I still don’t know what my district’s plan for this fall is. Supposedly there’s going to be some sort of announcement on Wednesday, and as of right now the start of school is still six weeks or so away. This is what Indiana’s current numbers look like:
…so it looks like we might be starting to trend upward again, but we just hit the typical weekend drop, and today will be on the lower side too. We’ll see how this week looks.
At any rate, that stray thought: school discipline is going to have to be a lot stricter in a lot of ways this year than what we are used to. Specifically, in terms of removing kids from the building, assuming we’re physically back at all. Because while I am willing to return to the building (at least in principle; we’ll see how the details go) in order to teach math, I’ll be damned if I’m going to risk my health and my family’s health to babysit some dipshit who is only in my classroom because his momma doesn’t want him around and he wants to clown with his friends.
Anyone who is not there to learn this year needs to get sent the hell home and needs to stay the hell home. Those kids can fail on their couches instead of failing in my classroom. I’m not dealing with anybody this year who is just in my room to act like a disease vector. Forget it.
Supposedly the governor is going to be releasing some sort of plan on what’s going to be happening with the schools this fall on July 1, which is– Jesus— next week. I expect two things from this plan: first, that it will, in some way, have us returning to our buildings as scheduled in August, and second, that it will be thrown overboard as things continue to get worse– because one of the iron-clad rules of the last several years is nothing ever gets better— and we will not, in fact, return. Disney World just cancelled plans to reopen, y’all; we’re going nowhere.
This means that I need to start thinking about taking virtual education a bit more seriously than I did last grading period, because we got thrown into that with no planning. I have the rest of the summer to get set up properly for this, and one of the first things I needed to do was set up my office better for recording lots of videos. The desk used to be against the wall that has the diplomas on it, right under the diplomas; as a result it showed the entire rest of the room whenever I was on camera, and I got into the habit of starting any video I recorded for the kids with the words “Welcome back to my filthy office!”
I spent the morning shoving furniture around. The white table behind the desk used to be against the low window to the right of my desk, and used to be against it the long way; in addition, the small file cabinet with the printer on it used to be basically where my chair is and there was a taller file cabinet in the corner. That tall file cabinet is basically immediately to the right of the picture, off-screen.
Advantages of the new layout:
It gives me more work space. Even if I don’t have to shoot a lot of videos next fall, all that desk area behind me is going to make things like organizing papers for grading a lot easier. I need to keep it clean, granted, but I’m sure I can do that. Really.
The image the camera on my desktop now sees is this:
That’s a lot cleaner, and the other advantage of the desk is if I end up using something like a green screen or a stand-up whiteboard to explain things I have the table space for it. Right now the camera is pointed a little lower than I want it to be, but that’s literally just a matter of reaching my arm out to my desktop and tilting it upward. Huge improvement.
I can actually reach my Goddamned printer now; with where it was before, the white table and the file cabinets were really tight, and getting to my printer to turn it on or get paper off of it was actually a pain in the ass. So was getting stuff out of the file cabinets. Access to all of those things is now much better.
Speaking of access to things, I can actually open the low window now. It was behind the table before; I couldn’t reach it to open it.
I could do this before, but I just learned about it: I can stream the PS4 to my desktop. It appears to work pretty damn well, too, which means if I want to I can play games in here without taking over what is basically the only TV in the house. It also means that when I want to play the occasional game that I don’t want the boy exposed to I can do it without waiting for him to go to bed. Again, I could do this before I rearranged, but I just learned about it so it feels like a new thing.
So that’s all a lot better. There are a few disadvantages, but they’re not a huge deal:
Lighting. As you can see from the webcam picture, even with the light on in the room and both the windows open, in broad daylight, my current webcam (which is the internal one on the computer) makes it look really dark in the room. I’m not sure what’s triggering this, but it definitely looks darker in here now than it did with the desk on the other wall. Possible fixes for this include a better webcam and a ring light behind the desktop. Possibly both. We’ll see.
