Matching Tracksuits

education and teaching

One Art

Monday 23 November 2020

Today, we finish up our poetry unit, going over my all-time favorite poem, Elizabeth Bishop’s villanelle “One Art.”

The art of losing isn’t hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother’s watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster.

—Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident
the art of losing’s not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

Every year I teach this, after we read it and define the unknown words (“vaster” is always in that list; “fluster” and “realm” are there from time to time), I have the kids jot down questions at the bottom of the page. “What strikes you as odd about this poem? In some ways it seems really simple, but there a few things that just seem out of place. What are those things?” The same questions appear every year — the same questions I want to appear:

  1. Does she mean she really lost houses? How are we to understand that?
  2. What does she mean, she lost cities? And a continent? What does that mean?
  3. What’s up with that parenthesis in the last line?
  4. And why is “Write” in italics?
  5. Why does she begin that final stanza with a — what is that? A hyphen?

I get them working in groups after I point out a few more things:

  • I give a brief refresher on imperative voice and the implied “you” subject they contain.
  • I suggest they might want to consider who this “you” is.
  • I point out that there is a “you” in the poem later and ask them to consider if it’s the same “you” as earlier in the imperative mood sentences.
  • I help them see that there is another imperative in the final line. “Do you think it’s the same implied ‘you’ as the first imperative passages?”
  • I remind them that there are often patterns in poetry. “I’m not just talking about rhyme schemes,” I clarify. “There’s a pattern in the meaning of the poem.”

They break into groups to work. Soon enough, someone notices the pattern: “Everything she loses keeps getting bigger and more significant.” Exactly.

At this point, I add a new twist I saw in the poem. (Great poetry is always revealing something new about itself.) The first word of the final stanza is deceptively ordinary. “Even.”

“Think about how you use ‘even’,” I suggest. “You might say something like this. ‘We’ve all finished the test. Even Steve is done.’ What does that mean?”

“That we’re surprised Steve finished,” someone answers.

“Why?”

“Because we don’t expect it.”

With some more group work, they figure it out. And then someone always states the obvious: “Oh, I see, Mr. Scott. It’s a break-up poem.”

Exactly. But such an exquisite break-up poem…

Meter

Tuesday 17 November 2020

Today we finished up a quick day-and-a-half overview of meter after spending about a week on Shakespearean sonnets. I wanted kids really to understand the level of Shakespeare’s achievement, how much he wrote in iambic pentameter.

“Remember, kiddos,” I said, “he was not only choosing words based on the ideas he wanted to express; he was also having to take into account their length and rhythm.”

In the evening, during L’s club volleyball signing and uniform fitting, I ran into two of my students who are playing on L’s team. They’re having a test tomorrow on sonnets but not on meter. It’s not in the standards in any sense, so I couldn’t justify testing them on it, and I could just barely justify to myself spending almost two days on it. It’s just on interpreting, on picking up on some of the rudimentary differences between modern and Elizabethan English. I reminded one of the girls to keep preparing for the test.

“We were going over it in the car,” said her father.

Starting the Bard

Thursday 5 November 2020

Students started the final series of poems in our poetry unit, turning to the poems of William Shakespeare in preparation for the next unit, which is on Romeo and Juliet.  We began parsing Shakespeare’s twenty-ninth sonnet:

When, in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes,
I all alone beweep my outcast state,
And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries,
And look upon myself and curse my fate,
Wishing me like to one more rich in hope,
Featured like him, like him with friends possessed,
Desiring this man’s art and that man’s scope,
With what I most enjoy contented least;
Yet in these thoughts myself almost despising,
Haply I think on thee, and then my state,
(Like to the lark at break of day arising
From sullen earth) sings hymns at heaven’s gate;
For thy sweet love remembered such wealth brings
That then I scorn to change my state with kings.

This is a particularly challenging piece with which to begin because it is one single sentence. We began by creating our own version of such a sentence, which in fact has an introductory subordinate clause with lots of other phrases connected to it.

