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.