stevenpiziks (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
stevenpiziks) wrote2021-01-14 06:51 pm
stevenpiziks) wrote2021-01-14 06:51 pm
Entry tags:
Setting Up the Paperless Classroom
We're supposed to start face-to-face instruction next week. I won't be there--that's a separate entry--but I did have to set up my room.
This was an unexpected challenge.
I've been teaching from home over the Internet since last March and haven't been to my classroom for more than a few minutes since the building closed. There's a lot to do, and new ways in which to do it. I had to get in there to set everything up.
This week is exams, and yesterday after the first set of finals ended, I got together all the stuff I'd brought home for teaching-- textbooks, regular books, various bits of computer equipment--and drove down to Nameless High School.
The place was empty and ghostly. The halls echoed in weird ways. In my classroom, I found all the tables and chairs stacked in neat piles--the custodial staff at work like magic elves. The last time I was here, I'd put all my teaching stuff into the room's cabinets as I did every year, though usually I do it before summer break, not before spring vacation. Getting it all out and setting it all up and arranging all the furniture is a huge annual chore, one I dislike very much under normal circumstances. This year, it was worse.
See, I had to figure out how to set the tables and chairs up so that my students could keep their distance from each other. This is easier in an elementary school, where the kids are tiny. In a high school, the students are full-sized, and they take up a lot of room. I also have large classes. As of this writing, my largest class has 34 students in it.
But wait--there's more.
The district is having students with last names A-K coming in on the first day while students who are L-Z will remote in from home. The next day, they switch. Theoretically, this means the class count is halved on any given day. But that ignores little anomalies, like the fact that my 34-kid class has 20 A-L students and 14 L-Z students. So I actually have to figure out how to accommodate and keep distant 20 students instead of 17.
I spent considerable time measuring out floor space and table size and finally was forced to conclude that it's impossible. In the end, I set up 20 tables and spaced them as far apart as possible. I put a chair at each one, measured, and found the best I could manage was between four and five feet distance. Nowhere was it six.
To keep myself as safe as I can, I'll be keeping empty the seats closest to my desk if at all possible. I'm hoping my classes get balanced out so I have fewer students, but I'm not holding my breath--unbalanced class loads is a perennial problem at Wherever Schools, even when there =isn't= a pandemic. I also plan to keep the window cracked and the door open to ventilate the space as much as possible. Students will have to wear layers.
The district has also provided these odd tri-fold barriers. The borders are made of a weird corrugated plastic material, and the windows are a pale, translucent blue. They unfold and stand upright on a table to make a little enclosure. This is a good idea, of course, but I can't for the life of me figure out why they windows are BLUE. You can't really see through them. The students won't be able to see me at the front of the room, and I can't see them. What idiot made these? And why did the district buy them?
Once I got all that set up, I started in on the technology. I have to keep a web cam set up so the students at home can see what's going on in class. I also have to be able to toggle between the web cam and the Smart Board so the home kids can see what I'm writing. This is going to be awkward and difficult, I can see already, and I have to adjust my expectations about how much material I can get through in a class--a fair amount of time will be taken up adjusting technology.
I connected, booted up, and fiddled. By now I was getting hungry. I had left home at 1:00 and it was closing on 4:00 now. Fortunately, I'd thought to bring food with me, so I took a break.
Another teacher dropped by and we chatted from a distance. She has teenaged daughters, and she warned me that in the local teen scene, mask restrictions are widely ignored. "They visit at each other's houses and hang out all the time without masking," she said. "No one's making them wear one."
Jesus.
Once the tech was what I hoped was running order, I started in on the teaching stuff in the cabinet. But after a while, I noticed something. I was getting out my set of in- and out trays for papers to grade, my staplers, hole punch, tape dispenser, pens, pencils, white board markers, and so on. Except, wait--all this stuff is for dealing with PAPER, and we're still using Google Classroom for our materials. I won't be handing out paper, nor collecting any. My classroom has gone truly paperless. I didn't actually NEED any of this stuff.
So I put it back.
Education types have been predicting a paperless classroom for more than fifteen years now, but it never quite happened. Partly it's because of momentum--paper is deeply entrenched in school culture--and partly it's because there hasn't been equitable access to technology. Now we've been forced into a paperless classroom, at least for this year. I'm wondering if it'll continue even after the pandemic.