Thursday at Home

Thursday 29 October 2020

We stayed home today because of potential high winds due to the remnants of Zeta. Since we’re all so used to it, switching to online learning was a snap for everyone. K pointed out the now-obvious: they’ll be more willing to do this in the future with less risk because they know we can do elearning.

No more snow days. More wind/rain/inclement weather elearning days.

Unfortunately, the neighbor up the street with the trashy Halloween decorations suffered little damage to his display…

First Day at 100%

Wednesday 28 October 2020

We go to school five days a week now, and this has advantages and disadvantages.

First, I get all my friends back. A and O are my two best friends, and because of Covid, I didn’t have them in class since we went to school in different groups. Today, though, we go five days a week, and we don’t have two groups anymore. We talked about the surprise I’m going to do for their mom. I’m going to take a Dobby mask and try to surprise her and maybe spook her a little bit with a fake knife.

Next, I feel better having a big group of twenty people. I think that everyone in one class should be together and not split up into two groups.

However, I have to wear a mask all day, and this is a disadvantage. A mask is uncomfortable because it rubs on your mouth, and it itches. Even though it’s uncomfortable, I have to do it because covid is bad, and we have to stop the spread. Masks help stop the spread.

I think that it’s very much better than two groups because I get so many people to be with.

Remembering and Forgetting

Friday 23 October 2020

Yesterday, we went over a new poem: Billy Collins’s “Forgetfulness.”

The name of the author is the first to go
followed obediently by the title, the plot,
the heartbreaking conclusion, the entire novel
which suddenly becomes one you have never read, never even heard of,

as if, one by one, the memories you used to harbor
decided to retire to the southern hemisphere of the brain,
to a little fishing village where there are no phones.

Long ago you kissed the names of the nine muses goodbye
and watched the quadratic equation pack its bag,
and even now as you memorize the order of the planets,

something else is slipping away, a state flower perhaps,
the address of an uncle, the capital of Paraguay.

Whatever it is you are struggling to remember,
it is not poised on the tip of your tongue
or even lurking in some obscure corner of your spleen.

It has floated away down a dark mythological river
whose name begins with an L as far as you can recall
well on your own way to oblivion where you will join those
who have even forgotten how to swim and how to ride a bicycle.

No wonder you rise in the middle of the night
to look up the date of a famous battle in a book on war.
No wonder the moon in the window seems to have drifted
out of a love poem that you used to know by heart.

Collins is famous for poems in which a witty, whimsical tone belies a deeper, subtler idea. He’s perfect for teaching kids what I call the two levels of poetry: what’s happening in the poem and what the poem is about. His work also often shows a clear tonal shift, and that’s something I want my students to be able to sense.

Yet eighth-grade students often miss the whimsy in his poems. They read something like this without cracking a smile. They even watch an animated version of it without reaction:

So we have to walk through it carefully.

This year, I started by focusing on the fifth stanza:

Whatever it is you are struggling to remember,
it is not poised on the tip of your tongue
or even lurking in some obscure corner of your spleen.

“Everyone has heard the phrase ‘it’s on the tip of your tongue,’ right?” I asked. Of course they had. But I had to lead them into “lurking in some obscure corner of your spleen.” We mapped it out:

  • “poised” turns into “lurking”
  • “tip” transmutes into “some obscure corner”
  • “tongue” becomes “spleen”

“Have you ever heard anyone say some memory is ‘lurking in the corner of my spleen’?” I asked. And everyone laughed. “That’s what the poet was getting at!”

Once they got it, they saw the other instances of whimsy in the poem:

  • We talked about the idea of “the memories you used to harbor” deciding to “retire to the southern hemisphere of the brain, / to a little fishing village where there are no phones.” “Look at all that absurd detail!”
  • We visualized kissing “the names of the nine muses goodbye” — “I’m going to miss you so much! What will life be like without you!?”
  • We imagined seeing “the quadratic equation pack its bag.” “It’s over, do you hear!? I saw you last week in the park with that pythagorean theorem!”
  • We saw the drama build up with the line “It has floated away down a dark mythological river” only to fizzle out pathetically with “whose name begins with an L as far as you can recall.”