Putting the white table perpendicular to the wall eats up a lot of floor space in the room. This is not necessarily a big deal, though, as the room is the office and it doesn’t really need to be super spacious. I have plenty of access to the closet you can see back there, and there’s enough room for me to move my chair around comfortably without feeling trapped here.
Related to that, though: my wife and I talked yesterday about setting up a small desk as a homework space for the boy, particularly if we’re in a situation where he and I are both at home this fall. Putting that table where it is makes the most logical location for his desk (behind me, on the wall where the flag is now) a little too tight. There’s more room than it looks like in the picture but there’s still not a ton, even for what is just a kid’s desk. Then again, if I do something different with the boxes of comic books that are everywhere right now (that’s what all those white boxes are) I can always rotate the table out when I need it or something.
I assume I’ll get over this, but my secondary monitor is now to the left of my desktop, not the right, and that feels really weird.
Yay for accomplishments!
12:41 PM, Thursday, June 25: 2,388,865 confirmed infections and 122,071 Americans dead.
I have spent the last couple of days working on the graduation video– or, at least, the “celebration” video, since technically we’re not supposed to call it a graduation (or use Pomp and Circumstance) if it’s not high school. One way or another, though, I’ve been working on it. The final project is going to end up being somewhere in the 35-minute range.
I used to do quite a lot of this type of work at a previous school, when I was one of the folks responsible for the morning announcements. The announcements themselves were no big deal, but we’d shoot commercials and little skits and stuff like that all the time to keep the kids paying attention, and it turned out that I wasn’t terrible at video editing, or at least the type of video editing you can do with a cheap camera (or, now, a smartphone) and iMovie. In an entirely alternate world, I can see a version of me that does this sort of thing for a living. There’s something very satisfying about it, honestly. There’s no world where I’m contemplating a career change or anything like that– if for no better reason than I don’t actually have any idea how you break into that field, and “I’m good at iMovie” probably isn’t going to be enough to get me any interviews.
The bike has finally shipped, and is currently slated to arrive on Tuesday, although I suspect it might arrive a bit quicker. This means that I now get to start obsessing about bike helmets, which is going to be extra special fun because I have an enormous head– seriously, I can’t ever find hats that fit– and therefore bike helmets that 1) fit me 2) I can afford and 3) I am willing to wear are going to, simultaneously, not exist and be sold out everywhere.
My wife’s foot remains in a boot, and I’ll need her to go with me the first time I ride anywhere so she can call the police when I crash and die, so I’ve got time to … I dunno, build one, I guess.
(Oh, also: bike helmets are not built for bald dudes? I have done a little looking around and I feel like any helmet that has actual holes in it is going to be fodder for the weirdest sunburn of all time, and I am not looking forward to that.)
I am beginning to be concerned about this fall. If we are back in class, we, or at least the adults, are probably going to be mandated to wear masks. I have not, to date, been able to spend more than about fifteen minutes in a mask without panic attacks becoming a real problem, so eight hours— to say nothing of eight hours where I’m expected to do something other than curl up into a fetal position and concentrate on not thinking about my breathing– is gonna be … let’s say troublesome.
I have a couple of surgical masks on hand, and I’m going to try one of those the next time I have to go anywhere, because getting cat food at Target (which, apparently, doesn’t actually sell pet supplies any longer, or at least ours doesn’t, or at least they’ve hidden them well enough that I couldn’t find them anywhere?) damn near killed me tonight. It was bad, y’all.
It still, despite the video and despite the fact that I haven’t actually been in my classroom since the middle of March, not quite hit me that the school year is basically over. I finished my grading today; I will finish my actual grades this weekend at some point, and Monday is some staff meeting types of things, and … that’s it. I’ll have survived (more or less) my first year back in the classroom in a while. More thoughts on this later, I imagine, once it actually manages to wash over me and it feels like it means something.
