multa et varia; many and varied (Journaling during Covid-19 - Entry 8)

I made this :). (It's a carrot cake.)

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

This one is a catch-up post, and it is going to get long, rambly, and random. I consider posts in this series to be mostly for myself, but some people have seemed to like reading at least a couple of them, so I'll keep going with them...but sort-of apologies for the length on this one.

The Core Questions

1. What did you do today?

Today was mostly a necessary wind-down from some recent busyness.

• mocha courtesy of hubby's coffee run (I had priorities other than making my own today)
• made cream cheese icing; levelled, frosted, and decorated the 3-layer carrot cake I baked yesterday evening
• delivered said cake to a colleague whose birthday is today
• picked up another fancy coffee (and snack) on the way home (imagine, I used to hate coffee...)
• helped my husband with some questions related to the census we had to do for the government in Canada today
• postponed drop-in meeting with my credit recovery students
• taught afternoon class (nomenclature more complex than in grade 9 & 10)
• recorded as part of a team for a podcast (an upcoming episode of The Mustard Seed)
• went for a drive (offered to take Secondborn, but he wasn't interested when I warned him I wasn't buying anything)
• made tea (raspberry oolong) and allowed myself to sit doing nothing until it was gone
• helped get dinner sorted
• lots of social media on and off all day
• now I'm blogging for the first time in days...

...so since I haven't blogged for a few days, allow me to add some of What's been going on lately?, not strictly in chronological order:

• recorded as part of a team for a different podcast (an upcoming episode of Flipped Learning Worldwide)
• I signed up for two Additional Qualification courses (more on that below)
• big for me since timely marking has not been my strong suit: over Wednesday and Thursday I recorded in my Markbook web platform all remaining items that had been marked but not recorded, and returned electronically to students all items that had been due to that point (with some comments where most helpful/appropriate). I also wrote the students' overall marks and maybe a symbolized notation about any particular issues beside their names on one of my class lists to help me recall a better idea of how they're all doing without logging into this web platform all the time. This meant that I had no marking to do this past weekend unless I wanted to look at work turned in early or from my credit recovery students (nope, I didn't).
• again on the Markbook platform, started trying a section I haven't used before to try to track learning skills (in this case, seeing if I can use the Collaboration skill to monitor their chat participation in part). Unfortunately, I don't think it's going to do what I want it to/what I've seen a previous platform perhaps do (admittedly, I didn't play with it much on that platform when I had access to it, either).
• in the afternoon class Thursday, we reviewed chapter 1 for the test that was coming up Monday, and I gave some guidance on assignments; Friday morning we had class sessions on ionic and molecular compounds (how and why they form, how to represent them/come up with their structures, and, for ionic compounds, what their properties are -- we'll come back to the properties of molecular compounds after we look at bond polarity and molecular polarity).
• had Internet issues about half an hour before students were to write the test online Monday, which interfered with some "tweaking" I'd wanted to do to it, but the issues did resolve in time and I was able to make one change I wanted to put in place (and shrugged off the rest as not critical)
• now that the students have written that test, submitted an assignment that was due Monday, and submitted another that was due early this morning, I have marking to catch up on again.
• the robotics club put a really sweet post on their Instagram for the end of teacher appreciation week, thanking me for being their staff sponsor and mentor, awww! I may have choked up a bit seeing comments and "likes" from some of the students I've now worked with for a few years, and even those who have since graduated but are still following the Instagram account.
• picked Mom up from a medical appointment and took her for a short grocery trip
• we've had a drippy kitchen faucet for a while. I learned how to change the washers in faucets from my dad growing up and have been quite proud to apply that minor skill in the past, but this is a washerless single-handle tap and outside my experience. My husband took it apart when he had a day off, and we learned more about what makes it tick. Retail deemed non-essential is closed for in-store shopping, but we were able to place an order for curbside pickup of what we thought the right parts might be to fix our problem. After I picked up the parts the next day, hubby was able to fix the recent dripping issue. There's another issue we've had with the tap basically since we moved in that we haven't yet resolved, but the dripping has been driving me nuts lately and I consider its fixing to be part of my Mother's Day present!
• also received a card from Secondborn on Thursday as his teacher had led them through making them and he wanted to give it to me right away / didn't know to keep it to himself until Sunday.
• had a dream early Saturday morning that I was at a jiu jitsu practice event; later than morning (when I was awake!), my gym owner and head coach made a post asking if anyone wanted to purchase gear to help support the gym (which has had to close a lot over the last year due to covid regulations) -- I took this coincidence as a sign and ordered some :). Later that day, between spurts of light rain, I set up my jiu jitsu practice mat in the backyard and the kids and I did a wee bit of exercise together. I learned that trying to run laps forward and sideways around my backyard is not the easiest experience -- the ground is a lot more uneven than I'd thought -- but we had some fun, and Firstborn and I went through some skills from some videos my gym has put out as well as some other things we could remember from our BJJ classes. The backyard is now my fight club ;).
• had a massage Saturday, followed by playing Dungeons & Dragons online with friends
• church online; it was Mother's Day, but hubby was on the A.V. team at church, but the kids thankfully ended up being pretty cooperative so not having the morning "off" for Mom's Day was fine; hubby was going to order some Cora's breakfast for myself and the kids, but they weren't open by the time he had to leave home in the morning, so I took care of the ordering, but I never mind an excuse for Cora's :). (He also got me a potted plant.)
• grocery trip, partly for cake ingredients
• curbside pickup order for cardboard cake bases and boxes (given that cake-baking has become my new thing over the last year, I figure it's time to start keeping some of these supplies on hand rather than having to pick them up each time like I had to for this week's cake)
• ordered my mom's Mother's Day gift; picked it up via curbside pickup; took hubby and the kids to deliver that and my mother-in-law's gift 
• more ukulele practice...and my church's worship director has asked if I want to play with the worship team sometime, and sent me a couple songs with chords...I'm still very much a beginner, but we'll see...
• at one point, Secondborn was playing around with the electric keyboard, and despite originally telling me he wanted to do that while I played the ukulele, he ended up taking it away from me for "interrupting" his music!
• baked my colleague's cake Monday evening...and admittedly left the kitchen a mess because I didn't have the energy to clean up after myself at the time. (It's my most labour-intensive cake recipe, but I am willing to put in that effort as long as I don't have to make this recipe frequently!) I ended up missing the weekly Twitter #flipclasschat for this, too.

