Tag: e-learning

In which I reimagine education

On By Luther M. SilerIn Teaching2 Comments

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.

Hmm let’s see

On By Luther M. SilerIn Uncategorized2 Comments

Feeling kind of bullet-pointy today, so let’s do a bits and bobs post rather than trying to construct some sort of coherent narrative:

  • After discovering at least one other teacher was doing this, I’ve decided to just go ahead and record my e-learning lessons for the rest of the year and get them all posted as fast as possible. I’m already done with the rest of this week and so I only have three more to do; they’ll probably all be finished tomorrow.
  • In theory, the kids are done on May 20, although they have until the 27th to turn in their work, and the district appears to think that we’re going to be doing trainings until school would have actually ended in June, but they haven’t actually given us any details on how that would work. I’m sure I’ll be super psyched about it once I know.
  • If you live in South Bend, you should have requested your primary ballot by now, dammit. I’d appreciate it if you’d vote yes on the referendum questions that are on the ballot so that my job can afford to keep paying me and we can invest in roofs and drinkable water and such in our buildings.
  • The usual gang of dipshits has discovered our dastardly plan to raise tax money and then spend it in such a way that it has a chance to benefit brown children, so naturally there’s a Vote No movement. I’ve only actually seen two signs about town but every time I do I have to forcibly restrain the urge to either steal the sign or drive up into people’s lawns to destroy them.
  • It is possible that the whole home-isolation thing is affecting my generally genial and go-along-to-get-along personality, I’m not sure.
  • I think Mike Pence probably has tested positive for coronavirus, because there was an announcement today that they were isolating him from that other person. I do not think that there is a single chance in hell that the White House would tell the truth about either of them being infected. Hell, I’d trust North Korean media about Kim Jong Un before I’d trust this White House to tell me the truth, and that’s kind of scary.
  • I am Back on My Shit in a number of ways recently, and in my idle moments today have been researching larger monitors for my computer (utterly unnecessary, as my iMac is already the largest possible size and I sit no more than two feet away from it, plus I already have a secondary monitor) as well as bikes for fat guys (they exist, and as far as I can tell America’s fat men have already bought them all, because none are in stock anywhere) and green screens for my office, which will become much less necessary tomorrow, when I’m done recording e-learning lessons for at least the next few months.
  • I have not been on a bike in over 30 years, as I basically learned how to ride one because my brother wanted to learn and then never did it again. If it is possible to forget how to ride a bike, I have done so. This is an exceptionally poor idea, especially given how much any bike robust enough to support my fat ass would cost.
  • I am wearing shorts. It’s not warm outside or anything like that, but it’s fucking mid-May and I’m wearing shorts because fuck you, mid-May.
  • We just ordered a new refrigerator for our garage, because I need a place to store my many beverages that will keep them cold. I do not actually drink alcohol, so yes, I’m actually envisioning an entire refrigerator filled with Pepsi, tea, Mountain Dew, and Gatorade.
  • Additional Back-On-My-Shittery: I’m back on oh man I really want to do a podcast I should buy a bunch of equipment for podcasting pay no attention to the fact that I still don’t have the vaguest idea what my podcast would be about I just wanna buy shit.
  • That said, my Blue Yeti desk microphone has finally earned back the money I spent on it over the last couple of months, as it really does sound a lot better in my videos than the internal mic on my computer. It’s also not entirely impossible that I’ll let myself invest in a better webcam than the one that’s built in, but I shouldn’t.
  • Lurking in the back of my head is the certainty that we will absolutely be needing to teach from home again this fall. That will probably be what ends up getting me to pull the trigger on the greenscreen, at least.
  • I also spent a few minutes yesterday looking into an online Ed.D, which … nah.
  • I’m listening to Post Malone right now, and this track he does with Ozzy Osbourne is amazing.
  • 3:42 PM, Tuesday May 12: 1,358,901 confirmed cases and 81,650 American deaths.

In which I am appreciated

On By Luther M. SilerIn Teaching1 Comment

We were listening to the radio today while taking my wife to the doctor to have her foot inspected (verdict: no weight-bearing for two weeks and a different boot and they’ll reassess at the follow-up; also, she can’t drive, so it’s good that I’m not going into school because I have to drive her back and forth to work now) and the radio DJ was talking about how it was Nurse’s Appreciation Day and how much he appreciated those nurses for all the nursing they’re doing. And then he pivoted to the fact that it’s also Teacher Appreciation Week, because let’s get all these assholes out of the way at once, and cracked a joke about how we’re all “chilling” because school isn’t in session.

