Tag: covid-19

on weariness

On By Luther M. SilerIn Teaching3 Comments

Before I say anything else, let’s all agree to take a minute and just appreciate black-and-white cinematography.

Also, leaving the O in the title of this post uncapitalized was originally a typo, and then I stared at it for a second and decided to keep it.

Back in July I submitted paperwork to my district regarding my desire to teach from home. This included a doctor’s note informing them that I had high blood pressure and was a fatty-fat, both of which are additional risk factors for Covid-19. On top of that, I have never once made it through a school year without using 90% of my sick days at least and more than once have run out of them by the end of the year; I was already out of sick days for the year in March when all hell broke loose and school got cancelled for the rest of the year. Not one time in my life have I made it through the first month of school without getting sick.

And then we went virtual-only until at least October 5, which is rapidly approaching, and the school board is voting on Monday about the reopening plan they’ve been presented with. It is unclear to me whether approving the plan, which at least in broad strokes I approve of– it’s basically a hybrid model like many other districts have adopted, and in general I approve of hybrid models although there are some quibbly bits here and there– is the same thing as directing us to return to school. I’m not going to post any graphs today but the short version is that basically every important metric has gotten worse than it was when they cancelled us until October 5, so the only reasonable thing to do (and, frankly, the easiest thing to do, believe it or not) is to continue to keep everyone at home.

Yesterday I got an email from my boss outlining how he sees my job responsibilities working out if the students return to school and I continue to work from home. And I don’t get he impression that he’s pissed at me about it or anything, to be clear. The email ended with “Let me know if you have any questions,” and my first thought was I don’t even know where to start.

I took a brief shopping trip today to buy a couple more work-appropriate polo shirts, because some of my favorites are starting to show their age. And while I was in the store I had to listen to a conversation between the store clerk and someone whose husband was waiting in the car because he didn’t want to put a mask on, and I think I aged five years during the conversation. Everyone was being very polite and understanding; it wasn’t one of those Hey, let me make you famous on the internet sorts of situations, but … Christ.

I look at this job description, and it’s manageable, and more importantly it’s reasonable– I should be clear here that I really like my principal and have since the second I met him– but it just makes me tired. And I’m falling into this trap, where I’m bored, and I’m tired, and so I’m sort of shrugging at basically every single health decision I’ve ever made, and shrugging at my wife and my son and my father and my father-in-law, and thinking fuck it, let’s go back.

(Oh, and one place where the plan really does stick in my craw is that it’s going to require another adult to be in my room managing things, presumably while I instruct my kids from home via Google Meet or maybe from the big-screen in the room like some sort of older, fatter Max Headroom bullshit. I don’t like the idea that I’m directly inconveniencing other people with this, which … there’s an argument to be made that I shouldn’t care, but still.)

My son is also home. He doesn’t have to be, and for various reasons I’m not going to get into his school is able to do some things with social distancing and masking that simply aren’t possible in any school I’ve ever worked in. And my days, generally, are spent with me in my office either instructing or (more often, honestly) just shooting the shit with my students, and keeping half an ear on him in the background. Every so often he forgets that he doesn’t actually have to scream for the people on the other end of the computer to hear him (a lesson he has never learned) and my kids will actually comment on what he’s doing. And every time his teacher says something even mildly cross to him, and every time I hear him leave the room to go to the bathroom or whatever, or hear a sound from his room that is likely not produced by a 9-year-old diligently working on his schoolwork, I go into this hideous mindfuck where I want to redirect him and help his teacher but I don’t want to leave my job to go do her job and also does it really matter if he left for a second and maybe she doesn’t want me shoving my face into her business.

(I told this story, right? I mildly corrected one of my students when his mom was within earshot and she blew up at him. I had to put him on mute to keep the other kids from hearing his mom. Not what I wanted. I don’t know if his teacher wants me charging into the room to Fix Shit every time he needs to be told to put something down or watch what she’s doing.)

He hasn’t seen another kid since March. I kind of feel like he should see other children. He’s kind of going feral.

(Also, I love my son, and I hope I don’t actually need to put that disclaimer there, but I have not been out of earshot from him for more than an hour or two at any point since March, and … yeah.)