It’s not the first time students have struggled to see the humor in Collins’s poetry. When we do “The Lanyard” next week, the same thing will happen. I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s an age thing: that type of whimsy just goes right over their inexperienced heads.

Late October

Wednesday 21 October 2020

Written a couple of years ago but still true

It’s late October. The first quarter is drawing to a close, and students sit wading through district-mandated benchmark tests. Despite this, its one of my favorite periods of the school year. The honeymoon period is over, and we’re up to our noses in work that occasionally seems like it might sweep over us all. The kids are getting comfortable with the demands of an honors course, and we’ve all settled in for several months of work. But more than that, more personal, when I look out over the class, the students are now not just faces to which I’m trying to attach names; when I scroll down the roll at the start of each class, the names are not just sitting there waiting for me to combine with a face.

They’ve emerged as this amalgamation of worry and laughter, of procrastination and focus, of silliness and maturity — everything that makes thirteen-year-olds and fourteen-year-olds thirteen-year-olds and fourteen-year-olds. They’re still kids but in bodies that are nearly fully developed, and the awkwardness that implies radiates from every smile of accomplishment and glistens from every tear of frustration that accompanies the eighth grade. Their brains, developing in new and unexpected ways, are awash in a warm flood of newly-released hormones. They realize they’re not adults yet but in some sense are convinced they are. They’ve become people that I think I might actually have quite warm feelings toward instead of just a list of names an administrator has handed me.

I look around the classroom and see faces behind which are entire universes of experiences, worries, excitements, concerns, joys, and doubts. Each face is a mixture of all these things and more.

I see B, who’s new to public school and worried the effect her shyness and lack of experience might have on making friends but who is, nonetheless, making friends because she is a genuinely good soul and everyone sees that. I glance over at J, sitting with his head down, a child I suspect is just on the edge of the autism spectrum, who seems just enough aware of his social awkwardness to be annoyed but not defeated by it. H sits in front of the class, a teacher’s dream in so many ways: quick, bright, kind, helpful, she would probably be accused of being a teacher’s pet if it weren’t so obvious that she does these things because it’s just the person she is. In the corner desk is D, who has a mouth that seems incapable of pausing at times yet is impossible not to like despite his frustrating behavior. In the middle of the room sits quiet J, who struggled mightily at the beginning of the year and wanted to leave the class but has in the last weeks blossomed into a determined but struggling writer who has shown more improvement in the last month than some students show all year because she is so very determined to make that improvement.

In short, it’s the time of year that I realize I was wrong in my assumptions at the end of the last year, just as I am wrong every year.

“I love these silly kids!” I think at the end of the year. “There’s no way any other group can compare to them.”

And then the next year’s students come, and over the course of a few weeks they go from being names on a list to kids I’m working with, laughing with, fighting with, crying with, and I see that the impossible has happened: once again, I have the greatest group of kids I could ever imagine working with, and I’m equally convinced that they are irreplaceable, that I can never feel for another group of kids what I feel for these kids.

Birds and Testing

Tuesday 20 October 2020

The kids are all taking a benchmark test. We’re spending two hours of each of the two days students will be in school taking a district-mandated benchmark test, which, truth be told, will be of little to no value to me. I know where my students are; I know where we’re going; I know what I haven’t covered. Further, I know the students better than a benchmark could show

In the midst of all this, a bird flies up to the window and perches on the sill. It cocks its head as it investigates all the humanoid forms on the inside, all hunched over glowing boxes, almost all oblivious to the bird’s presence. Except Anna. She’s sitting next to the window and has watched the bird flutter up. She takes a break from her test and looks over at the bird, smiling and likely grateful for the break the bird’s presence has brought.

