Tag: e-learning

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.

Wait, what?

On By Luther M. SilerIn TeachingLeave a comment

So I’m watching a School Board meeting right now, as they’re talking about what the plan is for us to return to school– incidentally, the superintendent is clearly on his phone right now and doesn’t appear aware that his camera is still on, which is just wonderful— and they are talking about a hybrid model, where kids above 6th grade attend part of the week, based on their last names.

One thing I did see that was different was that they appear to have realized that many of our kids have siblings with different last names; the rule is that each family attends based on the last name of the oldest kid. Okay, cool.

But never once to my knowledge has anyone actually discussed what the kids who aren’t in school are supposed to be doing. So, if Billy is supposed to be physically in class on Monday and Tuesday, and everybody’s e-learning on Wednesday … is Billy doing anything on Thursday and Friday? And if so, who’s instructing him?

That’s kind of a big oversight, y’all. I’m starting to wonder if they’ve even realized it’s a problem.

Jesus, what a clusterfuck. Just keep them the fuck home.

DOT DOT DOT

On By Luther M. SilerIn Uncategorized1 Comment

I need to either figure out how to start being done for the day at 4:00 instead of 7 or 8:00, or give up on the idea of posting every day for a while. Because I just got my video posted for tomorrow and I’m ready to fall the hell over.

In which I am confuzzled

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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.

How do Sundays work again?

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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.

Zzzzzzzzz

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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.

Postus interruptus

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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.

Bring it

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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. 🙂

(One-minute TikTok explainers? One-minute TikTok explainers.)