Matching Tracksuits

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Stop Everything

Wednesday 19 August 2020

How do you plan for elearning without computers? It’s a paradox — an oxymoron, even. You can’t do it any more than you can have a book-free book club or a cycling club with members who don’t own bikes.

Nevertheless, I spent the day trying to do just that. And when I’d come up with something that wasn’t entirely meaningless but not critical for students to complete, the AP comes in my room and tells me, “Don’t hate me. I just found out that all the lesson plans for next week will be supplied by the district.” It seems there are issues with technology — Google Classroom, to be specific — that make any significant rollout next week all but impossible.

What could we do but laugh at that point?

More Surprises

Tuesday 18 August 2020

For next week, we’re to prepare a week of elearning for the kids. All the students will come in for one class period (for the week), but they’ll spend the rest of the time doing elearning at home.

I found out today, though, that I can’t make any plans that assume they have computers because they won’t be getting their Chromebooks until they come to class that one day. (Never mind that the district set aside this week for students to come in and get their Chromebooks…) So I’m to plan elearning that includes no elearning.

I’m still trying to figure out just how that might work…

Trim

Monday 17 August 2020

The beard was getting out of hand.

I’d sworn that I wouldn’t trim the thing until we went back to school, back to school for good, not in some awkward, inefficient once-a-week/elearning hybrid. Real school.

When I put on a mask, it looked absolutely horrible.

And it left this awful wrinkle in the beard, a little curl that forced the lower part of the beard to shoot straight out, away from my face like a cowlick from hell.

So there was only one thing to do: let L do what she’s been begging to do for some time now. “When you trim it, let’s put the mask on and the cut around it.

The results, after the initial trim, weren’t that promising. I went in and cleaned it up but never got a real “after” picture.

But she enjoyed doing it, and the Boy enjoyed photographing the adventure.

16

Friday 14 August 2020

It doesn’t seem like that long ago. Yet it does. Worlds away.

Happy 16th anniversary to my one and only love — I have no idea how you’ve put up with me this long.

Family Sports

Thursday 13 August 2020

“Can we play some family sports tonight?” the Boy asked during dinner. He’s always interested in doing something as a family: a family bike ride, a family film, a game of family soccer. But our busy lives (busy even in this time of pandemic) being what they are, it’s rare that we get to play together. Tonight, for example, K had to write an offer on a house for one of her clients, and that takes a fair amount of time. So I went out with the kids and the dog and played some soccer and volleyball with them.

Tonight, the Boy learned a lesson during the game. He’d been bragging to L, insisting that he was a much better soccer player than she. Had the Boy developed fully the critical thinking skills a thirteen-year-old has, he would have looked at relative size, relative experience, and relative speed and thought, “It’s unlikely I’m much better than she.”

Then again, I’ve had plenty of thirteen-year-olds challenge me to chess, swear their going to beat me badly, and then ask as soon as the board is set up, “So, how do you play?” that a thirteen-year-old’s critical thinking skills can be less than ideal.

So they played. E lost. E fussed. I encouraged. And in the end, instead of giving up, he kept trying, kept attacking, and made some really good plays in the end.

More Questions

Wednesday 12 August 2020

We’re meeting with our kids once a week: each class is divided into four groups, with each group meeting on a given day. The other days the students are engaged in online learning or e-learning or whatever it’s called now. So here was my question: how do I plan lessons around that. Two options seemed obvious:

  1. Teach a special lesson on the day that the kids are with me and something else for the other kids. This seems to make the most of the fact that we’re together, in person. We don’t want to spend that time on activities that don’t need me right there — like reading a short text. We want that time for discussions, for one-on-one help. For things like that.
  2. Teach the same thing to the kids at home and at school.

Obviously, from the argument I just made, I was leaning toward option one. But then there’s all the potential disasters:

  • It will be almost impossible for the kids to keep up with what’s what.
  • Forget the kids — it would be tough for me to keep track of who’s where doing what.
  • What happens if we have a fire drill or something on that day? Those kids just lose out on that particular lesson.
  • What happens at the end of the quarter? Everyone is not at the same place at the same time. How can I equitably grade them?

Yet the second option has similar issues. I have to make sure that the activities are equitably spaced out among the days: I can’t have Monday kids always doing close reading with me and Thursday kids always writing things based on Monday’s close reading. Then there’s the question of how to assess and provide feedback to the kids who were at home that day. Do I come home from school and spend another six hours going over what kids did online?

The argument for e-learning until things to back to normal grows stronger…

What I Didn’t Consider

Tuesday 11 August 2020

We had our eighth-grade meeting today, held in the cafeteria in desks spaced far enough that we didn’t have to wear masks according to CDC guidelines. The meeting began at 8:30; it ended just before noon.

What all could we talk about for that long? Well, truth be told, things were rushed at the end to try to keep it from going even longer.

What could we talk about for so long?