I have not been to work since March. I can think of maybe three face-to-face, non-transactional conversations I have had with an adult who was not a relative by blood or marriage since March.

But if any of that was reasonable, then surely right now when shit has only gotten worse since this all started, it is still the right thing to do to continue to keep this shit up, right? We shut shit down when there weren’t any cases of Covid-19 in Indiana. Now we have a thousand a day. And that number only continues to go up.

And I see all these other people out there not wearing masks and doing whatever the fuck they want, and shit, maybe I’m the crazy motherfucker here. And I’m a data nerd and a numbers guy and I know full well that the millionth person to die from this will probably die this weekend and that shit is only getting worse precisely because of the type of thinking I’m engaged in right now and fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck.

I’m fucking tired.

In which I am out of clever and patience, and running low on hope

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy, life5 Comments

I almost just started this post by posting pictures of Covid-19 graphs; needless to say the state spiked monstrously yesterday and CNN finally heard me griping about how they clearly hadn’t been including Notre Dame’s numbers in our averages, because we had a similarly terrifying jump in our county numbers there as well. Meanwhile, the county health department says that our current seven-day rolling average of new cases is at over a hundred, and they want it below twenty before schools should reopen.

That’s a rolling average, remember, which implies, since the numbers have been going up daily for a while, that we’re seeing significantly more than 100 cases a day recently, according to the health department.

Dandy.

So I guess I need to find a way to get used to sitting in front of my computer for eight or nine hours a day, don’t I? I mean, granted, this is what I want, compared to the alternative, but it continues to blow my mind how people cannot simply act right so that we can get this thing dealt with like every other country on Earth. Because Americans are a uniquely toxic blend of selfish and stupid. I’m never going to pretend otherwise again. There’s simply no available evidence that we have any sort of national will left, if we ever actually did in the first place.

We are not going back to school in 2020. We just aren’t. And every day I move closer to declaring that we’re not going back this year at all. Colleges and universities will start shutting down in a couple of weeks. Just wait for it.

I dunno. I’m tired and my neck hurts and my back hurts and I’m already kind of half-assing my instructional videos and my attendance is already dropping off pretty significantly. So, that’s all bad. But it’s still better than being at work. My son’s only a couple of days into his school year (he’s home too) and he seems to be doing better than I thought he would be, but we’ll see where we’re at in a week.

Gah. I have to record a video about square roots now, because I need to make sure the kids know what they are for the next thing we’re doing, but what that’s going to lead to is a blowoff assignment for half of them and the ones who need to learn this aren’t going to bother trying. It’s way too early in the school year for cynicism to be setting in already, dammit. I need to get this together so that I can play video games for a bit and then go to bed early. Hopefully I’ll be in a better mood tomorrow.

In which I am confuzzled

On By Luther M. SilerIn TeachingLeave a comment

Proving that I will never understand how things get popular on the Internet, the Notre Dame post from yesterday evening has blown up, getting something like four or five times the number of normal views a post gets on its first day and so far about twice as many as a second day usually gets. Why? No clue. It’s getting most of its hits through Twitter clickthroughs, which makes even less sense, as the only thing that posts to Twitter is this:

https://twitter.com/nfinitefreetime/status/1295846370784555008

I almost wonder if the tweet got quietly featured on Buzzfeed or something like that, because with only 3 likes and 3 RTs it should barely have gotten any attention at all, but it’s getting much more interaction than my tweets usually get, and for no clear reason.

Ahh, internet, never stop being strange.

Notre Dame has reported another seventy-odd cases since I posted that, by the way, and the numbers did not show up in the county-level dashboard I usually look at, which is kind of alarming. These kids absolutely live in my county and not all of them live on campus; if there’s an outbreak (and there is), it’s not going to be physically confined anywhere. Keep in mind, too, that South Bend also has IUSB, St. Mary’s, Holy Cross, Bethel University and Ivy Tech in the immediate area. I haven’t seen numbers from those campuses– truthfully I’m not even sure they’re all back yet– but I’m sure they aren’t going to be a lot better. St. Mary’s is a women’s college so maybe we can hope they have a bit more sense, but I’m not holding my breath or anything like that.

