiated to have the first two pupil-present days (my week 1) set aside to do a stocktake of the school resources collections (those not physically housed within the library, but catalogued (somewhat) on Oliver). I though that would give me a bit of breathing room on getting the library prepared to receive students, mostly it managed to make me feel even more overwhelmed. I severely underestimated the time needed to stocktake the collections in question.
Somehow, though, I managed to re-cover my bulletin board display area and get up a minor book display on the shelves in my library entry way and prepare my basic classroom management paraphenalia for the new roll classes. I even had something ready to teach this week! 🙂 In the end, you get done what you can get done and you move on.
This is just a bit of a shout out to anyone else who sometimes teeters on a tightrope balance between inspiration and self-condemnation when seeing what others are doing and showing on the TL networks – you are not alone. I am as happy as the next person to put my best foot forward and share things I am proud of on the internet. But I also struggle. Imposter syndrome can strike at any time, but we just have to keep on keeping on. Try to take your disappointments and turn them into “features” of your library tapestry, rather than “mistakes”. To that end, my lack of inspiration for and time to create a bulletin board display has become a decision to co-create a display with students – asking them to contribute sticky notes naming books they love in celebration of Library Lover’s Day. For now it is an blank purple canvas – check in to a future blog post to see what we manage to create.
Now let’s get out there and do our best!
References
Dalla-Camina, M. (2018, September 03). The reality of imposter syndrome [Blog post]. In Psychology Today Australia. Retrieved February 07, 2020 from https://www.psychologytoday.com/au/blog/real-women/201809/the-reality-imposter-syndrome
tOrange.biz. (n.d.). Chinese new year 2020 year of the rat Christmas Snow forest background [Image file]. Retrieved from https://torange.biz/fx/year-overlay-banner-new-2020-background-213832