  • Masks — how do we make sure students wear them? How do we deal with students taking them off?
  • Bathroom — how does that work to ensure social distancing and such?
  • Lunch — how do we get them in and out while maintaining a safe distance? (And making sure they’ve all washed their hands.)
  • Attendance — how do we take roll for those students who are working at home that day?
  • Behavior issues — how will we deal with chronically misbehaving students since to suspend them three days would mean actually suspending them for three weeks?
  • Fire drills — what will they look like? And can we take into consideration that missing 15% of a class period for a fire drill is missing 15% of the week’s time with those given students?

Just a few things that will keep me up at night for the next few weeks.

The Coming School Year

Monday 10 August 2020

Today the district released the attendance plan for the beginning of this school year:

The latest DHEC COVID-19 spread ratings are out. Greenville County remains HIGH overall, but continues to show improvement. Greenville ranks HIGH in incidence rate (296) and the percent of positive tests (13.7%), but since our numbers overall are decreasing, we are rated LOW in the trend in incidence category.

As a result, GCS is announcing later this afternoon that we will return to school on August 24 under Attendance Plan 1. On the GCS Roadmap, this is the plan in which students in our traditional program attend school one day each week and are on eLearning the other four days.

Said roadmap looks like this:

So I will be meeting all my students one day a week. I counted that up this evening and had a little epiphany, which I mentioned to K: “That means I’ll teach the same lesson sixteen times in a row each week.”

At first she thought I was talking nonsense: “Won’t you just do the same thing with every class but some of them will be online?”

“That would require preparing two lessons a day, one for the online kids and one for the in-person kids, trying to figure out how to do the same thing two different ways.” She saw the problems with that method. “What I need to use my in-person time for is practice when I need to be there to lend a helping hand and be available for in-person help.”

In my mind, that means staggering lessons among students, though: if online lessons 1, 2, and 3 are meant to culminate with the in-person lesson for individual practice, every class will be at a different place on that continuum each day. That would be a nightmare to keep everything straight in my head and my planning.

This will really require us to re-think teaching in a lot of ways. Perhaps that will have some good long-term effects.

Raven Cliff Falls

Sunday 9 August 2020

Today was the last Sunday before the school year starts, so we made the most of it with a hike that was supposed to be 5 miles total but ended up being 8. A lot packed into that sentence.

Starting school. What does that even mean this year? For weeks we’ve been wondering about what the year will look like. When our average daily new C-19 statewide case number was 100-200, we ended the school year in March and spent the rest of the year online babysitting for the most part. Now our daily numbers are 1,000+, and they have been for weeks. And we’re talking about going back to school? It seems like madness. But we’ve got a Republican governor and a staunch Trump supporter to boot, so science be damned — let’s send those kids back to school. (Our governor pointed out that there’s little risk in school-age children dying from this. When asked about the risks to teachers and their families, our fine governor said, “Well, they signed up for the job” — as if he were talking about police officers or infantry soldiers.)

As for the 8-mile-should-have-been-5-mile hike — what can we say? We used AllTrails.com to calculate the distance and didn’t realize it was only calculating the portion of the hike that was on the red trail, neglecting the portion of the blue and pink trails we had to go on to reach Raven Cliff Falls. One would think that “Raven Cliff Falls Trail” leads to — guess — RCF. But it only gets you so far — the rest is whatever the blue and pink portions were called.

But all the kids made it — with minimal complaining. Well, “minimal” is often so very relative…

Turtle

Saturday 8 August 2020

“Padre! Padre! Come here!” The Girl had discovered a new dilemma — I could hear it in her voice. (She’s taken to calling K and me “Madre” and “Padre” of late — I think it’s kind of cute.)

“What?”

“There’s a snapping turtle in our backyard, trapped by the fence, and Clover is going crazy with it.”

I put on some heavy gloves and went out for a turtle rescue, only to discover

that L doesn’t know what a snapping turtle looks like compared to a regular box turtle.

“Does that mean we can take it up and show everyone?”

“Of course.”

Lake Jocassee 2020

Friday 7 August 2020

To say we’re creatures of habit is an understatement. Every time we go to Polska, we end up going to Zab roughly the same time. And here we have two years ago another trip to Lake Jocassee.

Lake Jocassee, Day 1

And then within another day, last year’s trip:

Lake Jocassee 2019

Each trip a little different. 2018 was our last family camping adventure at Jocassee. Last year we went without K as she was preparing for the real estate exam; this year, she’s so busy with said real estate that she sent me with E and his friend N. Other considerations, of course, but that was the main issue.

We arrived Wednesday evening and quickly set up camp before heading out to the lake. E wanted to show N the little “private” beach (which is not very private but is in fact limited to park campers only). It was here that we’d caught so many little minnows, and E was eager to show him how to catch them. Yet things had changed: the log from which we’d fished and around which all the minnows swam had lost all its branches and was thus no longer so inviting got the minnows.

Day two — our only full day — began with some fishing. We went to another location and immediately caught a few little fellows. The boys even managed to remove the hook and release the fish with little to no help from me. After a snack, the wanted to go back for some swimming. After lunch, they wanted to go back for more swimming. After dinner, they wanted to go back for more fishing. We basically spent the day on that little outcropping of rocks.