In other news, today was the one-week mark of school starting and for the first time I’m done with everything I have to do today other than attendance and I have tomorrow’s lesson ready, and not only is it not 9:00 PM but the school day technically isn’t even over yet. I fucked up hard yesterday; today’s lesson is all vocabulary involving the real number system and in both the TikTok explainer and the video I shot I managed to both leave the word “integer” out of the presentation and move the definitions for whole numbers and natural numbers “up” in the roster, so to speak. In other words, the word “integers” wasn’t there, the definition of whole number was actually the definition of integer, and the definition of natural number was actually the definition of whole number. I mean, I noticed it, which was good, but I didn’t actually notice it until I’d started uploading everything to YouTube and it still meant I had to completely redo the TikTok and partially re-record the video, then re-upload everything, and by the time I was done it was nearly 9:30 PM.

My attendance is dropping, too, which is both predictable and alarming. I don’t really know what to do about it, though. I need to spend a chunk of time on Friday calling families; we’ll see if I can get through to any of my no-shows and infrequent flyers.

In which no one could have guessed

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy1 Comment

I’m mostly just putting this here for the sake of posterity, but Notre Dame today announced, after reporting twice as many Covid-19 cases yesterday as the entire rest of the county, that they were going to lock everyone in their dorms for two weeks (that’ll go well) and that off-campus (this will also go well) students should not come onto campus while they do virtual learning. If, within two weeks, the numbers aren’t better, they’re sending everyone home.

They’ve been back for, like, two weeks, max, and — get this — tested every single student before allowing them back on campus. And this still happened.

Go ahead. Put some money on what happens next. I dare you.

In which we breathe

On By Luther M. SilerIn Teaching3 Comments

The board meeting is still going on right now, and they haven’t voted yet (but school starts in 9 days, so they’re not going back to the drawing board) but it looks like we’re not going to be back to face-to-face instruction until the first week of October at least, and there are indications that they’re at least beginning to prepare for the possibility that we won’t be back at all this year. Supposedly there will be a determination in mid-September about whether that October return date is happening or not, so we’ll have a two-week warning or so about what the plan is at that time.

The one thing I don’t like: they seem to want teachers back in our buildings for the duration during e-learning. Which, on one hand, I kind of get, and I don’t know that there’s a lot of health concern about me sitting alone in my classroom all day long, but this is my setup at home:

Versus at work, it’s me and my lil’ school-issued laptop. I am much better set up for e-learning from home than I ever will be at work, and other than giving principals a way to keep an eye on us I don’t see a strong benefit to keeping us in the buildings.

That said, I expect them to back off on this particular rule pretty quickly, and knowing that I won’t be in front of kids for seven or eight weeks is a relief. For right now, I can take a deep breath and figure out what’s next.

It is too early in the morning for this shit

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy1 Comment

It is 9:09 in the morning, I have been up for approximately 39 minutes, and I have not had my coffee yet. I had a dream last night where I won tickets to a Phil Collins concert, was late to the concert, showing up only after the entire first set had finished, and then realized that not only was I the only person at the entire show wearing a mask but that somebody from high school who I never want to see again was sitting right in front of me.

Since waking up, I have checked my email, to find a message from the guy who is supposed to be my new partner teacher this year. He has sent me a couple of emails over the last week or two. I did not respond to the first one, and just replied to the second last night saying that I had basically been ignoring my work email (true) and that I would be in the building sometime this week to move my stuff between classrooms and that if he wanted to get together I’d let him know when I would be in.

I received a response this morning. He will not be in this week, because he is driving with his daughter to South Carolina to attend a wedding. South Carolina is currently in worse shape than Indiana is, and I suspect anyone dumb enough to be holding a wedding right now is also dumb enough that there will be no masking and/or social distancing involved.

This motherfucker doesn’t get to come near me for two weeks after he gets home. Sorry! Except not.

I’m done for the day now, I think.

