Pulse Check (Journaling during Covid-19 - Entry 10 - for Mon., May 17, 2021)

"Pulse" flickr photo by Eliot Phillips
https://www.flickr.com/photos/hackaday/6633061255/
shared under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC 2.0) license

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

This will end up posting on Tuesday, but it's mostly about Monday.

The Core Questions

1. What did you do today?

• a common breakfast for me lately has been a hard-boiled egg or two, my mocha, and a croissant. There are changes I'd like to make to this, sure, but it's what's working for me right now. (I've always appreciated PrecisionNutrition's encouragement not to overwhelm yourself trying to make every meal "perfect" but rather just looking at how you can continually move things up the "better" scale; right now, making sure I include protein in the morning is helpful. Also, I really hate that I feel the need to include sentences here justifying my food choices when I could be doing far worse.)
• today's PrecisionNutrition lesson was about a brand-new 2-week habit that wasn't in the program the last 2 times I went through it: finding your Bare A** Minimums (BAMs) when it comes to movement on even your crappiest of days. The concept has been in the PN program before, but this is the first time that considering it has been one of the 2-week habits. It's a helpful one for me to consider because various issues (physical and otherwise) can seriously drain my energy at times; it can feel really difficult during those times to extricate myself from the blanket cocoon and do some movement even though I know that doing so would probably help to increase that energy. I dug out my list of BJJ-related movements I'd like to make part of a regular mobility workout and will be working more with that list Tuesday.
• anxious frittering (though it did get me my "space at the table" back again - keeping that space clear will just be an ongoing thing I have to do, like some people make their beds daily) and social media-ing; set some Keep Calm tea brewing, set a timer for when it would be ready, and forgot about it for the rest of the day anyway, oops!
• taught afternoon class: I focused a good chunk of today on just checking how the students are doing, since it's harder to take the "pulse" of a class when you're not with them in person seeing who's sitting slumped and who's babbling away energetically with friends (though a very small portion of that does come through in the chat). After our usual Classcraft time, I gave them a Google Form survey to do for a few minutes (see pictures below; here's a link that will make a copy of the form for you, if you'd like to use or tweak it yourself). I showed them the graphs showing their answers to the questions with rating scales (also shown below) and commented on each briefly; I also opened the spreadsheet of their responses and copied and pasted their answers to the "word cloud" question into a word cloud generator and showed the students the results. ("Happy" was the largest word, but followed by "tired" and "stressful." "Happy" only had 6 mentions out of 24 students, so it being the largest didn't mean the majority of the students felt that way, but that did also seem backed up by the "how are you doing?" graph, so I guess that's encouraging.) I've also included an image below showing a selection of the answers they gave to the "word cloud" question; I will not share the answers they gave to the "private" questions, except to say that one students responded to the question about what he needed with "uh I could use a coffee right now but i'm good" :). We also talked some about chemical equations -- some really basic stuff they should know from grade 10 (like where the reactants are vs. the products in the equation, which elements do and don't get subscripts when they appear on their own vs. in compounds -- and for crying out loud don't put an equal sign in the equation because it is an equation but not an equality because hydrogen and oxygen aren't "equal to"/the same as water they just react to product it arggggh), but which I always find I have to emphasize at the start of this unit because at least a handful of students will still need the reminders.

Results:

(rating scale was from "Awful :(" to "Awesome :D")

(rating scale was from "Not at all" to "Severely")

• recorded as part of a team for a podcast (an upcoming episode of Flipped Learning Worldwide)
• grabbed Starbucks and went for a drive blasting some music (this is where going for a walk or doing a workout while also listening to music or an audiobook could have produced the same -- or better -- emotional effect while also giving my body some movement, but that's a takeaway to learn from for today maybe)
• ukulele time
• put together questions for the day's Twitter #flipclasschat , then moderated that chat
• got the kids to sleep...then dealt after a while with Secondborn waking up with one of the nosebleeds he gets occasionally :(.

2. What did you enjoy?

• receiving an email that started with this:

• seeing several students report that they're happy or at least doing ok, even if they are stressed
• recording the podcast went well -- even though we had a smaller panel than usual (only 2 of us besides the host, when we normally have 4), the conversation flowed really well. It was amazing to see how many good points we got out in the 15 minutes or so we recorded, and that's part of why I love being connected with other educators around the world -- I always come away inspired by at least one thing that someone said.
• reconnecting with some of my "flipfriends" during the #flipclasschat . It always makes me a little anxious when I put out the initial welcome and intro question and I don't seem to get any response for a few minutes, but once people started checking in we had a good conversation (the others involved seemed to appreciate it, too).

3. What did you find difficult?

I had a really hard time getting myself into a working mindset today. I had a short burst of readiness at one point during my quiet time, but it didn't keep up. In the past, when I've had a morning where I just wasn't in the mood to do my job, I've found that getting up in front of students and falling into my "teacher persona" has often swept those feelings away. (My "teacher persona" is not a fake; it's just a different aspect of me than those who aren't my students usually get to see, and her focus on "doing the thing" changes the emotional focus as well.) I did experience that to a certain extent today, but since I didn't teach until the afternoon today, I found the first part of the day very unfocused, and I didn't get done the things I would have liked to to help stay on top of things (like getting in both some movement and some marking). Not being in the school building makes this difficult, too...and I'm sure it being Monday doesn't help, either.

4. What has changed?

I often forget to stop and appreciate the ways in which I have grown in various areas of my life, yet I made question 1 for the #flipclasschat one asking attendees to reflect on how they'd grown in their flipped classroom practice. I'm patting myself on the back for recognizing my own progress for a change.