8:05 PM, Friday, May 29: 1,745,606 confirmed cases and 102,798 dead Americans.
I spent the entire day with my face buried in iMovie, putting together the 8th grade recognition video for my kids, since we can’t have an actual ceremony. It’s up to half an hour and I still have people who owe me bits of it. My eyes are bleeding, and I’m taking the rest of the night off.
That said, it’s a damn shame I can’t share this thing with y’all, because I think I’m pretty proud of it.
Meanwhile, this song will be running through my head until I die, and if you didn’t want people using your video for graduation celebrations you shouldn’t have called it “Graduation,” lady.
6:44 PM, Thursday May 28: 1,719,855 confirmed cases and — sigh — 101,562 Americans dead.
Let’s start with this: We should not be returning to schools in the fall. I think it very likely that this will be worse in the fall, not better, and even if we do return at the beginning of the year I don’t see any chance at all that we make it through next winter without at the very least a substantial chunk of the year dedicated to e-learning.
But, for several reasons, most of them perfectly obvious, we should probably try to have schools open in the fall– if for no better reason than the idea of starting a new school year with the kids already at home fills me and every other teacher I know with bone-deep horror. If we want to have a school year next year (and we may not! That’s not an entirely unreasonable position!) we have got to start it with at least a little bit of in-person education or this just isn’t going to work at all.
You saw the CDC guidelines the other day; you also saw, in the same post, me state that the CDC guidelines as they currently exist cannot be fulfilled in any school I have ever worked in. So: how do we do this, in a way that allows in-person education and, as much as humanly possible, maximizes student safety? Oh, and also: this needs to be revenue-neutral, or, if possible, save districts money, because we all know nobody’s ponying up for, for example, doubling the bus fleet.
(Nor should they. Any solution involving a need to buy more buses isn’t going to fly simply because you don’t double your bus fleet for a problem that, even hugely pessimistically, is probably going to be gone in a couple of years once there’s a vaccine. That’s too much of a capital outlay for something like that. But I’m off subject.)
So, I’m taking the following as written:
That our students are not suddenly going to become any better-behaved or more likely to follow rules than they already are;
That any solution to this problem cannot cost money and should probably save it;
That in-person education is necessary to get some knowledge whacked into the brains of these kids, somehow;
That most classrooms and school buildings are not even a tiny bit set up in such a way to successfully promote social distancing. Put simply, tape on the damn floor isn’t gonna do it; see item #1 up there.
What we are going to have to do– and the legislatures are just going to have to do something to make this legal– is split the kids in half. We can’t stagger arrival times or anything like that; any solution to that not involving doubling or tripling the number of school buses leads to 10-hour working days for staff and teachers and that’s not gonna fly.
Half of the students, and yes-this-is-a-logistical-nightmare-but-we-have-to-figure-it-out-anyway, keeping families in the same building and in different buildings on the same days, so that no one has their kids on conflicting schedules, go to school on either Monday-Wednesday or Monday-Tuesday. I suspect two successive days is better, but that’s a detail. The other half go to school on Tuesday-Thursday or Wednesday-Thursday.
Students who are not in school in-person have e-learning on the days they are not there, focusing on basic skill retention and shoring up deficits whenever possible. New material is covered by a teacher, in class, doing their level damn best to cover grade-appropriate material as much as possible.
Standardized testing is either cancelled or minimized as much as humanly possible.
Fridays can either be rotated between the two groups or, and I think this is my preference, Fridays are always e-learning days. Teachers are on office hours all day on Fridays. In my district, we have two preps a day, one of which is a “real” prep and the other is owned by the office; in this scenario on Mon-Thurs that extra prep, rather than being devoted to daily meetings like it usually is, would be time for office hours and catching up on email from e-learning students who had questions while in-person teaching was taking place.
