The academic year has finished and it is time to farewell students and prepare to welcome others. The students are the best part of my job. I like helping them, I enjoy showing them what the library can offer them.
I hope they have come to realise that going to university is a life changing event. I hope they dived in to their studies and got to the marrow of it and realised the richness of an education, rather than just getting a degree
.I was a first generation university student. My mother had always told us about the haves and the havenots. The haves went to university, they got the education and the good jobs. We, as part of the havenots, got the trade or the factory jobs. When I graduated with an M.A. degree, she told me that my education was useless, it was nothing compared to her life education. I don't blame my mother, it's the way she was brought up. But my daughter is not going to have any of that.
I did my secondary education at a technical school. When I left I got a job and stayed their twelve years, doing just what I had been brought up to do, not succeed. After the twelve years I went to England on holiday and one day I got drunk with my cousin on Johnny Walker scotch. In my drunken state I told her how miserable I was and how I hated working in the job that I was doing. Luckily for me, my cousin was a lecturer in psychology at the University of Lancaster at the time. She then gave me one of the best counselling sessions I have ever had and convinced me to try going to uni. I came back to Australia and applied. To my amazement I was accepted. I started as a mature age student and one of the things that immediately struck me was how young most students were. I had this sense of university students with long hair and beards. Images from the Vietnam war era when you used to see students protesting on television. I had no idea of what university would be like, or if I was capable of doing the work. I was someone who plodded on and persevered and eventually got my degree in the end. This is one thing that has affected my teaching, I understand that students are not just a homogenous group and I can sympathise with those students, who struggle with university study. I think also of importance to the way that I teach is that I grew up going to libraries and reading and finding libraries, much like I found university study, a liberating experience. When I teach students information literacy, what I am telling them is this is what the library can do! This is the power of the library! Get into it and go for it.