Plague School Teaching: Prepping

Since all the schools in Michigan are closed, we teachers have been told to set up online learning. And since all the teachers and students in the Wherever school district have a school Google account, Wherever decreed the online learning would be in Google Classroom.

Monday, just the teachers went in. Most kept their distance from everyone else.  We had a little inservice session in the auditorium that gave an introduction to Google Classroom, followed by some new district policies. Because of various complications, including special education students whose IEPs are still in full force, we aren't able to introduce brand new material. For now, it's review and discussion and short writing assignments and such. Benchmark Assessments have been officially suspended.  (!!)

It ended with a Q&A. There was a lot of Q.

Afterward, I went back to my classroom and gathered up a bunch of materials to take home (textbooks, mostly).  I thought about bringing my school laptop home, but I realized all the programs I'll be using are web-based, so my laptop would probably go unused. I left it.

The halls were mostly deserted.  Lots of teachers were there, but most were keeping their distance.  I popped in to consult (from a distance) with a couple other English teachers (who kept their distance). English 12 could do this.  English 9 could do that.  From a distance.  There was an eerie sense of tension. It was a little like the feeling in the air when a blizzard is bearing down on the town, and everything is closing early.  People spoke quietly and worked quickly, ready to flee the moment they were able.  But this feeling was heightened.  We all know that in a building of 1600 students and over 100 staff members in the first county to confirm a case of corona, it's highly likely we've been exposed.  But no one is quite willing to say it aloud.

I straightened up my room, cleaned a bunch of surfaces, and left.

We're supposed to be back on April 13, what would have been the Monday after spring break.  Me?  I have the feeling we won't be back at all.  I hope we re-open in September.

Plague School Teaching: More Prep

When I got home, I switched on my own desktop, grabbed lunch while it was booting up, and hit Google Classroom.  I've never used it before, even though it's been available to me.  Now I dug in.  It has a definite learning curve.

I spent all afternoon learning the ins and outs of GC and setting up a virtual classroom space for each of my classes.  Then I planned out schedules.  English 12 was midway through a project, so they could work on that.  For my freshmen, Monday would be vocab day. Tuesday, an online reading assignment at Newsela.org . Wednesday, grammar. Thursday, a short story or other fiction reading. Friday, whatever I felt needed doing.  Media literacy I set to looking up and analyzing various TV shows and movies.  I decided to continue my normal practice of setting up lessons (lesson plans, materials, copies, etc.) for the entire week, but in this case, I would upload them all to GC under a time delay so each day's lesson would show up at 7:00 AM each morning (just in case any of my students are morning people).

It was at it all.  Freakin'. Evening.  Seriously.  By 9:30, I was still setting things up.  Part of this is GC's steep learning curve and the fact that you can't post the same lesson to more than one class--you have do it for each individual one. This is a serious flaw in GC, if you ask me.  By 10:00 PM, I finished with the last assignment and had an hour to myself before going to bed.

Welcome to the new normal.

Plague School Teaching: Day One

I've noted elsewhere that during the Time of Isolation, I would run twice a day instead of just once.  When I'm at work, you see, I'm usually on my feet, and I get my minimum number of steps each day at just my job.  Now, though, my teaching day will be spent at a computer, so we have to change things up. I also decided I'll need a regular schedule. It'll keep me focused and stop me from being "on" for work all day and night.

My schedule runs like this:
7:00 AM - Get up.  (I'm sleeping in! Usually I'm up before 6:00.)
7:10 - Run for half an hour.
7:45 - Shower and breakfast.
8:00 - At my computer.
12:00 - Lunch break
2:30 - End student interaction (no more answering emails or comments)
3:00 - Log out of GC

Today, I got up, ran, showered, breakfasted, and logged into GC. None of my students had responded to the lesson materials yet. (No surprise, really.)  I checked my rosters to see who hadn't enrolled in GC yet and busied myself with other tasks.

Dinah has decided that, since I'm home, I should be her personal armchair.