Meet-ception (Journaling during Covid-19 - Entry 7)

"Recursive Picture Taking Recursion" flickr photo by liquoredonlife
https://www.flickr.com/photos/liquoredonlife/3767472525/
shared under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0) license

(See this post for some background if this is the first entry you're reading in this series.)

The Core Questions

1. What did you do today?

• today I only had an afternoon class to teach...and I ended up taking my sweet time getting up and ready for the day this morning
• coffee/mocha, goat cheese on croissant (mmm) and an egg for breakfast
• still premade the kids' lunches, but about 2 hours later than I did the last 2 days
• I had told the students in post yesterday evening I'd mark something this morning, so I finally started that close to noon, and did get it all marked and electronically returned to the students before I had to do today's class prep
• did run out of time to prep something for today's class one way, but I knew I'd be able to handle it another way anyway
• afternoon class: I'm not teaching from the school building right now, so I don't have access to chemicals (and I didn't take any home from the school with me because I didn't want to worry about storage and disposal, plus the amount of time to which we were supposed to limit our pickup visit wasn't long enough to grab all my personal stuff and sort out chemicals). However, last quadmester I did have one face-to-face cohort and one fully-virtual cohort of this class, so I did have a recording of me doing a demonstration of this periodicity lab for that fully-virtual cohort while I had that cohort take notes for their observations on the same lab handout I use with the face-to-face students. After our Classcraft attendance this morning, I basically played that recording for my students (with my own camera turned off so as not to cause confusion with the other "me" on the screen), also having them use that same lab handout, and posing some questions via the chat as we went, and I also told them to chime in with answers when "my previous quadmester self" asked verbal questions of my then-students in the video. I played a recording of a Google Meet within a Google Meet...feels Inception-like (Meet-ception?). I wasn't sure how well this would go, but once we figured out some hiccups with the audio (I ended up having to turn on my laptop's speakers to be heard by my laptop's internal microphone rather than using my headset, since the computer audio wasn't picked up by Google Meet since I wasn't playing a video in another tab), it actually went really well. Several of the students DID respond in chat anytime I or the video asked a question, and they seemed to actually get into it, when I had worried it would be a bit boring. (There was a disappointing thing from a particular student near the end of the class, but I'll talk about that below.) We had just enough time to watch the entire demonstration before it was time to dismiss the class at 3:15pm.
• at 3:45pm I offered a drop-in session to my students who are doing credit recovery of one of my courses from last quadmester. Only one of the three students showed up; she had found the assignment in Google Classroom and found the relevant class recording she was supposed to review to complete part of the assignment, but she hadn't actually gone through the recording yet, so I told her to do so and check in with me at the next drop-in session (which will be Friday). She thanked me and logged off. I'd told the students I'd keep the session open until 4:15pm, but no one else showed up; I'd worked on some other small tasks while waiting, so it wasn't really any loss of time on my part.
• the rest of the day was basically lazy...entertaining myself on my phone, taking Secondborn for a drive, dinner, napping, being lazy in bed, entertaining myself some more, bath time somewhere in there for Secondborn...
• we did do a hot chocolate time with the kids.
• put Secondborn to bed while hubby took care of Firstborn, and now here I am writing a blog!

2. What did you enjoy?

Goat cheese on a croissant.

Hot chocolate time with the kids.

Seeing the students respond well during the virtual lab demo.

3. What did you find difficult?

While I am getting better at the "just do it" of tackling marking (especially as, again, I know it will help avoid the greater stress and self-criticism that results when I end up with a backlog), I do still get anxious about it. I don't really know why this is, and I have talked to therapists about it. Today I noticed at one point I just couldn't get myself to feel full even though it seemed like I was doing a lot of snacking...and then I wondered if it was because I happened to be doing marking at the time. I eventually made myself a real lunch (kicking myself because I thought I'd already done that, but no, I'd only given the kids their lunches and forgotten my own, like some moms do sometimes) and finally did hit a point where I felt satisfied...but was that because I'd finally eaten something decent, because the marking was done, or some combination thereof?

Near the end of the class, there were some unusual noises coming through the Meet. At first I thought they were some part of the recording (maybe a bug with a former student's audio getting picked up)...but my current students and I soon figured out one of my other students was playing a video game and wasn't always muted. This is also the student who normally asks a lot of seemingly obvious questions during other classes, so I am now wondering if his questions are because he's not paying full attention during those class sessions as well. I had to tell my firstborn off yesterday for watching YouTube videos while logged in to his class, too...ugh, this virtual teaching and learning thing definitely has its own struggles over face-to-face school.

4. What has changed?

I certainly had a lot more free time today than I normally would on this date any other school year (not complaining after the unbelievable lack of prep time and high stress level I had last quadmester). I am also not normally this on top of marking at this point (even though only a few things have come in so far), and I think I need to take my chiropractor's advice from yesterday and be proud of that (and also keep it up).

I'm not going to do the stretch questions tonight. Be well, and good night.