Birds come to this window regularly, but their presence injects a bit of tragic chaos into the class atmosphere. Twice this year, birds have flown into the window with a sickening thud, only to lie outside the window slowly dying of the blunt force trauma the window and physics delivered. They flap about just outside our window as if they are trying to distract a predator to lure it away from its nest. Those times, though, the bird was not faking.

There’s an analogy there, I think. The window is our education system: it can either offer a glimpse into a new world, inviting participation and fascination, or it can just break students, often with rigid testing systems and the one-size-fits-all mentality they can engender.

During this highly stressful year, I think testing is more the break-students type of experience than anything else. Why are we spending two hours of each of the two days this week testing? Our students are in the classroom two days a week. That’s about fourteen hours a week. And we’re four of those hours (about 28.5%) of that time administering benchmark tests? Benchmark tests?! I can tell you just have close my students are to any given benchmark without taking nearly thirty percent of my week’s time with students to do it.

On a positive note, though, the assistant principal came into my room about ten minutes into the lesson with the district’s assistant superintendent so he could see how I’m streaming my class. Apparently, I’m something of a trailblazer with this in the district. I, for one, can’t understand why more teachers aren’t doing it on their own: it returns my planning to normal, pre-covid dimensions. I no longer have to create something separate for the kids at home. I do, though, have a unique situation in that I teach only honors kids, which means that most of them are motivated to log on and follow along from home. Other students might not be so willing. (Still, said students — at risk, we would call them — are not necessarily doing the elearning anyway. What difference does it make which type of online learning they are neglecting? I’m fortunate that most of the kids follow along.

Today in School

Wednesday 14 October 2020

We had the PSAT today, so many students were out during class. No matter — it’s recorded and posted on Google Classroom.

We began the day with a short open-note quiz on the two poems we just finished and on poetry in general. We followed that with a short viewing (about a minute) of the Stanford Viennese Ball’s opening waltz:

This was in order to provide students with some perspective about what a waltz looks like when we read “My Papa’s Waltz.”

Our reading of “My Papa’s Waltz” was a cautionary tale. At first it seems like so many words have connotations of abuse that the poem is actually about an abusive father.

  • The “whiskey on your breath” line makes us think he’s inebriated.
  • “Death” has obvious bad connotations.
  • “Battered” and “beat” are abusive words.

The problem, though, is this is not a close-enough reading.

  • Notice: his knuckle is what’s battered. Along with the “palm caked hard with dirt,” this suggests he’s a man used to hard manual labor.
  • He’s beating time and nothing else — he’s tapping the boy’s head 1-2-3 to help him keep up with the waltz.
  • The text shows he’s had something to drink; it doesn’t say he’s inebriated. (“Remember what that waltz looked like?” I reminded the students. “Do you think he could do that if he’d been inebriated?”)
  • Note who puts him to bed: the father.

So this was a cautionary tale about reading too much into the connotations of a poem. Don’t overdo it. If there’s no evidence in the text, it’s likely not a valid interpretation.

Streaming

Wednesday 7 October 2020

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.

Today in Class

Thursday 10 September 2020

Students have been spending the last two days working on how we can use plot and setting to analyze a short story. Each day’s classes came up with slightly different results.

Our first step was to explicate the plot and setting of our story:

We determined that the real heart of the story, and thus of the conflict, was the fact that the protagonist unknowingly kills his brother as he tries to escape from being pinned down on the roof. This is what gives the story its power; this is the heart of the story that cannot be tampered with.

We then began asking whether we could change various elements of the plot. We determined that it doesn’t have to be on a roof; it just has to be somewhere the protagonist can be trapped. We decided that it doesn’t have to be Dublin, though a historian of the Irish Civil War might tell us that snipers were only active in Dublin. (I have no idea if this is the case. I used it as an example.) At first, everyone thought it couldn’t be moved from Ireland because it’s set in the Irish Civil War, but we soon figured out that it simply has to be in a setting where a brother could kill a brother without knowing it. Civil war and gang warfare are the most logical locations.

