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2020 School Year Day 2

Tuesday 25 August 2020

We’ve finished two days of school. I swear it feels like a week already. There’s nothing like doing the same thing over and over to drive the joy out of something. Today, the same lessons as yesterday: one lesson four times, the other once. And what’s worse: this is only the halfway point. I still have to do the same lesson just as many times as I’ve already done it.

As with yesterday, I tried journaling with my journalism/creative nonfiction students today:

Day two is now behind us. I feel like we’ve been here for a week. I’ve done the same thing with eight — count them, eight — classes, and I still have eight more to do. I’m already seeing that the plan to try to do the same lesson with the in-person kids throughout the week was an absolutely ridiculous idea: I’d go stark raving mad if I had to do every week like this week, with the same lesson over and over and over and over and over and over and over. (I’m tempted to do that sixteen times, but I don’t even want to try to keep track of how many times I’ve actually typed it…)

So what was different about today as opposed to yesterday? New kids — the obvious answer. Some very entertaining kids, including siblings of folks I”ve taught in the class (at least two that I can think of). Some very quiet kids. (I used to worry about such kids, but I’ve learned over the years that such kids are quiet as a sort of defense mechanism. What I mistook for near-apathy is in fact just a lack of certainty about where they fit in the class, what their role will be.) SOme kids with great senses of humor — kids that can take ribbing and know that I”m’ actually being silly with them and who hopefully realize I mean the exact opposite.

I also remembered to have my online meeting with kids who are still at home. I got to talk to three girls, one I’ll meet tomorrow and two I’ll meet Thursday. I don’t think anyone really realizes how far that goes in creating a positive first impression. It’s a little bit of effort that has a disproportionately large impact on one’s impression. It’s like paying a dollar and getting ten dollars worth of candy.

All these new procedures are gradually becoming new habits. I didn’t forget to spray disinfectant on any desks today, and I”m not sure I got them all yesterday. It’s one of those things that I think, “Missing one time is not the end of the world,” when, in fact, in a pandemic situation, it might very well ultimately be the end of the world for someone. It’s almost depressing to think about it like that, but viruses don’t care how we feel about them. They’re just there, doing what they do without giving it a single thought.

I am getting terribly yawny now. I always do during seventh period. When I used to have English I during seventh period, I felt those kids were getting something of a raw deal because I could never get through that class with the same enthusiasm as I did with other classes. I found myself wishing I’d filmed fourth period so I could just say, “Watch this video and do it along with them…” It was the same way yesterday, and as a result, I went to bed shortly after nine. I was so exhausted that it was difficult to focus. I guess it’s the way every year during the first few weeks: my body is used to a different schedule, and it rebels at having revert back to a school-year schedule.

It was an especially long day because it was the Girl’s first volleyball game. Possibly the last — who knows in these times. Is it safe? We all take the most precautions that we can. It’s such an important element in L’s life, so important to her mental heath — does that outweigh the risks? What exactly are the risks? It still seems so unlikely and yet so inevitable.

The Girl did well; her team won both sets. She had a couple of really good saves, and in set one, her spike was the winning point (if memory serves).

Her school won both sets easily, and the coach was wise and sportsmanlike enough to pull almost all the starters when the second set was clearly in the bag and put some sixth- and seventh-graders in to get some experience.

A good day, but tiring.

First Day 2020

Monday 24 August 2020

It’s an odd thing, repeating the same thing four times. Four times. Four times. Four times. But that’s what I did today, doing the first day scenario four times as I have four English I Honors classes this year. But in fact, I’ll be repeating today’s lessons four days, hitting a quarter of the students in a given period each day. That’s an altogether different issue: repeating the same lesson sixteen times.

That’s the Covid-19, 2020-school-year reality.

The only exception to this is journalism, which is not journalism this year because it’s logistically impossible. Instead, it’s “Creative Nonfiction” — close but not really the same at all. In that class, I had the kids start their journals, and I wrote in my own to model the expectation and show that when I say “You can write about anything,” I mean it:

The first day of the dreaded 2020 school year is over and what do I have to show for it? Well, I’m quite frankly completely sick of this mask: I haven’t worn a mask continually ever. Evetr. During last week, I took it off in the classroom, but GCS requires teachers to wear a mask when around students, and honestly, if the didn’t require it, I would be a little upset. It’s a pain, but it’s for everyone’s safety.

Still, there were a lot of things I didn’t expect. For one thing, it’s much harder to understand what students are saying when they’re wearing masks. I had one girl who spoke very quietly, and I had to ask her to slip her mask off for a second because I couldn’t understand what she was saying at one point. And it happened more than once now that I think about it. Another unexpected element was how warm my face got with it on. Having not worn a mask for more than a hour at a time, I didn’t realize how my face would warm up and just stay warm. My wife had to wear a mask every day when she was still working at __, and she told me how hot it was, but it really didn’t register that it would be my reality when the school year started. A final unexpected element was how I could get used to it. Despite the heat and the other challenges, there were points that I wasn’t even thinking about it — until my nose itched and I went to scratch it.

Still, it’s a small price to pay. I’m glad to be back in the classroom with students. That 100% online teaching was hardly teaching. Granted, I didn’t do any teaching today to speak of (well, perhaps showing students how to organize their Drive folders a bit), but still, being physically with the students–there’s no substitute for it. I don’t really like that I won’t see these kids for a week after they leave today, though I know it’s necessary for preventing the spread of our covid reality. Will I remember everyone’s name in a week after not having seen them? I kind of doubt it. I’m so terrible with names as it is: having a week between each meeting will make it all the more difficult. That’s tempered by the fact that I”m only learning 4-7 names per period. Despite that, I doubt I’ll remember every name next Monday.

(I just had a realization: if we have a snow day, one group of kids is missing essentially a whole week of school. It’s another argument against having in-person days different lessons from what online kids are doing.)

I will have to write a “first” entry three more times this week.

That’s the Covid-19, 2020-school-year reality.

The Night Before

Sunday 23 August 2020

Tomorrow is the first day of school. We were supposed to start a week ago, but for whatever reason, the district moved the start date back a week. Kids were supposed to come to the school in shifts and get their Chromebooks and do some other administrative-type things. A lot of kids did; a lot didn’t.

We were supposed to have elearning starting tomorrow for those not coming into the school building (75% of the students on any given day). Instead, since the district was having issues with Google Classroom rosters, we’re doing school-wide lessons instead of teacher/subject-specific lessons.

Everything is turned, twisted, confused, and confusing. For the first time in my teaching career, including when I was student-teaching, I’m going into the first day of school with no clear idea of how things will go, what we will do, when we will do it.

And I’m completely okay with that. Seriously — no stress at all. This is going to be the year (as long as we’re going to school in person in one form or another) of letting go. This is the year of flexibility.

We — teachers, students, and parents — will become figurative contortion artists.

Prep

Friday 21 August 2020

Today was a day of preparation. Rosol for tomorrow; lots of cleaning; a bit of discussion.

Tomorrow is the Boy’s first communion. We’re having the god-parents and their families over for dinner tomorrow after Mass.

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.