Help! I'm surrounded!

So, my students return to school Monday. That means I am now trying to restore some sort of order to my classroom - putting posters on walls, moving furniture (including figuring out how I am going to put an additional 10 student desks into the same space that was crowded with 32), off-loading books from rolling carts onto bookshelves. And today/tonight I get to do it while parents and students are dropping by...

To top it all off - yesterday we picked up the base cabinets for the island that is going into my kitchen, and Tuesday I bought another filing cabinet for my home office. Only, there are modifications that need to be done to the kitchen cabinets and the furniture in the office needs to be rearranged before I can put the file cabinet in place. So both at work and at home, I'm surrounded by looming pieces of furniture.

Right about now, I'm seriously considering becoming a sheepherder and going to live in a tent.

Peer -ing Into the Future

So, here I am, in my penultimate semester at SLIS, getting ready to be a Peer Mentor in one class and looking forward - with more than a little dread - toward having to learn yet-another-style of formatting and citations, since the section of LIBR 285 I signed up for is focused on history and apparently historians use the Chicago Manual of Style, rather than APA - as all my other classes at SLIS have used - or MLA, which I used during my entire undergraduate career and which I have been teaching for the last eight years.

And in my in-box today was a reply to an inquiry on a possible fieldwork placement for Spring '12, along with a form to fill out. It looks like I'm really going to do this - get a Teacher-Librarian credential. Whether I'll ever actually be able to use it, given the state of California's budget and the way people seem to think librarians, as a whole, but especially school librarians are expendable - well, let's just say that sometimes I wonder if this isn't as futile an exercise as the year I spent in law school.

But then I remind myself that I always feel like this at the beginning of a semester. I am suffering from what my daughter so brilliantly describes as an excess of whelm. Considering that I've had some sort of major life-changing event every semester since I started the program in Fall '08 - at least until last semester, which was relatively calm - maybe what I'm feeling isn't so surprising. At least it ought to provide me with some empathy for my mentees - if that's the correct word for those one mentors.

I am reminded by the URL of this blog that I am woefully behind in my professional reading, as well - guess that's next up.