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.
This has potential to be a really, really important week, both for reasons that are obvious and I can talk about and at least one or two that aren’t. I’m kind of in a place where I want to just put my head down and sleep through it and find out a week from now what happened.
The school board is meeting tomorrow, and supposedly they are going to vote to let us know what the plan is for the next few weeks, which is good, because school starts on the 12th. I will probably head into work at least once this week, if for no better reason than to move my stuff into my new classroom, in a pile in a corner if nothing else. I am not going to put any effort into decorating my classroom this year, simply because I don’t expect to be in my classroom this year. My district’s plan has gone from “we’re back in person, but parents can opt their kids out, and we’ll find teachers for those kids” to “we are going to be virtual for two weeks to get kids used to the rules about masks” to a document that I was emailed by my principal today that at one point uses the word if to describe returning to school in-person. I am fully expecting to find out that we are virtual for the first nine weeks, I am predicting we will not return to school at all in 2020, and while I’m not willing to make it an official prediction yet I would not be surprised at all if we don’t return at all during this school year, because none of this is fixable with the current administration in office, and it’ll be February at least before President Biden (and Vice-President Harris, crossing my fingers) are able to start solving problems. But one way or another I ought to actually know something in about 24 hours (maybe 26) and at that point I can sort of maybe pretend to start planning.
To that end, I went to Guitar Center today, because I want to put my desk microphone on a boom arm so that I can keep it out of my way when I’m not recording and it’s more functional when I am, and while they didn’t have what I was looking for I was really happy to note that they are actually taking the pandemic seriously– the front door was opened for me by a guy with a mask and gloves on, and another thanked me for wearing my mask and explained that I needed to keep it on and my nose covered while I was in the store. Not a single employee had their damn mask on under their nose while I was in there, either.
Which: for fuck’s sake, people. I had to make a Target run afterwards too and by the end of it I was halfway to being a goddamned axe murderer. You motherfuckers have been told how to wear these goddamn things and you have been told why to wear these goddamn things. I am tired of stupid people.
Anyway, I came home and ordered a boom arm, because I can’t find one in a store and I’m not about to do what I might have done a year ago and check more than one place before having someone bring me shit. I wish there had been something else I wanted to spend money on at Guitar Center, but as a non-guitar person there just aren’t a lot of options.
(Okay, I took a look at a $1000 “podcaster recording bundle,” but I’ll never have a podcast because I’ll never have a good idea for one.)
Let’s see, what else? Eyes are getting better. Dropping the nighttime gel drops was a good idea. I’m noticing them a lot less often, which I think is supposed to be the point, right? Let’s go with yes.
I feel like I had more, but it’s fallen out of my brain. Maybe I’ll update if I remember something important.
I wanted to post more pictures of the boy’s room today, but it’s not quite done yet– one patch of wall maybe a foot square needs a touch more paint on it, the tree decals need to all be put in place, and we need to hang his curtains– and for some reason I don’t want to put up any more in-progress pictures. So have a sleepy kitty.
PAINTING! All in all I’m happier with how the project turned out than I thought it was going to be; I spent most of the first day of painting muttering it’s not my room under my breath and looking forward to repainting the entire mess again in five years when he grows out of it, but now that it’s mostly finished I feel like we did a pretty good job. More soon.
VISION! I have this thing going where I either stop paying attention to my eyes or they get noticeably better once about noon rolls around. I’m still kind of frustrated with mid- and long-distance vision, and even close up can be kind of spotty for the first couple of hours after I get up. I had a long talk with a friend of mine who also had the surgery earlier in the week and she assured me that everything was within normal parameters; despite trying to not be impatient about the healing process I think I’m expecting too much too soon.
VAGUEBLOGGING! I hoped I was going to have good news this week. I do not have good news. Strictly speaking I don’t have bad news either, but this is one of those situations where no news and bad news are indistinguishable. I am not very happy with the world right now.
AUGUST! Nobody knows anything. The superintendent’s plan has been radically revised three times in three weeks, the county health department released their own plan, and dominos are falling across the state as more and more districts go to online-only for the first nine weeks, which is the only available responsible decision. Remember: I’m not dying for your child care, nor am I endangering my family, period; and there is no magic switch that flips in August that prevents whatever you’ve been doing with your kids since March from working any longer. We have a school board meeting on Monday and I fully expect to find out at that time that we are online only for the full first quarter, at which point we can reset the clock until we make another last-second decision in October.
THOUGHTS AND PRAYERS! I’ve been keeping a pretty close eye on noted dipshit Herman Cain over the last few weeks; turns out that being an idiot about masks earned him a final month of his life where he was isolated from his family and struggling to breathe before he died alone and ignominiously. I hope that hour or two where he was courageously owning the lib orthodoxy by not protecting himself from a highly communicable disease that didn’t know or care that he was a Republican was worth that pain for him. I suspect not. I also wonder how many other people that Tulsa rally killed who aren’t famous enough for us to know their names.