Now, to be clear, when I say “split the students in half,” what I’m envisioning is that where right now I have a classroom cap of 32 students, my classroom cap would fall to sixteen, meaning that while I might not have room for perfect six-feet-between-everybody distancing I can definitely spread the kids out. It would mean that students with IEPs could also get some face time with their TORs and might actually stand a chance of getting some of their accommodations, most of which are impossible to fulfill during e-learning.
This keeps the buildings at 50% capacity, which, okay, they’re still going to be out in the halls together but it’s a lot better than all of them being together. Other aspects of the school day could be dealt with as reasonable and available per building and district; I don’t love the lunch-in-the-classroom thing but I can see why it might be a deal, and if necessary for some grades we can set up a situation where the kids rotating from class to class is minimized and the adults move instead, or wherever possible try to have classes that are blocked together– my district, for example, could go back to one teacher doing both sections of math and putting Reading/LA together rather than using two teachers, just to keep movement minimized as much as possible.
We’re not putting plexiglass between desks, y’all, it’s just not gonna happen. Pointing desks all in one direction, okay, yeah, I can get with that, those types of things are easy, but social distancing is only possible by minimizing the number of kids in a room at a time– and the only way we can do that is if they’re not all there.
Staff should probably be wearing cloth masks all day, especially since I don’t see a way we can stay 6′ away from the kids. Once they’re seated, that’s one thing, but I can’t help somebody with something they don’t get from six feet away a lot of the time. I would like for the kids (the ones old enough to know what they’re doing, at least) to all be wearing masks as well but … well, look at any time I’ve ever mentioned dress code around here. That may or may not be worth the fight.
What do y’all think? Feel free to share this out, if you like.
4:29 PM, Sunday, May 24: 1,635,192 confirmed infections and 97,495 Americans dead.
The Wonder Woman Funko POP on the far left is brand new as of today; do I keep her with the other Wonder Woman or move her with the other three Funkos on the desk?
These are the questions that keep me up at night.
I have left the house more in this last week than in the six weeks prior to it, mostly because I have to drive my wife to and from work, which is automatically two trips a day, and I went and got groceries yesterday and picked up the grill and blah blah blah. I had a couple more errands that needed running today, unfortunately, but other than work runs I shouldn’t really need to go anywhere for most of next week. When I’m out, I’m wearing a bandana over my face, and I have a friend who is a seamstress making a few proper masks for us. Witness:
We are under a state order right now to wear masks when in “enclosed public spaces,” and the county health department has released a bunch of recommendations as well. What this has led to is a bunch of businesses posting prominent signs outside that you need to have a mask on to be inside … and a bunch of people inside without masks on. One of the errands I had to run was to the pet store, and I was in and out in under five minutes, and less than half of the customers I saw while I was in there were wearing masks. Indiana has had 1400 Covid-related deaths, and St. Joseph county is closing in on its thousandth confirmed case.
This is not fucking complicated, God damn it. It blows my mind that, three years and some change into this person’s administration, the GOP is still finding new ways to be venal and cruel and stupid, and then it blows my mind that I’m still capable of being surprised by these people. Wear a mask so that you don’t get sick! Wear a mask so that you don’t get other people sick! Why is this difficult? Why is “stop being a fucking asshole” a partisan statement?
My Google-fu has failed me, but I saw a clip of a comedian a bit back where he explained that he’s figured out the equation for this administration, which is (surprised x disappointed)2, because if you multiply it properly, first you’re surprised that you’re surprised, then you’re surprised that you’re disappointed, then you’re disappointed that you’re surprised, then you’re disappointed that you’re disappointed. Or something close to that, anyway. I can’t find it.
The other thing I want to bitch about is that on three different occasions today I have either read or heard people speculating about the “second wave” of this disaster that’s coming this fall. Y’all, this shit hasn’t slowed down yet. If anything, we’ve plateaued. There are a few specific localities in America that have bent the curve a bit but they’re about to be overwhelmed by the states that are all opening too fast– probably about another week from now, if past experience is worth anything. We can’t have a fucking second wave if the first wave never stops. And the way things are going, this isn’t going to get any better anytime soon. We have an entire fucking political party openly fucking dedicated to making it worse. We’re fucked for as long as any of these people hold any power, damn it.
