This won’t be long, I don’t have enough emotional distance from today to make too much sense of what just transpired. I do feel it is important to at least register what this day felt like.
We were supposed to return to school from our spring break on Monday, March 16. Well, it did not work out that way. As many (MANY!) people are, we are dealing with uncertainty about when we will be a school community in a physical place together again. We took two days for intensive, in house PD aimed at easing the concerns of the adults on campus and aimed at beginning to develop some sense of comfort with our options. I chose to use Zoom as my vehicle for meeting with my students and we use a Google classroom environment to push and organize information.
We are on a rotating schedule and only three of my five classes were scheduled for today. We all met and of my 33 students that were supposed to be ‘with’ me, I saw all but three. Pretty darned good, especially considering that some of them are now scattered around the globe. One student logged in while waiting to go through customs at JFK and one student joined us from Korea at 3 AM local time there. Pretty amazing commitment from these young scholars. It was clear that they appreciated seeing and talking to each other again and it was great to see and hear them again. The interface is certainly not perfect. When there are over a dozen people, hearing anyone is tough. We need to get better at listening out for each other and paying careful attention to each other. I was physically aware of how draining it is to conduct a conversation where my eyes are scanning the thumbnails of 14 students at once, looking to see if they are engaged, if they need something from me. Over the course of 32 plus years of teaching, I think I have gotten good at recognizing those non-verbal cues from my students. It is much harder in this environment to find those cues, I will have to work hard (and fast) at this skill.
One of my colleagues had the idea of buying a graphics tablet to attach to his laptop. I am eager to hear how that goes. Writing with my touchpad is a sloppy mess. Any advice from experienced folks is more than welcome on this front!
I created some power point slides, ran a solo Zoom session and recorded myself narrating the slides. Not perfect, but the kids seemed to appreciate it. I did get a request for writing out my solutions rather than just talking through them. I may do some late night sessions in my classroom filming myself at the board. If so, what should be my vehicle for this?
My main takeaway from today as a dad of a 10th grader and a 5th grader as well as a teacher of 9th – 12th graders is that having some semblance of a normal routine was comforting. I think it is important for us to see and hear each other to maintain a sense that we are a community. I will be pretty insistent (and consistent) in asking for some community time when our class is scheduled to meet. We have a 90 minute class block immediately preceding a lunch hour. I can nab those times to schedule 10 minute one on one Zoom sessions to really check in on individual understandings. I think that any semblance of timed paper and pen assessments needs to be pushed aside, but I know that my school will have grade books open and they want some evidence of student work and some idea of progress. I have a lot of thinking to do in the next few days about this.
Certainly more questions than answers after today, but it felt great to see and hear my students again. Looking forward to the day when it is in person again!
As always, drop me a line here in the comments or over on the twitters where I am @mrdardy