The Day After
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16
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
"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
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:
- 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.
- 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
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
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
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
"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
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.
And then within another day, last year's trip:
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
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.
