I tried to record this morning’s instructional video last night before going to bed and had to bail because I was finding myself entirely incapable of explaining adding and subtracting negative numbers in a way that made sense. Like, even to me. So I went to bed and tried to get up early to finish it.
And failed, because I slept for shit last night, and I’ve spent most of the day just sort of gazing into the middle distance.
I have nothing intelligent to say tonight. Have a woodworking video as penance.
I spent the day administering standardized tests, of all fucking things, which are somewhat more difficult to do remotely than in person. Furthermore, spending seven hours in front of my computer– I literally did not leave my desk all day, and my wife was nice enough to bring me lunch– watching numbers slowly tick up from 1 to 53 has got to rank as one of my most boring days as an educator ever.
And I get to do it a minimum of twice more, since they’re not all done yet. This is basically the plan for the rest of the week.
Nonetheless, I’m going to loudly insist that I’m not complaining, because the alternative remains worse.
Speaking of that: neighboring districts have announced their plan to move to hybrid learning in a couple of weeks, which will be fun until they back off of it right before it happens. The state’s numbers have done nothing but worsen in the month of August, and so have the county’s, particularly once Notre Dame came back– so do you know what the state board of health did? They took a set of metrics that had everything in the red and added a new color band so that what was once red and definitely recommending distance learning was now orange and distance learning was just “strongly recommended,” or some shit like that.
Just say you’re bored and you don’t care if people die. Just fuckin’ do it, we all know it’s what you mean.
It’s more honest and I’m really tired of bullshit.
We closed everything down in March, when there were virtually no cases in the state. We closed them again in August, when things were much much much worse than they were in March because Americans are dog-stupid and selfish as fuck and no one could be counted on to act right. Now in September damn near everything is worse than it was in August and with Labor Day next weekend, guess what’s about to happen? Motherfuckers are gonna have parties and then two weeks after that they’re gonna get sick.
Oh, and Notre Dame, fresh off of two weeks of quarantine, is about to allow crowds at the football games they’re still insisting they’re going to have. So, a super-spreader event in my town roughly every two weeks for the next few months? Awesome. Just what we want.
It’ll work out fine, I’m sure. After all, we’re bored.
I am, technically, monitoring my classes while I’m typing this right now; it’s just that today’s assignment fell apart due to an utterly inexplicable block on a web service that was kiiinda essential to my kids being able to do what I wanted them to do today. Were I in a regular classroom I could photocopy a worksheet or some shit, or quickly rework, but when I don’t quite realize how widespread the problem is until half of my kids have already checked in and back out for the day there’s not much I can do to get them back.
So! Turns out this is going to be an easier day than I expected, if a somewhat more frustrating one, and the hidden good news is that I was testing something that I need for tomorrow and it’s very very good that I figured this out early! This is actually exactly why we test things. Today is shot, but they’re actually expecting us to administer standardized tests remotely this week, so tomorrow will be much more functional now that I know how This Thing is going to work. So … yay?
I talked about this a bit earlier this week, but I may as well talk about it some more, since it’s still going on: my viral TikTok video is now up to 2.1 million views, 124,800 Likes and 753 comments, and I am officially in the stage of Having Created a Viral Thing where I am completely fuckin’ over it. On Twitter you can simply mute a post or a thread when this happens, but you can’t do that on TikTok. My stupid, stupid rat brain keeps going back and checking the post like my phone is a Skinner box, and also much like a Skinner box the number of times I have to hit reload for the dopamine hit is getting higher and higher.
Plus, Jesus, the video is literally two sentences long and there are three sentences of text on the screen, and the number of people who think they’re being clever in comments who clearly didn’t manage to read like twelve words is beginning to aggravate. There’s also a weird subgroup of people who are coming in and insisting that the word פיצה, which is an English cognate because it’s an Italian word to begin with, doesn’t mean “pizza.”
Which … yeah, it does, and why are you like this? I literally looked up a couple of Israeli pizza joint’s websites and posted them in response to one of these comments yesterday. Go argue with them, dude.
I’ve also picked up about 600 new followers, and the number of straight-up children who have access to that app is kind of shocking. I’m going to start blocking anyone who appears to be nine years old and follows me, because … just … nah.
(And I recognize that I’m kind of being a dick by talking about the video and not linking to it, but remember, the account is under my actual name. If you want to see it, email me or something and if you’ve been around long enough that I recognize your name I’ll send you the link.)
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:
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.
I mowed the lawn this morning, for the first time in … um … a while, after looking at it the other day and realizing that it really was starting to look like the house had maybe been abandoned. My lawn right now is a weird mix of 1) dead, yellow grass, because it hasn’t been raining much; 2) weeds, up to two feet tall in one specific place, because apparently weeds don’t require nutrients to grow, and 3) the occasional patch that apparently gets a better mix of sun and shade and needed cutting but wasn’t necessarily looking completely out of control. But there are definitely patches where nothing has grown in weeks, meaning that about half the time it was super obvious where I’d mown and where I hadn’t and the other half I was basically trying to find the tracks the mower had left in the dead grass.
9 years and counting in this house, and I still hate my lawn.
And then Dad came over, and he and the boy went swimming, and we had pizza for dinner, and now I’m trying my best to not remember that I actually have a small amount of grading and lesson planning to get done tonight, because this is officially the first Sunday of the school year and Sunday is Grading Day again. There’s nothing that will take too long– one advantage of e-learning is that I can justify doing everything electronically and mostly multiple choice, so the computer can do the grading for me and I just have to record it– but I’m still vaguely resentful of the entire process.
Oh, and I got manipulated into volunteering (that’s a thing) to be team leader this year, which comes with more responsibility and zero additional pay, so that’s an extra meeting this week. I think I can dodge some professional development for it, though, which is probably a net positive.