And right about then was when I blacked out, and I’m told that I had to be restrained from calling the station right then and there and possibly having a negative impact on someone’s day. And right now at this exact moment I’m at home and not driving to somebody’s place of business, because it ain’t exactly a national secret where U93 broadcasts from. So, yeah, “Big Perm,” it’s good for both of us that my wife is a more civilized person than I am.

Any notion of “teacher appreciation” is always going to be a big joke in America anyway; there is no more anti-intellectual country anywhere on Earth short of a handful of dictatorships and theocracies, and certainly nowhere among the countries that are supposedly democracies. This country hates education and always has, and frankly at this point I’d rather be ignored than “appreciated.” Y’all can keep your damn coffee mugs. I have enough of them already.

I’m gonna go figure out how to teach math to some kids who aren’t in the same building as me and are worried about their families and friends keeping their jobs and lives intact; y’all let me know when the appreciatin’s over.

(This post was going to be about Maslow’s hierarchy of needs before this Perm human got my jimmies all rustled; turns out that there’s good reasons why my kids might not be in the very best place to learn right now, believe it or not.)

5:33 PM, Wednesday May 6: 1,219,952 confirmed cases; 72,617 deaths.

Friday music video break

On By Luther M. SilerIn Music, Reading1 Comment

what the hell do you mean its wednesday SHUT UP

Truth is, I’m posting this video mostly because I’m listening to this song right now and the line fuckshit is finished today is really resonating with me for some reason. I mean, it’s not, fuckshit is just the way life is now, but I appreciate optimism when I encounter it.

I’ve spent most of the day with a book in front of me; I did all of my office hours and responded to my email and all that but apparently today’s lesson clicked with the 25% of my students who looked at it, since grades were pretty good on the assignment. For the first time this week, tomorrow’s video is stolen from elsewhere on the internet, though, because I have to DM tonight and I don’t really feel the need to record my own video when I just did one on this yesterday. Maybe for the handful of them who didn’t get it hearing it from a different source will click, I dunno.

Also speaking of reading:

This book is the second in a series and occupied most of my morning in between those emails and video conferences. Luckily for me, morning office hours were sparsely attended, so I sat there and read while waiting for students to log in. You may recall that its predecessor Foundryside was, uh, a book I rather enjoyed, and the sequel is absolutely up to the standard of the first if not better– this is in the top 2 or 3 for the year so far. It’s fast-paced and complicated and heartbreaking and a masterclass in how to write a fascinating magic system. You should go pick both of them up.

Plus, God, that cover.

6:15 PM, Wednesday April 29: 1,036,652 confirmed cases, and 60,475 American deaths.

A thing that just happened

On By Luther M. SilerIn Parenting6 Comments

A trifle too long for Twitter, so a second short blog post on the day it is!

The boy is working on some language arts homework, and he’s occasionally coming to ask me some questions (I’m in the office) when he hits something he can’t immediately figure out. The theme for this particular assignment appears to be words with double letters and opposites, so we’re trying to find words that have both. I try to give him indirect answers so that he has to figure the words out himself, and his vocabulary is generally pretty good. For example, the first time the initial word was alike and he needed to come up with different.

So he comes back into the office a bit later and this time the task is to find a word that is something to wear. So, dress. I tell him it’s something that is usually worn by girls.

“Boobs?”

Suddenly I have a headache.

“People don’t wear boobs, dude. That’s a body part. They’re attached.”

He thinks about it for a second, and then, while rubbing his chest, asks what the things that “cover the boobs” are.

“That’s a bra. Three letters. No repeats.”

He thinks for another minute or two and comes up with the word dress, and I send him away.

The end.

A brief note about tomorrow’s E-Learning lesson

On By Luther M. SilerIn TeachingLeave a comment

It is possible that I have lost my shit, to some degree or another.

I am pretty certain that if I record another damn YouTube video about math tonight my organs will shut down out of spite and I will die. And I had another ten kids (about a quarter of the total number of kids who did today’s assignment, which is about a quarter of the total number of students I have) get zeroes on today’s assignment despite carefully going over each problem they were given in today’s video.

And I have no way of knowing– I have my suspicions, of course, but I have no way of knowing– which of those ten or so kids just went through and clicked several answers at random because they didn’t give a shit or whether the way I’m trying to teach them just doesn’t work, and the lack of feedback from the kids that is inherent to “distance learning” is just fucking with my head do a degree that I’m not even sure I can describe. I cannot do my job like this. My job involves people, not computer screens.