On planning and the lack thereof

On By Luther M. SilerIn TeachingLeave a comment

A week ago, my school district was telling all of us that we were back to in-person learning on the day school starts. There have been a couple of School Board meetings since then and hundreds of teachers (myself included) have been burning up the internet sending irate emails, and now the plan appears to be that we’re starting with e-learning, but only for two weeks, and then phasing everyone back into the building in early September, except that at least three Board members appear to believe that we need to lose the entire first nine weeks, the plan hasn’t been voted on, and they do not have remotely enough time to hire the people that they are going to need to make any existing plan beyond “keep everyone home” work.

I made this specific point at one of the board meetings, actually; every plan that does not involve keeping us all home requires hiring more people, or if it doesn’t require that immediately, it will start requiring that the very second people start getting sick. We are not at full staffing as a district right now and in the last twelve years we never have been. There is a board vote scheduled on August 3rd, but remember, school supposedly starts on August 12. There is not enough time in nine days to do anything.

The superintendent has sent out three or four separate surveys trying to figure out who both wants to and/or has a medical need to be home beyond “I don’t want to die.” Each time they’ve had to pull the survey because of health privacy violations. They’ve made no decisions about who might be home to teach the kids whose parents don’t want them to enter the buildings and as of right now they don’t have time to, because every teacher that gets pulled out of a classroom means they need to put another body in that room.

(I was very pleased to discover that both obesity and high blood pressure put me in high-risk status for Covid, and no, that’s not a typo; I was pleased. I do not want to return to classroom teaching right now, and it’s nice that for once being a giant fat man is working for me and not against me.)

In addition, the county health department … person— I don’t know if he’s a chairman or what the hell his title is, but one way or another he was at one of the board meetings too. He stated in front of Jesus and everybody that he thinks the county needs to be at or below fifteen new infections a day before he’s comfortable reopening schools. We are currently at about three times that many, and I don’t see that number falling into safe range anytime in August at all, much less September.

A number of things have been clear to me for a while, and at this point I’m basically just waiting for everyone else to face up to reality and make the necessary intelligent decisions: we are not going back to school for at least nine weeks and I suspect we are probably done for 2020. Sports– professional, high school, college, whatever– are not coming back this year. They may have started some practices, but the seasons are going to get cut very, very short if they even get started at all. This has only gotten worse since March, and it’s not getting better until the current US government is mostly replaced, so we’re looking at probably February before we can see any any chance of actual useful positive movement, and if the Republicans aren’t voted out of office in every imaginable capacity in November and then probably forced out of certain government buildings in Washington at gunpoint on January 20 we are dead. I’m not ready to say we’re going to lose the entire school year yet, but it wouldn’t surprise me a bit if it happened. Not one tiny bit.

None of this had to be this way, but … y’know. Emails.

In which I review a mask

On By Luther M. SilerIn Reviews3 Comments

I think I have a new favorite mask. I suspect I’m not the only person out there who has been through a whole bunch of different specific masks and styles of masks without finding one that would work well for long-term use, and I just got this one that I ordered through Etsy and I think it may be the big winner. What sets it apart is the size; it’s made specifically for men with large beards, so unlike every mask I’ve tried it actually fits completely under my chin and doesn’t get in my mouth. There’s a pouch in there for a filter if I want to put one in (mental note: figure out how to get mask filters? And whether I need them?) and even without the filter it passes the blow test. There’s also a nose wire that seems to work better than the wires in standard surgical masks, which I never was able to position so as to keep my glasses from fogging up.

I spent a few minutes in front of the mirror just sort of talking as if I was addressing a classroom and it never got in my mouth, and it doesn’t put pressure on my ears– the top band wraps around my head and the bottom one goes around the back of my neck. I’m a little concerned about how it sort of pooches away from my face along my jawline, but that’s at a weird enough angle to the rest of the world that I have some trouble imagining danger droplets getting in that way. The only other concern I can think of is that, as you can tell, the elastic is a little bit on the thin side, so that may be a problem in the long-term. For now it doesn’t feel like it’s going to snap on me, and the drawstring in the back means that it’s not pulling super hard anyway.

All that said, I’m going to give this one a week and if I’m still happy with it at the end of the week I’m going to order a few more. This definitely passes the initial quality test, though.