A couple of days ago my “quarantini” group sprung to life again with one of the members asking if anyone still had access to the Shanghai quarantine group WeChat – thankfully it is totally defunct, but I mentioned I’d blogged on our antics at the time and got a rather nice review on my writing, which made me wonder what on earth had happened that I hadn’t blogged for nearly 2 full years now.
To be honest, although I came through Covid healthy, and in fact only got it for the first time in December 2022, the whole hoopla around doing EdTech during the covid period left me feeling quite burnt out and at least in 22-23 extremely reluctant to even touch my computer out of school hours. Which is perhaps not a bad thing. I scaled down from working all the time to only working when I was at school. Not taking my school laptop home and leaving my home laptop shut away in my desk. I also have been trying to be much more zen about letting things go and not being too obsessive about every tiny detail and focusing on “good enough”.
Of course, only having to do one job – middle school teacher librarian, rather than having the EdTech plus Library role has been huge. That’s not to say that I didn’t learn an enormous amount in the 4 years that I combined the roles, and I have to give credit to an amazing team of library assistants I had at WAB that made up for the times that I was doing the one job rather than the other, but it’s nice to have focus rather than what I refer to as “continual partial attention“.
For the last 2 years I’ve been in Dubai and at an American School. After always having been in the IB system it’s been quite a culture shock, especially after 16 years in Asia, but there are fortunately enough commonalities that not everything is new. I’m still “in the middle” i.e Middle School and we have an amazing library and it’s nice to share a space and office with the High School Librarian who I’ve known “online” for many years.
In the next few days I’m going to share a few of the library things I’ve been up to and give access to files that may be of interest to the rest of the library world and I’m going to try and have my blogging streak look at bit more like my DuoLingo streak – 677 continuous days. I bravely started in Arabic, but after a few months and managing to read a bit phonetically (mainly the names of the shops on our strip) switched to French as Switzerland is my home of the heart and I need it there.
Informative Flights - Musings of a Teacher Librarian 