5:25 PM, Saturday May 9: the world crossed four million confirmed infections today, with 1,305,199 of those being in America; 78,469 Americans have died, and we’ll be over 80K by the end of the weekend. And y’all are too fucking manly to wear a mask. Fucking idiots.
Had to leave the house today to run some errands– two banks, interacting with the tellers through vacuum tubes, the pharmacy for a new supply of my supplemental Yeah It’s A Bad Day Let’s Take These Too brain meds, also interacting through a vacuum tube, Arby’s, where stuff was passed through a window, the post office, where I did actually have to don my mask and go inside, and Target, which was by far the least necessary of the trips but I ordered my stuff online and had them pick them up for me and then when I walked in the kid who had actually done the shopping and was at the register was a former student, so it was literally “Oh, hi, Mr. Siler! Were those AirPods for you? Let me go grab them,” and I was out. I had a mask on for the Target and post office visits– the same one as last time but folded differently, and I was able to keep my pulse under control but I still had to force myself to calm down after the Target trip.
I’m not even sure why I bought the AirPods, although I’ve managed to convince myself over the last few days that they had their uses around the house, particularly now that I never drive anywhere. Listening to stuff in bed is going to be a lot easier now that I don’t have to be tethered to the phone, for example. They’ll make a few things a bit less unwieldy; I don’t know if it was enough to justify the cost but every other damn thing I own has an apple on it so whatever. I have the money.
Since I got home, my stress level has been through the roof, and not for any good reason, although I think it might have something to do with the fact that … heh, yeah, I was gonna say “life felt normal for a while,” except I was wearing a fucking bandanna on my face in the post office and I didn’t go into the grocery store so that I could minimize the number of actual humans I spoke to while I got my brain drugs from the pharmacy, and after I got my Arby’s I ate it in my car in the Target parking lot like a God damned animal rather than going inside because you can’t do that anymore, so no, none of this shit is normal, none of it at all.
(By the way, I cast my primary ballot today, which wasn’t the only reason I had to go to the post office, but still got mailed along the way. After thinking about it for a while, I voted for Warren. I don’t feel bad about this decision.)
I’m gonna play D&D with my wife and son in a bit, and then I’m gonna record tomorrow’s e-learning lesson, and then I’m gonna take one of those happy brain pills and go to bed, and hope tomorrow is better, because I spent two hours this afternoon after I got home sitting in a chair and staring at TikTok and hating every second of it and that is no way to spend your damn time.
Ugh. 2020 is stupid.
6:14 PM, Monday April 27: 985,374 confirmed cases (though I’ve seen reports in other places that we’re over a million already) and 55,906 Americans dead.
This is one of those days, y’all. Everyone and everything is on my nerves and it is getting harder and harder to deal with the fact that we are governed by the worst and stupidest people among us. Like, it’s fun to yammer on about fucking Darwin Awards and some shit– some of these dumb bastards are going to die because of their stupid little protests, and they’re going to make a whole bunch of other people who are fucking smarter than them sick along the way, and if the fucking virus was somehow able to only infect the motherfuckers who deserve it we’d be fine, but it’s a fucking virus and it doesn’t work like that. Because these ignorant assholes are going to get a lot of people killed, and it’s too bad that we can’t find a way to ensure that the people get killed are all them. “Dying of coronavirus to own the libs” is supposed to be sarcastic, you bumblefucks.
Stay the fuck inside.
If you don’t want to stay the fuck inside, stay the fuck inside anyway.
Enough of this shit.
7:40 PM, Saturday April 18: 732,197 and 38,664, and– guess what– the states that don’t have stay-at-home orders are all seeing spikes in infections. You stupid fucks.
