It’s taken a while to get everything lined up, to get everything prepared, to get all the kids set and expecting it, but today, I finally pulled it off.

I live-streamed my classes so that students at home could simply follow along. I used a bone-conduction blue tooth headset to hear questions from the online kids and to make sure they heard me clearly, and I presented the screen through Google Meet so they could simply follow along with the text as we annotated it. (And one of the administrators, knowing I was doing this, dropped by to take some pictures, which made it to social media.)

In the past, we’ve had material prepared for kids at home and material prepared for kids in school. I’ve been teaching doubled lessons: I teach the same thing on Monday to the students who attend Monday and Wednesday then I repeat it all Tuesday for the other group. But no more.

The parental response has been completely positive and overwhelmingly uniform:

  • This was great…my son really liked this
  • THIS IS AWESOME!! Would love to see y’all make this happen!!!
  • This was excellent! The most positive school response I’ve seen from my daughter since Covid began.
  • I have wondered from the beginning why this wasn’t done for every class.
  • Rave reviews from my 8th grader!
  • This was a huge help. Thank you, Mr. Scott! Would love to see this happen for additional classes.

So two things now come to mind:

  1. I must plan all my lessons so that they can fit into such a template. (Or almost all my lessons. I don’t know about Socratic seminars and other forms of discussion, but perhaps it’s do-able with a little ingenuity.)
  2. I must talk several teachers off the ledge when word starts getting around that this is going to be required (it won’t) and that it’s terribly complicated (it isn’t) and that it will require much more planning time (much less, actually).

Finally, it’s proved one thing to me as well: snow days are now completely obsolete.