Journaling during Covid-19 - Entry 1

Photo 3713471 © Jakub Jirsák | Dreamstime.com

Hello, blog. It's been a while.

I feel the need for a writing outlet. As much as this goes against the typical description of an INFJ, I think I'm missing the idle chit-chat we don't get when lockdown keeps us all away from those casual connections of seeing people you're not related to in the church lobby, lunch room, or non-spatially-distanced coffee and grocery lineups, and I guess Facebook isn't doing it for me right now. This entry isn't likely going to be anything profound, and it may in fact end up just being boring, but I'm mainly writing this for my own benefit and you all can take or leave this as you like <shrug>.

I've occasionally checked out an ongoing blog series by friend and Flipped Learning Network board member Ken Bauer in which he blogs about "life on the ground" during Covid-19 (drawing inspiration from a post by Ben Werdmuller). He's been using a simple Four-Questions-plus-some-stretch-questions format -- also based on a post by Ben -- and I like the way it seems that format can prompt some simple reflection about one's day without it getting overwhelming. I'm going to give it a whirl and see if it's something that can work for me, too. Knowing me, even four questions can be enough to spark a novel!

Since this is my first post in this series, I will give some context.

Here we are currently in a state of lockdown, with all students attending school online only and teachers teaching from home unless they have a case for needing to teach from the school building. Most of our retail is likewise shut down, as is in-restaurant dining (delivery and takeout options still exist). We have upgraded our Internet service at home, and so I am now teaching from home even though during the previous extended period of virtual learning I got permission to teach from the school due to some issues I was having with our service (especially when my husband working from home and my two children attending classes online often means there are four different videoconferences going on at the same time in this house).

In the high school system we recently changed to a new quadmester (started April 23), and I now have a lighter course load than I did in the previous quadmester. We are also about 10 weeks from the end of our school year: the regular classes for this quadmester end June 23, then there are 3 weekdays of "credit rescue" (to try to help students whose credits are at risk do something to try to pass their courses), and then the last work day for teachers is a June 29 P.A. day. The course I'm teaching this quad is one I also taught last quad; I do have to tweak it a little given that I taught it hybrid-style last quad and will be fully online this quad, and there are also improvements I want to make, but quite a lot will be the same. All this means that while I will be able to focus better on my students this time around, I am also definitely feeling a relaxation of the pressure I was under last quad. Summertime's coming -- there are now only 44 working days left -- and the living is, well, not easy, but easier than it has been for months.

The daily schedule for our high schools currently looks like this:

• 8:45 - 10:00am - "live" time with a teacher (Course 1 on days 1 & 2, Course 2 on days 3 & 4)
• 10:00 - 10:30am - break/asynchronous work time
• 10:30 - 11:45am - "live" time with the same teacher/course as above
• 11:45am - 12:30pm - break/asynchronous work time
• 12:30 - 1:10pm - lunch
• 1:10 - 2:00pm - "alternative professional assignments" and "professionally managed activities" for teachers (basically this is prep time and time we can be asked by admin to do other things related to our jobs)
• 2:00pm - 3:15pm - "live" time with the teacher the students didn't see yet that day (Course 2 on days 1 & 2, Course 1 on days 3 & 4)

In my current timetable, I only teach during Course 2 time slots, so I only teach in the afternoons on days 1 & 2 and only the longer morning classes on days 3 & 4.

My own children (as in my offspring) are in the elementary system at two different schools, so they are on different schedules from each other and both of those schedules are also different from mine. My husband has alarms set to remind him to check that the kids are in their various class periods on time; I help with that somewhat, but it's not easy given the overlaps in some of our class times.

The Core Questions

1. What did you do today?

Today was a day 3. I had my first morning class of the quad with this new group of students. After dealing with some unexpected technical issues, I finished going through a review package we started yesterday afternoon recalling several main ideas from the grade 9 and 10 chemistry units. I also set up the Classcraft interface for this new class and sent all my students their join codes through email, though we won't be able to have them set up their characters until we've formed the students into teams and they've decided who will take on what roles within their teams.

Once my morning class was done, I spent a lot of time setting up items behind the scenes for my class, including setting up the first 4 mini-assignments for their ISU in Google Classroom and tying it to a Quest in Classcraft to reward their progress with story text and in-game points (XP and GP). I spent a LOT of time on stuff for this class today, but that up-front investment of time should pay off, and it was made a lot easier by being able to reuse materials I developed last quad and earlier.

At 4pm I was part of a recording session for a podcast hosted by my friend Dan Jones. He has a few different podcast series on the go; I am a regular guest on two of them, with a few other people on the panel with me each time. The episodes are about 10-12 minutes long each, and we record them more or less as a conversation that doesn't take us much longer than the episode length to record once we get started. I record these sessions sitting in my van because currently that's the best way for me to avoid interruptions or noises from the family interfering in the background. Both the series that I've recorded episodes for are still in production, but I'll be sure to share links to them once they've been released.

After the recording session, I took the kids for a drive -- we picked up Dairy Queen and McDonald's (just cheeseburgers for them plus one box of fries for me) and then came back home. I tried to relax some, but I also spent some time continuing my course prep and sharing final marks with my students from quadmester 3 (since they won't get their official report card for the quad for a while but they still need to know how they did). I also looked into how to use a certain extension for Google Meets to get breakout rooms happening more effectively. At some point I put the youngest kid to bed, but then felt like I wanted to get up and blog...and here I am.

2. What did you enjoy?

I did enjoy little things a little - my morning mocha, the fries after school, my youngest giving me a spontaneous unexpected kiss at bedtime. I know I also appreciate the reduced workload compared to last quad, and only having to teach one part of the day. I am still a bit shell-shocked from that pressure, though, and it may take a bit of time to recover from it.

3. What did you find difficult?

Having technical issues with both attempted document cameras was quite frustrating. I know I know my tech stuff and don't like looking like I don't...but I'm also not the one to crack the case open and know exactly what the issue is when things don't cooperate. I had to kick everyone out of the online class, restart my computer, and then get everyone to join again, and not everyone who was present before that annoyance logged back into class, so I guess they may have already just left their computers logged on and physically checked themselves out/gone back to bed (this was about 20 minutes into the start of the first class session).

One student asks a lot of questions in chat that are pretty basic, and I wonder if he really has those questions or if it is a time-wasting maneuver. I do encourage questions but have a weird gut feeling on this one. I did make sure I told the students not to feel badly about asking questions, however, because they are important; I'll just have to monitor whether my intuition seems to be off in this one case.

The topic we talked about in the podcast interview today was a difficult one. It definitely provoked some good discussion, but after the host posed the question, there was probably about a good minute of awkward silence -- we'd known about the subject ahead of time, but no one was keen to jump into it! (Meanwhile, our host silently did the teacher "I'll wait" thing, heh...no rescue!)

I also didn't sleep much on Sunday night, and I find it's the second day after an all-nighter that hurts the most, so it was a bit of a tired, headachey, not-quite-here Tuesday.

4. What has changed?

I'm trying a new thing where I will actually use my planner for school and life stuff both, and each time I record that students have an assignment due or a quiz/test to write, I am also trying to record what day I will assess/mark that item. I need the intention of writing it down and the reminder to set aside proper time to give that feedback in a more timely manner than I have in the past. Hopefully this will also help me to get to know my students better in spite of the mostly-faceless context in which we find ourselves.

I'm going to pass on the "stretch questions" for now as I've already written quite a bit and I think it's time I went back to bed :). Thanks for reading, and I hope you're all well.

- Joy