BOOKS! I recently finished Lisbeth Campbell’s excellent debut The Vanished Queen, which isn’t actually out for a couple of weeks. I read a very early draft of this and it was amazing to see how much had changed since I’d seen it. There is a review coming, but I’m waiting for a go-ahead from her to publish it. I’m currently reading Alexis Henderson’s The Year of the Witching, which I’m also quite enjoying but am having some trouble getting into because my eyes haven’t been cooperating when I pick it up. This one will probably get a review too at some point.
KAMALA? Word on the street is that Biden is going to announce his VP pick possibly as early as tomorrow and certainly by next week, and word also is that it’s going to be Kamala Harris, which would be just about the only thing about next week that could lift my mood. Please, goddammit, give me this one fucking thing. Well, this thing and that other thing that you haven’t given me yet, but at least one of them.
I have received your email communication of Jul 27th, and it did indeed find me well, at least for a moment, until the subject of your message sunk in and I found my previous wellness replaced with a bone-deep, nearly painful level of exhaustion. While in principle I do agree that we will be working together this year and that we should discuss such things as the curriculum we will be teaching, I feel compelled to remind you that it remains July for several more days yet, and that furthermore it is also somehow still March, and that at the moment I find myself entirely unable to do anything so civilized as “plan” for any so-called “future.” At the moment I barely even believe tomorrow is happening. Three weeks from now is literally unimaginable, and yes, I know what both of those words mean and I assure you I am using them accurately.
Furthermore, I have stalked you on Facebook and you look like a cop, and while I admit and agree that forming an early impression of someone by such means is manifestly unfair, doing so has not led to the cessation of one single bit of my current level of exhaustion. In addition, your use of “your new partner in math” as the closure to your email is unnecessarily precious when a simple “yours,” or perhaps the somewhat archaic but at least moderately humorous “Your obdt. servant” would have sufficed.
In conclusion, please do not expect a response to your query prior to the 3rd August, and later than that is a strong possibility. Responses to this message will be deleted unread, and I swear to God and baby Jesus that if you email my ass just to say “Okay!” or “Thanks!” I will kill myself on the spot and haunt the dog shit out of you and your descendants unto the 4th generation.
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.
I was talking with one of my oldest friends the other day, and as one might expect the conversation turned to what my district was planning to do when school opens back up in … uh, less than a month.
“Nobody knows!” I said. “There’s no plan.”
Which, okay, is a slight exaggeration; it is fairer to say that the plan that they do have is grossly inadequate in every measurable way. But it’s a plan! It’s a plan that’s going to fail miserably, but it’s a plan!
She lives in another state, and like most of my long-term friends she is a college professor. (I am very much the uneducated rube among my closest friends, believe it or not.) So she is already trying to figure out how to manage her own classes in the best way she can, and she commented that she just didn’t know what the hell she was going to do if all three of her kids were home with her all the time. While she’s lucky in that she can work from home, that doesn’t mean that she can work from home and take on schooling responsibilities for three kids, who are all at inconveniently different grades and levels of responsibility.
I figure she’s not the only one.
I am here to help.
THE LUTHER SILER GUIDE TO EDUCATING YOUR OWN CHILDREN DURING A PANDEMIC, WHEN YOU ARE NOT A TEACHER, DO NOT WANT TO BE A TEACHER, AND FRANKLY WOULD BE PERFECTLY HAPPY TO LOCK YOUR OWN CHILDREN IN A BOX FOR EIGHT HOURS A DAY IF IT MEANT THEY WOULD LEAVE YOU ALONE FOR A FEW MINUTES
It’s a working title.
Here is how to homeschool your kids until such time as it is safe to send them back to school:
Make sure they read every day. At least a couple of hours. I don’t care what they read. Game guides. Comic books. Nonfiction. Chapter books. Newspapers. Age-appropriateness is probably a good thing; if you have a library nearby, and it’s still open, take ’em a couple of times a month and get a big pile of books. When you have time, ask them about what they read.
Maybe– maybe— go on the internet, I recommend math-aids.com— find some math work from under the grade they are in right now, because you are making sure they’re keeping up basic skills, not reinventing the wheel– and make them do a couple of pages of math a day. Focus on basic operations, fractions, decimals, percentages, things like that. Story problems are good. Yes, I know you hated story problems as a kid. Make ’em do some math once in a while that doesn’t immediately tell them every step to do, is what I’m saying.
That’s it.
That’s the whole curriculum.
Worried about science or social studies? Okay, make some of those books they’re reading be about topics in those departments that they find interesting, and again, asking them about what they read is good. If you’re concerned about them getting some exercise, figure out the safest way to force them to run around once in a while and call that gym class. If they already play an instrument, have them keep practicing that with whatever they have on hand. If they don’t, this is not the time to learn. Call that music class. If they’re artistically inclined, get some books on art and buy some paper to draw on. There’s art class.