I can’t do it tonight. So I’ve declared– officially, on my Google Classroom page, mind you, where I post all of my assignments– that tomorrow is a mental health day and they are to take the 20-30 minutes they are supposed to be spending on my class and do something that they find relaxing instead. Because fuck it, nobody’s paying attention and no one is going to tell me I can’t.

Another short one tonight

On By Luther M. SilerIn TeachingLeave a comment

It’s weird that taking attendance for e-learning takes longer than doing my grading, right? Because grading is just grading, and because I’m doing everything electronically and I’m a math teacher I’m able to grade almost everything automatically, and attendance is a hideous nightmare involving two different online programs and a spreadsheet as well as backdating everything when kids do assignments from two weeks ago. Which means that every time I do my grading and my attendance I have to check every assignment I have given since this started. And, okay, it’s not the hardest thing I’ve ever done as a teacher or anything, but have you ever had to remember to click something in one place if someone is not clicked in another place? It melts your brain and your eyes after a while, and I was sitting here for probably about 2 1/2 hours tonight getting this done. Attendance in school takes less than a minute per class.

My overall numbers are scary and getting scarier; I’m averaging about a third of my students checking in on any given day, which is … not great, at all, and I expect there to be even more attrition by the end of the year even if it has been shortened. Maybe if I figure out a way to unlock a TikTok video or something every time they do an assignment … ugh. The math team had a meeting today that ended up lasting an hour and a half because we got to talking about what we were going to do this fall if the school year started without the kids in the building, which I am pretty damn convinced it is going to. The long and short of it is none of us have any idea how the hell to handle that, and we’re all terrified of it.

So, yeah, that’s all fun.

8:56 PM, Friday April 24th: 890,524 confirmed infections and 51,017 American deaths. What day next week do we cross over a million infections, do you think? Wednesday?

In which I need to figure this out

On By Luther M. SilerIn Teaching1 Comment

Right now this is my new Facebook profile picture, but I felt like it was necessary to share it here too. Sushi hates me so much, it’s adorable.

The kids appear to be having massive difficulties with the assignment I gave them today. I’ve tried to move on a bit from endless review into new material (effectively the entire fourth quarter has been distance learning, so none of the stuff that is supposed to be covered in the last 25% of the year has been taught yet) and something that probably should have occurred to me earlier occurred to me today.

When I’m teaching in a regular classroom setting, if I notice my first couple of groups having trouble with a specific aspect of something or simply not understanding the way I’m teaching it, or a common mistake I wasn’t expecting, I can adjust throughout the day. If kids in 3rd and 4th hour are frequently making the same kind of error, you can bet that 6th and 7th hour are going to hear me specifically address that type of mistake before I turn the kids loose on whatever their assignment was for that day. And in e-learning, not only do I not really have a way to adjust from class to class, but the vast majority of the time I can’t even tell what mistakes they’re making. This could be fixed somewhat if I adjusted how I was instructing– I’ve been defaulting to mostly multiple-choice assignments in a Google form that can grade itself– but it’s difficult to imagine what I could be doing that would let me see their thinking as they’re making mistakes. I mean, sure, I could ask— I could give them a problem, then they answer it, and then maybe explain in a text box how they solved it, but I know my kids well enough to know that that’s not actually going to be as helpful as it sounds like it could be. I’ve only got about 30-40% of my kids even doing the work on a day-to-day basis, it’s tough enough to get them to watch the instructional videos that are showing them how to do the stuff in the first place, and I have no way of telling whether a kid who got a terrible score on an assignment got a terrible score because he doesn’t understand what he’s doing or because he simply logged on and answered “C” for everything– which I suspect at least a couple of my kids are doing.

I need to figure out a way to get this material to teach itself, effectively– because while there’s less than a month of school left, and maybe only 15 days of actual instruction, there is no way that we don’t lose a substantial chunk of next year to this as well, and when that happens I want to be prepared.

If you’re wondering what I mean by “teach itself,” read this excellent article about how– this is not a joke– the first level of Nintendo’s Super Mario Brothers teaches you how to play it. That game is a masterclass of tutorial design; I just need to figure out a way to apply that style of learning to math.

It’ll be easy, I’m sure.

6:52 PM, Wednesday (God, is it Wednesday? Is that right?) April 22nd: 837,947 confirmed cases and 46,560 Americans dead. That is a pretty staggering increase in the 31 hours since I last posted.