attendance – Welcome to infinitefreetime dot com

I am proud to report that, for what feels like the first time in years, I went to work five days this week, and in fact managed to be early to work on two of those five days. I am hoping to be able to continue this trend next week, which is going to be the end of the quarter and includes two ILEARN days and Pi Day, which math teachers are supposed to pretend is important and I generally do my best to ignore. This year it’s falling on a Friday on the day after all of my kids’ work is due and my grades are due, though, so coming up with something fun and foolproof might actually be a pretty good use of my time.

One month until Spring Break. If you’re counting. I’m not counting. I refuse to count.

I swear.

It’s weird that taking attendance for e-learning takes longer than doing my grading, right? Because grading is just grading, and because I’m doing everything electronically and I’m a math teacher I’m able to grade almost everything automatically, and attendance is a hideous nightmare involving two different online programs and a spreadsheet as well as backdating everything when kids do assignments from two weeks ago. Which means that every time I do my grading and my attendance I have to check every assignment I have given since this started. And, okay, it’s not the hardest thing I’ve ever done as a teacher or anything, but have you ever had to remember to click something in one place if someone is not clicked in another place? It melts your brain and your eyes after a while, and I was sitting here for probably about 2 1/2 hours tonight getting this done. Attendance in school takes less than a minute per class.

My overall numbers are scary and getting scarier; I’m averaging about a third of my students checking in on any given day, which is … not great, at all, and I expect there to be even more attrition by the end of the year even if it has been shortened. Maybe if I figure out a way to unlock a TikTok video or something every time they do an assignment … ugh. The math team had a meeting today that ended up lasting an hour and a half because we got to talking about what we were going to do this fall if the school year started without the kids in the building, which I am pretty damn convinced it is going to. The long and short of it is none of us have any idea how the hell to handle that, and we’re all terrified of it.

So, yeah, that’s all fun.

8:56 PM, Friday April 24th: 890,524 confirmed infections and 51,017 American deaths. What day next week do we cross over a million infections, do you think? Wednesday?