And today, pretty much the same.

Bridge

Thursday 6 August 2020

A bridge of the Lipniczanka, which I photographed just shy of twenty years ago, but with a little processing looks like I could have found this image in a box of old photographs.

Assumptions

Wednesday 5 August 2020

We go through our lives with basic assumptions that we often never question. Some of those assumptions are small, relatively insignificant; others involve reality on a global scale.

Take for instance the Cold War: growing up, I never thought it would end. And yet it did. I never would have conceived of the Soviet Union not existing; and it’s been gone close to thirty years now.

What about the threat of Germany? We mostly thought some kind of far-right resurgence could never happen — at least I always thought that. At least in my adulthood. In my childhood — that’s a different story. At any rate, an interesting article appeared in the New York Times the other day about just what I have thought all my adult life is impossible:

One central motivation of the extremists has seemed so far-fetched and fantastical that for a long time the authorities and investigators did not take it seriously, even as it gained broader currency in far-right circles.

Neo-Nazi groups and other extremists call it Day X — a mythical moment when Germany’s social order collapses, requiring committed far-right extremists, in their telling, to save themselves and rescue the nation.

Today Day X preppers are drawing serious people with serious skills and ambition. Increasingly, the German authorities consider the scenario a pretext for domestic terrorism by far-right plotters or even for a takeover of the government.

“I fear we’ve only seen the tip of the iceberg,” said Dirk Friedriszik, a lawmaker in the northeastern state of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, where Nordkreuz was founded. “It isn’t just the KSK. The real worry is: These cells are everywhere. In the army, in the police, in reservist units.”

New York Times

I’m such an anti-conspiracy theorist that I forget that people actually do conspire sometimes…

New New Year

Tuesday 4 August 2020

We had our first staff meeting of the 2020/2021 school year this afternoon — via Zoom. I think that’s fairly indicative of what the year will be like.

What do we know now? We know what our various schedules will look like. We have four possibilities:

  1. Remote learning 100% — no days in the school.
  2. In-person learning 25% of the time — every kid comes to school one day a week, with the other days being online-only. (Reduces class sizes to about 7 per period.)
  3. In-person learning 50% of the time — every kid comes to school twice a week, with the other days being online-only.
  4. Full-time in-person learning.

But we’ve known about these possibilities for weeks now. What exactly will we be doing? We’re supposed to find out 10 August — the first day teachers head back for in-school work days. If we go with option 1, which would be the sensible option given how awful our state if faring because of the high proportion of anti-maskers in our lovely red state, all our “getting rooms ready” time will be for nothing. No big deal — more planning time.

Still, there’s a lot more behind the scenes than I’d really thought about. What about kids who would otherwise be suspended? If we’re in scenario 2, a three-day suspension would mean in reality three-week suspension. “We’re just not going to do that if we can at all avoid it,” our principal said. That was a scenario that I’d never considered, though.

I expect in the coming weeks, we’ll be encountering much we didn’t expect, no matter what our schooling looks like.

More Hearts

Monday 3 August 2020

Papa won, hence the “heart attack.”

Hearts

Sunday 2 August 2020

K and I played a three-handed game of hearts with the Girl tonight. We wanted to watch a movie, but L was not in the mood. “She’ll play a card game,” I thought, and bounded up to her room to suggest it.

I like throwing down the queen of spades on unsuspecting players, and I usually keep her in my hand. L did poorly on the first hand, and so for the second hand, I wanted to make sure she didn’t get the queen. I almost ended up with it myself as a result.

But I did manage to do something that has crossed my mind a few times, but I never did: announce to everyone I had the queen. I began the hand with 7 spades; K gave me the ace, king, and queen of spades. But I had not a single diamond. At one point, I even lead with spades to get the hand to someone else, waiting for the first person to lead with diamonds. It was K. I laid it on her.

In the end, I gave her the queen probably four or five times. When we finished, she said, “Well, pack up your stuff to sleep on the couch.”

L thought it was uproariously amusing. And I think that was what it was all about. Next time, I’ll have to fall on the sword a number of times — it should amuse L even more, and K, too.

Saturday

Saturday 1 August 2020

The day began with a challenge: the Swamp Rabbit Trail. Our goal was to ride the whole distance (well, the main part of the trail) and back again — a total of 22 miles. For K and me, it was probably not that big a deal — we’ve ridden further, and faster. For the Girl, it was no big deal: she’s been cycling a lot lately, plus she’s just young and strong. But for the Boy? His longest ride to date was 16 miles, just over a year ago.

Other than being younger and not as strong, he has another disadvantage: a smaller bike that cannot possibly go nearly as fast. Yet he soldiered through.

In the afternoon, he and I finished our summer project. French drain completed and completely hidden.

Papa’s Parents

Friday 31 July 2020

I found this scanned picture while going through copied files to make sure that I’d moved everything from the old to the new computer. They’re quite younger in this picture than I remember.