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2020 school year

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…

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.