My point is, you do not need an expensive fucking curriculum and you also do not need to feel bad about being an inadequate educator when your actual job is keeping the lights on and food on the table (I have enough trouble just remembering to feed my own child, who would only eat once a week if we never made him) and a roof over their heads.
Keep them reading, make them do some math once in a while, and pull in stuff from other subjects that they find interesting. Do not fight with them on anything but the reading. And, again, if it has printed words on it it is reading. Your main focus is to keep their brains from either solidifying into cement inside their skulls or liquefying and dribbling out of their ears. We’re looking for a nice tofu-like brain consistency here, and yes, I just Googled “consistency of the human brain,” and it’s the best thing I’ve done all day.
It’s possible that there are laws wherever you live that regulate homeschooling, but I genuinely doubt anybody’s paying attention to them right now and I’m absolutely certain that if you have to tell the state what curriculum you’re using or some shit like that they aren’t going to come to your house and double-check. If your kid is enrolled in school and is e-learning, and you find the volume of work you’re supposed to keep track of for your kids to be impossible, email their teachers and tell them the deal. Chances are, it’ll be fine. The parents who are worried about it are not the ones we’re worried about.
Breathe.
It will be fine. Your kid will miss some learning and some later teachers will have to clean that up. That’s okay. It will be fine.
It will not keep them out of college. It will not keep them from being able to hold a job later on in life. They’re all gonna miss a good chunk of this year. Once they’re back in school, we’ll take care of it.
Just keep them safe, keep them healthy, keep them fed, and keep their brains at a nice, moist, tofu-like consistency. Everything else is fixable.
I had a hard time getting to sleep last night– those damn eye shields really are a pain in the ass– but beyond that I was busy writing this post in my head, starting with the kids waiting outdoors for the bus and going through to the end of the day. And, yeah, it was going to be long as hell. Like, Star Wars movie review levels of long.
And then I thought about it this morning, and it occurred to me that this doesn’t really need to be complicated.
We cannot reopen schools yet.
We cannot reopen schools because there is no way to make 34 people crowded into the same room safe, masks or otherwise. It is not possible given perfect compliance from everyone involved, and we will not get anything even vaguely close perfect compliance from everyone involved. And that, really, is the end of it. I can talk all I want about hand sanitizer and bathrooms and hallways and passing periods and discipline and lunch and breakfast and, dear God, band and choir,(*) but it all keeps boiling down to the fact that in my classroom I will have 32 kids and another adult beyond myself and that is not safe. Period.
I would be more willing to give this a shot if my district was setting things up in such a way that I saw half of my students each day. But even then, that model only holds up until someone gets sick, which is inevitable. Once we start talking about contact tracing and quarantine all hell breaks loose, and the one place where I am willing to literally point and laugh at my district leaders is when they claim that there will be enough subs to cover sick and/or quarantined adults.
This is an utter fantasy. No, there will not. There aren’t enough pencils and paper, for God’s sake, there will not be enough hand sanitizer and there will not be enough masks and there sure as hell will not be enough subs. There haven’t been enough subs for years. It’s not going to get better when the subs have to shove their faces into a petri dish to go make their little $100 a day, and once a single sub gets sick we have now potentially infected multiple buildings in the course of just a few days.
We can’t do this. We might try and do it anyway, because if you ever thought that maybe Americans weren’t utter idiots the last six months have rather definitively proved you wrong, but we can not do this.
I also keep seeing people throwing up their hands and pretending to panic about What Parents Will Have to Do if their kids remain home. I have said this before, and I will reiterate: first of all, your kids have been home since March, so let’s not pretend that this is a new problem. Your kids are home right now, because it is summertime, and there is no magic switch that flips in August and makes whatever child care scenario you have going right now somehow magically impossible. Keep doing whatever you’re doing right now. It might suck! I agree! I have a kid too, and I’ve been at home with him since March as well!
I agree. I just don’t care. Because your child care problems are not a reason for me to endanger my health and my family’s health. Your child care problems are not a reason to make what is already uncontrolled spread of a highly contagious and incredibly dangerous disease massively worse. Because that’s what will happen.
There are going to be teacher strikes in a few weeks if this isn’t settled better, folks. We aren’t going back. Nobody’s going back. Best get used to it right now.
And yes, this was absolutely the short version.
(*) I have many friends who are band and choir teachers. I am very sorry, but your classes are just going to have to go away this year. Your classes generate so many droplets that band instruments have special valves that are used to drain the spit out of them. It’s just not possible to do this safely right now, even in comparison with other classes. I love y’all, but … no.
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.
Welcome to infinitefreetime dot com 