And here I thought that juggling work and study was hard enough! Teaching can be incredibly draining and by the end of the day, you don’t want to be staring at a computer screen do to University work (well, I certainly didn’t!).

Time management is always a tough thing for me. I want to put my 100% into everything and I’m not willing to do less. Having to juggle teaching, where my students deserve 100%, and my study, where I need to give 100% otherwise, I may not pass the subject/s made it a rough year. Imagine this, an early career teacher having to teach 4 subjects and still maintaining a full-time study load. Essentially having to keep my grips on six subjects. Six. That was rough.

I am now at the end of term 3, I have submitted two assignments late because I chose to put my students first, do I regret it? Nope. Not one bit. My students needed to come first, they needed the stability of knowing that they were number 1 for me (in a professional sense). If I had a free lesson, I would prioritise doing some university study so I didn’t fall too behind. This sort of worked as it gave me a break from consistently doing work but also gave me a greater opportunity to become distracted by everything else.

I also needed to realise that burning myself out, gets me nowhere. It does not help anyone or anything. So developing some coping mechanisms for when it got too much really helped too. I would spend weekends with family and friends. I would prioritise the people in my life over the work I had to do. I would go out for date nights with my partner. These things kept me sane.
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So, having rambled on for a while, do I have any pearls of wisdom for someone who wishes to do what I have done (or similar)? Nope, everyone is different. Everyone has different study patterns, motivation levels and the ability to multitask much better than I. When juggling many balls, remember that some are plastic and can be picked up later. Prioritise the glass ones and make sure that you are one of the glass ones. Remember your self-care and your own sanity.

Your first year out of your teaching degree is one of the hardest that you will do. You are new, and you still have a lot to learn. You are hesitant and not wanting to stuff it up. I’ve been there this year and these are my top tips.

          Coffee in the AM and your beverage of choice in the PM.
There are some days where you will only be able to function on caffeine in the morning and will then need to have a beverage at night (AKA a glass of wine or an aperitif). You will need the fortification to get through the day and to get through the marking at night.

          Prepare, prepare, prepare
Make sure you are prepared, with Plan A, B, and C. And for good measure, add Plan D in there too. Be prepared for a black out or a kid telling you to “f**k off”, or for some students to start bawling or a fight. Be prepared for students who are Autistic, for those who have ADHD, dyslexia, anxiety, depression. You will face all of this and more during your first few years and at times you will have no idea what to do. Hence, prepare, prepare, prepare.

(Unless you have a worldwide pandemic. Nothing prepares you for that!)

         Learn from your co-workers
Your co-workers are your greatest allies – unless you severely piss them off (which I don’t recommend). Share resources and take what you can from them. You will be able to learn a lot from them and be able to adapt their resources. You can also look at their professional practice and learn a lot from it. You can decide what you will borrow and what you won’t.

          Fake it until you make it
Confidence, people, confidence. Some of us have it, others have to work for it. If you don’t feel confident, don’t let it show. The more you ‘fake it’ the more confident you will begin to feel until it becomes natural. And the best part? The students you have won’t know.

These are my top 4 tips, but at the end of the day; you do you. You follow what you think is right and what you think is going to help you create your career. Ultimately, you are in charge of your own destiny.

COVID-19 is still rocking Australia. Victoria is still in lockdown; some states are opening up to South Australia and we still can’t go international. We are still sanitising our hands and, in some places, wearing masks.

But we are getting better in adapting to it – slowly.

COVID-19 shut down didn’t affect me too much. Yeah, it was a pain to not be able to go down to the pub for a meal and a drink. It was annoying as hell to not be able to buy toilet paper or have restrictions on basic things (#panicbuying) but overall, I wasn’t too affected by it.

I worked my butt off to get the lesson and unit plans structured for a move to online learning. I planned like I never had planned before and at the end of the day, I was thankful for it. I like to think that my students were thankful for it too as it gave them a sense of structure.

That was one thing I tried to give to all of my students: structure. Structure in the lesson flow, in my expectations, in how I approached them. I also let them see me as human. Many of my students were being negatively affected by COVID-19 in many, many ways and I wanted them to see that I was human and affected by it as much as them – even if it was a simple “Was planning on going out for dinner but we can’t any more”. They knew I was their teacher but they could also see me as human.

One of the hardest things we faced was the feeling of the unknown. Of not knowing if some students could come to school, if people we knew were going to have jobs or not, of if (or when) we would make the move to online, distance learning. Students were restless, their attention was rock bottom and work submission was for the most part even more sporadic than usual.

But we survived. Writing this at the end of Term 3, we still have one term to go, but the hard part is over. We have learnt how flexible we can be, how quickly we can pivot from our original plan to aa completely new one. We learnt the in’s and out’s of Zoom and Microsoft Teams and how to (hopefully) avoid the pitfalls.

Families, friends, strangers and more discovered how valued teachers are and how much work we actually do. They learnt that teaching isn’t just a ‘soft’ career, that a shit load of planning, hard work and heart goes into what we do.
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And that is the one thing I am probably most grateful for.

Attempting to locate a placement was tricky. Really tricky. I contacted my former high school (The Heights School (CPC-Year 12 School) in Adelaide, South Australia) and none of the staff there were qualified information professionals. I also contacted 14 local councils and, at the time, 9 were either closed or not accepting Placement Students and the remaining 5 did not respond to me. Of the university libraries in South Australia, all 3 were not accepting Placement students and Flinders University recommended a school library.

 The State Records of South Australia and the State Library of South Australia were also not accepting any Placement Students either, however, I was able to join a consultation group on the Stage 2 Research Project in conjunction with the SACE Board of South Australia. This is an opportunity I am looking forward to greatly going into 2021.
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I, then, got into contact with the President of the School Libraries Association of South Australia, Hajnalka Molloy and she offered me a Professional Placement at Aberfoyle Park Primary School Campus. I gratefully accepted her offer and I undertook my Placement there during October 2020.

The Study Visits have helped me professionally by highlighting how different Information Studies fields can be impactful on the local community. I really enjoyed the Study Visits conducted by Katie Haden (Study Visit 2: Supreme Court Library Queensland), Krystal Gagen-Springs (Study Visit 1: Mount Alvernia College), and Justine Hanna (Study Visit 8: Moonee Valley Libraries). This is because I am a Legal Studies teaching major and hearing how Katie Haden works in the Supreme Court Library really ties into the area that I teach – it makes another link between my degrees that I didn’t expect nor did I know of. In an ideal world, I’d love to be able to work in a secondary school library and hearing from Krystal Gagen-Springs highlights what the current climate is in a school library and gives me ideas for what I could possibly try if I were in her position. It has made me consider the different possibilities and consider the impact that I could have on the low literacy students, in terms of what resources I could bring into the collection. I have also had a real love for my public library; however, my council area only has one site, not several like the Moonee Valley Library. This study visit, highlighted how different sites can help different patrons but also help the wider community, as seen with COVID-19. I learnt a lot about how they operate on a multi-site system and how you need to consider the local demographic in all that you do.
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Personally, I really enjoyed the Study Visits and they were a good alternative to face-to-face ones. Ideally, I would have loved to have the face-to-face Study Visits as I found the different times that they were held difficult to manage and keep track of. Having a consistent time for all study visits would be of benefit, especially for those who are in a different time zones to the majority. Overall, the Study Visits were enjoyable and well worth the time and effort.