I’m still probably gonna go play video games after I finish this.
I realized a couple of days ago that I could read the titles on my bookshelves while sitting in my recliner in the living room. While yesterday specifically was definitely rough, I’m definitely officially healing up now, and I haven’t had much cause to complain about my vision at all for at least a week or so. The surgery was a month and three days ago, and I had a one-month follow-up last week and the same doctor who was concerned about my eyes being too dry last time proclaimed me “much better” and “healing perfectly” this time. My understanding is that nearsightedness takes a little longer to heal than farsightedness does, so I expect more improvement over the next few weeks, but honestly if it were to stabilize right around where it is I think I’d be pretty damn happy. Seriously, if you’ve ever considered this and you have the money I’d jump at it; if you’re local enough to use the same folks I did, let me know, as they sent me a couple of $500 off coupons that don’t have expiration dates on them.
I said in my introductory video for my kids yesterday that I was expecting this to be my second weirdest first day of school ever, only getting beaten out by the first day of school that I missed because my son had just been born the day before.
This may have been weirder. I’m trying to put a heavy emphasis right now on being accessible to my kids, right? I don’t want anyone anywhere to be able to use “I couldn’t reach my teacher” as an excuse to not do what they’re supposed to be doing. And I know that this is the first day of school and that things are going to calm down, and frankly that’s unfortunate. I was expecting to have maybe two or three kids at a time in my little Google Meet room for most of the day, with occasional periods of time where there was no one in there. What I was not expecting was that kids were going to log in and that they were just going to stay there. I had sixteen to twenty eighth graders in my virtual “classroom” for three straight hours this morning, some of whom came in at 9 and just stuck around for the whole time. Probably a dozen, at least, were in there for more than an hour, and literally all I was asking them to do was pop in and say hello, since we’re not doing any real instruction just yet.
I have also learned that Google Meet is going to be entirely unacceptable for trying to actually do synchronous teaching, because I don’t have remotely the level of control over the meeting that I need to have. I can’t boot kids or mute them because they can literally unmute themselves or come back in immediately. I don’t really want to have to boot kids, and I don’t know to what extent disruptiveness is even going to be a thing in this, but I need the ability. So we’re trying Zoom tomorrow, which I think they have installed on their Chromebooks but I’m not 100% sure. We’ll see what the numbers look like compared to today.
And then, after three solid hours of listening to 8th graders try to yell over each other, which doesn’t sound tiring even as I’m sitting here typing it but trust me, I had to do three hours of professional development this afternoon, and … Christ. It’s 6:30 as I’m writing this, I’ve basically been working since 9:00 this morning, and I still need to record tomorrow’s lesson in its entirety, so I’m not done yet.
This will get easier, it always does, but man, am I tired.
I have a good half-dozen posts rattling around in my head right now, none of which are really publishable at this exact moment for one reason or another. There are a couple of things I’d like to review; I’m not done with one of them yet and I’m going to wait a few days for another. I’m waiting to see about a couple of work-related things before I speculate much more online about how next year is going to go. I could find any of half-a-dozen different online bits of nonsense and get mad about that.
And it’s just, like, nah.
Here’s what I’ve got for right now: Not getting that job I wanted was a bit of a disappointing setback but for the most part everything has been going the way I want it to on the work front for the last few days; the school board and the superintendent both seem to be behaving and it seems like the teachers actually have some good advocacy there. We had a little bit of nonsense going about how they wanted all of the teachers to come into school and sit alone in our empty classrooms to do our e-learning, and that got quashed with a quickness, which was good– I’m not about to leave my damn office that I’ve set up exactly like I want it to go try and record videos on my little work laptop, and not having to have to fight with somebody about that is all good.
I continue to improve my little corner of the office, and I’m enjoying this far more than I ought to. Still need a little bit more lighting and maybe a new webcam, which since I’m not buying any classroom decoration stuff this year ought to be a reasonable expenditure. I am changing classrooms this year, and I went into school yesterday and basically packed up all of my stuff from last year’s classroom and stuck it in a corner in the new one. I’m not spending a single second longer than I have to in there; once/if school reopens I’ll have plenty of warning to get everything set up and right now I’m not wasting the effort.
The new room has what is effectively a walk-in closet in it; I had previously thought that it was some sort of common storage space and would be full of crumbling editions of abandoned textbook lines or something, so I was surprised to discover yesterday that it was completely empty. There’s not even any shelving in there– just an empty, carpeted, windowless, concrete-block rectangle, maybe 8′ x 15′ or so. I would be all over this little room if we were actually about to have a normal school year– I could make myself a separate office area that wasn’t part of my classroom if I wanted, or a quieter small group area– lamps! Beanbags!– or any of a dozen different things, and instead it’s just gonna be there, empty, because if we go back there’s not room for more than one person in there and I suspect I can’t literally isolate a child in this little room without getting in some trouble with somebody.
Ah well. We’ll see what happens when and if things ever get back to normal.
Re: vagueblogging, I applied for a bunch of other jobs including one I was really excited about that would have involved a life-changing salary increase and didn’t get any of ’em. But we’re not going back to work until October at the least and chances are we’re not going back after that either. So fuck it. Still a teacher. Let’s do this.
I’ve spent all day fidding around with various online services that I told myself I’d make sure to learn how to use properly “when I had time,” and well, now I have time. I’m going to figure out how to make this distance learning thing work as best I can for the kids who are going to show up and I’m not going to stress myself worrying about the ones who don’t. I’ve got plans, damn it, and if I’m being honest I’m actually a tiny bit excited right now. I’m sure it won’t last. 🙂