From there, it was fairly easy to create a working TS for our paragraph. We added some CDs before we decided that we had them in the wrong order: CD2 was our first CD so we would actually reverse the order if we were to write this paragraph. Finally, once all the CM was completed, we saw that our TS was a little out of alignment with our chunks, so we gave it a whack to knock it over a bit, adding “In order for the surprise ending to work” at the beginning of the paragraph.

At this point, the majority of the work is done. We still have actually to write out everything, but the hardest part is behind us.

Covid-Era Lesson

Tuesday 8 September 2020

Today we began the heavy lifting of the first unit of significance: we’re learning the difference between analyzing and summarizing in order to begin analyzing short stories. We looked at Li-young  Lee’s “The GIft” in order to determine the difference. The first step was to determine how much of the summary was not from the poem, highlighting those portions in the summary yellow. By the middle of class, it was clear to students that none of the summary should be highlighted yellow as all of the material in the summary comes directly or indirectly from the text.

Next students looked at analysis of the poem:

The poem “The Gift” tells the story of a young boy whose father is removing a splinter from his hand. It is a poem about the fact that everyday events like pulling a splinter out can be in fact gifts, and the poem accomplishes this by highlighting apparent opposites. To begin with, the act of pulling a splinter out of the hand is inherently violent, but the poem creates a tenderness about it. The speaker tells us that instead of focusing on the painful act of pulling the splinter out, he “watched his [father’s] lovely face” and listened as his father “recited a story in a low voice.” His father’s face and voice were calming, and this undoubtedly helped turn the situation into a calm memory later in life. In fact, instead of being a violent act, this is only a tender moment.

Students, working in groups, were to highlight light blue anything that’s an inference and dark red anything that comes directly from the text.

The upshot was the understanding that most if not all of the content for summary comes from the text itself whereas most of the content in analysis comes from the writer’s head — opinion and inference backed from the text.

The final step was to analyze the paragraph for Schaffer completeness. Students determined the following:

  • This sentence feels like a topic sentence (it makes a claim) but is in the wrong location:
    It is a poem about the fact that everyday events like pulling a splinter out can be in fact gifts, and the poem accomplishes this by highlighting apparent opposites.
  • The third sentence feels like it might be a CD because it’s got a transition element but it’s an opinion, which is not the role of CDs but rather CMs or even TSs.
    To begin with, the act of pulling a splinter out of the hand is inherently violent, but the poem creates a tenderness about it.
  • The fourth sentence has a quote, which means it comes from the writer’s source (in this case, the poem) and not his/her head. This means it feels like a CD but is in the position of a CM otherwise.
    The speaker tells us that instead of focusing on the painful act of pulling the splinter out, he “watched his [father’s] lovely face” and listened as his father “recited a story in a low voice.”

Schooling 2020

Friday 4 September 2020

Were this a normal week, I would have finished today feeling that I had laid the foundation my students for the rest of the year by teaching them the basics of the writing system we use. They would have practiced and planned with partners as I wandered about the room, listening to conversations here and there and intervening when I felt it was necessary.

“Please zoom in to 150% on Google Docs,” I would have said, “so I can get a peek as I walk by and see if you need direction or not.” I would have looked over students shoulders to see if their first attempts with this at-first bizarre system of writing I teach (and insist on students using) were developing according to plan.

I would have told a few students, “Look, you really need some one-on-one time with this, so come by tomorrow during advisory, and we’ll make sure you leave feeling much more confident.”

Instead, I went step by step with students through the process, but each student was with me for a different part of the process; the other time they worked through it on their own at home with materials I developed. Which means I was unable to assess and assist them as they went along. Which meant I spent an inordinate amount of time assessing things online this week that I never would have assessed in a normal year. Which means I’m not at all confident about my students’ development right now.

Covid-schooling.

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.

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.

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…

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.