Phew. 

2. What did you enjoy?

In my science department at school, we are all given responsibility for another science colleague's birthday treat. In the past, this has meant baking or buying a cake. When the school closure pushed us all online in March 2020 through the end of that school year, the May birthday of the colleague I was assigned was the first science department birthday that had to be reconsidered...so I baked her a carrot cake anyway and took it to her house. The rest of the department didn't get to share it, but she really enjoyed it! This year, we kept more or less the same people assignments as last school year (adjusted somewhat for people going on or returning from leave), but we made a rule during the weeks we were in the building that the birthday treats this year had to be individually-wrapped items instead, like cupcakes or Jos Louis or donuts. Well, guess what, we're back to fully virtual school, so I didn't have to abide by that -- hence the baking of the exact same cake recipe yesterday evening and delivering it to my person today. Her kids came to see who was visiting when she opened the door, and one of them asked me, "Are you the one who made the carrot cake?" Apparently he loved last year's cake and keeps talking about it. Compliments and thanks from adults are great, too, don't get me wrong, but children can be bluntly honest when they don't like something, so I will absolutely take this as a glowing review!

3. What did you find difficult?

I found myself feeling somewhat tired and drained from about noon onward. I think it's because of the busy busyness of the last few days -- not that parts of it weren't enjoyable and fun, but the number of trips for errands and getting things for people and delivering things to people and the amount of being responsible to other people over the last few days has been a bit, shall we say, concentrated. I let myself off the hook today for a lot, but I know I have to get back to putting in small, consistent efforts tomorrow in various areas to avoid bigger problems later. I didn't feel like I contributed as well to today's podcast recording as I wanted to, but I know that doesn't necessarily mean there wasn't something useful shared (we do have a pretty awesome editor!).

4. What has changed?

I knew from an early age that I wanted to be a teacher when I grew up, but the specifics of that vision have changed in various ways over the years. When I was in high school, I pictured myself eventually working with those with developmental disabilities, and saw that as part of my calling. However, despite being over 13 years into my full-time teaching career, I am still not currently working in that area; I have seen a couple of postings that seem to indicate I have the bare minimum certification requirement (a Special Education Part 1 qualification), but I don't have anywhere the knowledge or experience that would give me a successful interview for such a position, let alone success in the role itself. I did that Part 1 qualification back in the summer of 2014, but I have kept putting off getting more training of any kind in the summers because of feeling a need to recover from the school year or due to other priorities (I did do some Flipped Learning certification work more recently than that)...plus I had lost a feel of that original calling and was really more focused on either becoming a better teacher of my academic courses or maybe even moving upward into administration (not really serious about that last bit -- I was very frustrated with particular people when I first considered it several years ago -- but it's been an idea I've toyed with occasionally). Within the last little while, I've really considered whether some of the frustrations I've been experiencing in my professional life are to do in part with not pursuing the path I'd seen myself going down way back when I felt more calling and purpose. There are frustrations to be found working in special education, of course -- some huge ones! -- but I think it's time I explore again whether that's an area I'd find a more natural fit because that's where I'm supposed to be. I'll be taking Special Education Part 2 through Queen's University (in Kingston, Ontario, though of course the course will be online) June 28 through August 13, and the one-session qualification Teaching Students with Intellectual Needs (Developmental Disability) online through York University (in Toronto, Ontario) August 3 through September 2. Oh, by the way, our last working day of this school year is June 29, and September 2 is also probably going to be the first day school staff are back at schools for the 2021-2022 school year here (though it will be a P. A. day rather than a teaching day), so I really am devoting my whole summer to this. This may all just be some big midlife crisis thinking, but hey, I'm going to run with it for now, because more quality education on special education is never really wasted for any teacher.

Again...phew. I think you can understand that I'm not doing the stretch questions tonight; I hope to return to those in my next entry, which should be shorter due to not having to catch up on a backlog of thoughts (including some big ones!) and things done.

Have a great night, y'all.

Cheers,

Joy