I got home well after 7:00.
This was an unexpected challenge.
I've been teaching from home over the Internet since last March and haven't been to my classroom for more than a few minutes since the building closed. There's a lot to do, and new ways in which to do it. I had to get in there to set everything up.
This week is exams, and yesterday after the first set of finals ended, I got together all the stuff I'd brought home for teaching-- textbooks, regular books, various bits of computer equipment--and drove down to Nameless High School.
The place was empty and ghostly. The halls echoed in weird ways. In my classroom, I found all the tables and chairs stacked in neat piles--the custodial staff at work like magic elves. The last time I was here, I'd put all my teaching stuff into the room's cabinets as I did every year, though usually I do it before summer break, not before spring vacation. Getting it all out and setting it all up and arranging all the furniture is a huge annual chore, one I dislike very much under normal circumstances. This year, it was worse.
See, I had to figure out how to set the tables and chairs up so that my students could keep their distance from each other. This is easier in an elementary school, where the kids are tiny. In a high school, the students are full-sized, and they take up a lot of room. I also have large classes. As of this writing, my largest class has 34 students in it.
But wait--there's more.
The district is having students with last names A-K coming in on the first day while students who are L-Z will remote in from home. The next day, they switch. Theoretically, this means the class count is halved on any given day. But that ignores little anomalies, like the fact that my 34-kid class has 20 A-L students and 14 L-Z students. So I actually have to figure out how to accommodate and keep distant 20 students instead of 17.
I spent considerable time measuring out floor space and table size and finally was forced to conclude that it's impossible. In the end, I set up 20 tables and spaced them as far apart as possible. I put a chair at each one, measured, and found the best I could manage was between four and five feet distance. Nowhere was it six.
To keep myself as safe as I can, I'll be keeping empty the seats closest to my desk if at all possible. I'm hoping my classes get balanced out so I have fewer students, but I'm not holding my breath--unbalanced class loads is a perennial problem at Wherever Schools, even when there =isn't= a pandemic. I also plan to keep the window cracked and the door open to ventilate the space as much as possible. Students will have to wear layers.
The district has also provided these odd tri-fold barriers. The borders are made of a weird corrugated plastic material, and the windows are a pale, translucent blue. They unfold and stand upright on a table to make a little enclosure. This is a good idea, of course, but I can't for the life of me figure out why they windows are BLUE. You can't really see through them. The students won't be able to see me at the front of the room, and I can't see them. What idiot made these? And why did the district buy them?
Once I got all that set up, I started in on the technology. I have to keep a web cam set up so the students at home can see what's going on in class. I also have to be able to toggle between the web cam and the Smart Board so the home kids can see what I'm writing. This is going to be awkward and difficult, I can see already, and I have to adjust my expectations about how much material I can get through in a class--a fair amount of time will be taken up adjusting technology.
I connected, booted up, and fiddled. By now I was getting hungry. I had left home at 1:00 and it was closing on 4:00 now. Fortunately, I'd thought to bring food with me, so I took a break.
Another teacher dropped by and we chatted from a distance. She has teenaged daughters, and she warned me that in the local teen scene, mask restrictions are widely ignored. "They visit at each other's houses and hang out all the time without masking," she said. "No one's making them wear one."
Jesus.
Once the tech was what I hoped was running order, I started in on the teaching stuff in the cabinet. But after a while, I noticed something. I was getting out my set of in- and out trays for papers to grade, my staplers, hole punch, tape dispenser, pens, pencils, white board markers, and so on. Except, wait--all this stuff is for dealing with PAPER, and we're still using Google Classroom for our materials. I won't be handing out paper, nor collecting any. My classroom has gone truly paperless. I didn't actually NEED any of this stuff.
So I put it back.
Education types have been predicting a paperless classroom for more than fifteen years now, but it never quite happened. Partly it's because of momentum--paper is deeply entrenched in school culture--and partly it's because there hasn't been equitable access to technology. Now we've been forced into a paperless classroom, at least for this year. I'm wondering if it'll continue even after the pandemic.
I got home well after 7:00.