Total words: 0 (it’s only 6am and I’m still on my first cup of coffee)
Manuscript total: 15,160
There was a joke I came across many years ago in the form of a cartoon. In the first panel, the devil is welcoming a new arrival to hell.
“Bad news is, you’re here for eternity,” the devil says. “Good news is, you get to choose which room you’re going to be in.”
He takes the man to the first room, and it’s filled with fire and people being tortured — classic image of hell. The next few rooms are all the same. The man is beginning to feel increasingly alarmed.
Then the devil takes the man into a room in which people are standing around, sipping tea, but ankle-deep in a flood of poo. The room stinks to high heaven (pun intended), but there’s no fire, no torture.
“This doesn’t seem so bad,” the man says to himself. He tells the devil this is the room he wants to be in.
The devil agrees and leaves the man in the room. The man goes to the urn, pours himself a cuppa, and looks for someone to introduce himself to. But alas, a minute later, the demon who’s in charge of the room announces loudly,
“Okay, break’s over! Back on your heads!”
All lockdowns must come to a (virtual) end
Well, yesterday marked the end of spring break at the high school (which coronavirus unexpectedly turned from two weeks into three weeks); today marks the first of five days of training for the teachers + me on “distance learning.”
Today’s schedule: Staff meeting via Zoom, 9am – 3pm, with a 30 minute break for lunch.
Ummm… a six hour staff meeting on Zoom?!
Why does that sound so torturous to me? I mean, it would be basically a six hour staff meeting if we weren’t on lockdown, so why does a meeting via Zoom sound so much worse? Maybe because, on a normal teacher workday, the day would be a blend of meetings and time in our classrooms to prepare for the kids coming back. Six straight hours of meeting, on the other hand…….
(“Okay, break’s over! Back on your heads!”)
LT is in the same boat as me — different school district, same schedule today. The difference between our boats: LT has two little kids, and her ex, a doctor, both works full-time and is self-quarantining anyway, so cannot be around to help. LT is wondering aloud how the hell her administrators are expecting this to work, exactly.
Same for my guiding teacher, who has a toddler. She told me that after she read the email with the day’s schedule, she had to watch Zombieland 2 just to calm herself down.
(Great movie, btw.)
I wonder what people will say about Spring 2020 in K-12 education when they look back on this period…?
Will it be the beginning of a brave new world in education? Maybe, as I blogged about earlier, “old” teachers (I’m older than both my GT and LT by 2 years) will learn new tricks. Maybe we’ll figure out that we need contingency plans and not have such a chaotic transition if a shutdown ever occurs again. Maybe a blended learning environment will forever change how we think about and approach education. Maybe the shared experience of COVID-19 will provide a whole host of new teachable moments.
Or maybe all of us, students and teachers alike, will have even more appreciation for what we (normally) have… (?)
I’m wondering how it’s all going to pan out. In LT’s district, they are going to maintain an essentially “normal” schedule, but online, 30 minutes at a time.
I’m not exactly clear on what we’re doing yet. I’m hoping we find out at some point between 9am and 3pm today. I do know that we’re supposed to be taking attendance online each day once classes start back up (and the kids are basically going to have a four-week spring break — one week of school being closed, two weeks of spring break, and this week in which the teachers go back but they don’t), but I don’t know when we are all going to be online together yet.
LT and I discussed whether or not we should even be trying to have school right now. After all, everyone — students and parents alike — are extremely stressed out and anxious right now. But on the other hand, perhaps “school,” albeit in a strange form, gives much needed structure and stability to families.
One thought LT had was that perhaps we should just call this current time period “summer break,” and start school up again in mid-July or early August to make up for the lost time. Maybe she’s right about that.
Well… I guess we’ll see how it goes.
PS, I don’t know if I’ll be blogging daily after today.
I’ll probably blog more than usual still for as long as the pandemic is in full-swing, but with work resuming (for a few weeks, anyway — my student teaching obligations are finished at the end of the month!), I can’t guarantee a daily post.
Just a heads-up. So you don’t think I stopped blogging because I got coronavirus or anything. 😉
2 Comments
Jan · April 6, 2020 at 5:59 pm
Ack-all day zoom–sorrows –we perpetually leave our camera covered, so at least there is a semblance of privacy, but there’s no way to avoid that it feels somewhat like a home invasion at times. The district here had one day after spring break for teachers to provide modified lesson plans, to take online training for the platform they were going to use, and a sprint into rooms to collect laptops or other things. The next day kids came to sign out laptops to use at home. So it’s been full online since then; they extended the estimated return date twice already. They had to cancel the state/EOC testing, which normally blows out April/May–and THAT would be the greatest gift for the educational systems to realize moving forward if they were to drop that focus on so much testing. The other element would be viable platforms that are reasonable in terms of access and efficient use.
The protocols they are using for assignments require teachers to put material in 4 different places [some without copy/paste capability] to ensure that kids can access things–obviously this is really time and labor intensive in set up, grading, and posting, because the students aren’t ‘in class’ at set times, so can do & submit the work whenever during the day to accommodate all the tech problems; if teachers opt to do interactive portions, say a zoom event, they still have to provide alternative plans for kids who couldn’t make it. So the teaching aspect gets whacked some– hopefully your district has a more efficient system. My wife made bellwork her method of attendance so at least the kids had some value in the process of logging in; some of the interactions have been fun with gifs being added to punctuate a level of understanding; one good thing is that the kids have had to become more proficient in regular communication, and possibly they miss the immediate and human contact of what in person teaching can provide [these are high school kids-dynamics might be different with younger kids].
Hope your experience has plenty of positive elements–how it became necessary is not good, but the exposure at this point in your teaching career to witness and participate in how fluid and creative teaching can be [if done intelligently] is a huge opportunity. That being said, of course, be sure to keep your sense of humor close at hand.
Sarah Wiseman · April 6, 2020 at 7:55 pm
Oh, wow Eliza, this is so tough for you and any student teachers. I would listen to all the experienced teachers you know… The desire to run and hide will be pretty universal. A 6 hour zoom meeting, or any meeting that long sounds like madness and the result of panic and poor leadership from probably regional level. The reality is that NOONE knows what they are doing and we are all making it up as we go along.
Trying to teach millions of pupils on line has never been done before and I have to agree with LT, that it probably should not be done. Anyway, you will be part of this giant experiment, and my advice (not that you asked for it) is to go easy on yourself, and don’t expect brilliant results. There will certainly be tech problems.
It will be hard for experienced teachers… But, many pupils will be desperate for some structure and contact, and THAT is what matters. Children need respect, love, routine and mental stimulation (to name just 4 things at the top of my brain) and I’m sure you will be able to provide that and more to your pupils as much as anyone.
I can imagine high-school kids responding fairly well, on the whole, if they can access the resources.
So, wow, good luck and try to enjoy it and I will expect fewer blog posts.. Lol.
Take care mate! ! 😊