Steven Harper Piziks

Thursday morning when I got to work, I learned the Internet was down in the building. No computer network, no web, no phones, no attendance program, no PA system. I couldn't even access my lesson plans--I store them in my network drive and don't print them out.

I remember back when the Internet was a new thing for the school. The district offered "everyone who wants one" an email address. I was one of the few people who took one. We had four computers for teachers to use. I kept my materials on 5 1'2" disks. It was a wonder when we got our first grade book program: GradeQuick. But all that was optional. You didn't have to touch a computer if you didn't want to--and most of the staff didn't want to. Eventually, as the World Wide Web merged with the Internet, the school started requiring computer usage. Everyone had to have an email address, and everyone had to check their email at least once per day. Then we were required to use an electronic grade book (but you could still use a physical book, and many teachers did). 

Eventually, we moved more fully online. Physical grade books vanished. (I don't know of anyone who uses one anymore.) The Internet powers our phone and PA system, and we were able to put phones on teacher desks. (Other professionals have had phones on their desks for over 100 years. I finally got one just after 9/11.)  Everyone has a ton of network space. The video library, once fully stocked with video tapes and DVDs has disappeared, since everyone simply streams everything. Copy machines have been combined with printers, and are networked to the computer system. All teachers have a district-issued computer and smart projector. All teachers have a Google Classroom account.  A lot of changes during my career in Wherever.

But it all means that when the Internet goes down, it's a major disaster. We can't take attendance. Hell, we can't even make copies.  And I'm not the only teacher who stores lesson plans in the network drive.

Fortunately, my first hour was in the middle of something that didn't require the Internet, so while they were working, I worked on my own connection. I have a hotspot on my phone, but the school computers are finicky and don't like connecting to anything but our in-school Internet service. It took quite a lot of finagling, but I finally got my computer to recognize my phone and got online. Yay! I could take attendance and access my network drive!

It still made for a frustrating day. The copiers were down. My desk phone was down. The PA system was down. If I moved my cell more than a few feet from my desk, it would drop the hotspot, so my phone was chained down.

On top of it all, we learned that the outage was caused by a broken cable, and it wouldn't be fixed today. Likely, we'd have no Internet Friday as well.

I was actually fairly lucky. My lessons for the day didn't require Internet access. I didn't need to copy or print anything. Lots of other teachers were stuck. One science teacher, who had an online day planned, ended up playing Mythbusters episodes on DVD for his classes.

Also, the lesson for my seniors went very well. I'd assigned them the article "It's Not Your Opinion. You're Just Wrong," so they could start to see how adding "In my opinion" in front of a statement didn't make the statement correct; you can have a wrong opinion. We discussed this, and then I had them write a set of statements: a fact, an opinion, a mixed statement, and a flat wrong opinion statement. We shared them with the class, and they actually got into it. I think many of them began to understand the point.

So that went well, at least. But it was a relief when the day drew to a close and I could shut off my hotspot.

I was on my out of the school building Tuesday afternoon when I learned about the shooting.

Oxford is a medium-sized town just up the road from Wherever.  Darwin grew up there.  Like Wherever, it's mostly a bedroom community, a suburb of Detroit.  Nothing special, really, unless you happen to live there.  And now it's joined a very small, terrible club.

At home, I scanned social media, looking for information. Lots of rumor and speculation, a few facts. Terrifying tragedy. A lot of people in Wherever, including my students, know people in Oxford.  And, of course, there was (still is) a lot of nervousness that it could happen again.

Wednesday was a half-day for students, with staff development for teachers afterward. A lot of students were absent for the first half, and there was a lot of discussion and speculation among the teachers during the second half.

I went to bed Wednesday evening, tired and stressed.  I'm not--never have been--worried about a school shooter. The odds are so very, very low that I'm better off worrying about a meteor strike. Really, I'm at more risk of life and limb every time I drive through a crowd of student drivers every day before work. No, I worry about how my students are handling this and what impact all this has and will continue to have on our school. I worry about the victims and their families.  I worry about living in a society that allows these things to happen.

There's no real playbook for this. A lot of people think schools and teachers have some kind of list or something, what to say or do when something like this happens. The truth is, we don't. No one knows what the best or right thing to say or do is. We only have a best guess, based on what we know about our students. The district gives us talking points and advice, but no one really knows what we're supposed to do. I honestly don't know if there =is= a right thing to do.

At about 3:00 AM my phone rang. It was a robo-call informing everyone that Wherever Schools were closed on Thursday "out of an abundance of caution." Students were making false copycat threats and the school took a better safe than sorry stance.  Later, this closing was extended to Friday as well.  More than sixty other school districts in the area were doing the same.

On Thursday, I sat around not doing anything, and I realized just then how TIRED I was.  I was so tired, I couldn't do anything but sit.  The pandemic was already a huge source of stress, both at my job and in my personal life, and now this piled on top of it. 

I was glad of the day where I could just sit. And then I felt guilty about the reason for the day at home.

Now we're back at school. The students are nervous and subdued. And me? Still tired.

School started last week.

We're not as excited as you might think.

Some years, I'm ready to get back to it. Some years, I still feel like I need a couple more weeks. This time? I need another year.  Teaching under the pandemic, with a virtual classroom first semester and a hybrid classroom second semester, was a real burnout.  My reserves and my emergency reserves and my special, secret hidden reserves were all depleted, and they haven't been replenished.  If I had the years, I would have joined the many teachers who retired.  But I don't, so here we go.

This year, the emphasis--for me, at least--is an attempt to return to regularity.  I'm not planning anything new.  I'm not going to reinvent anything.  I don't have the reserves for it.  My current work will have to suffice.  Fortunately for my students, my "current work" is platinum A-grade.  (I don't do modesty.  I've learned the hard way that no one will praise you in public except you yourself.  And anyway, it's not boasting if it's true.)  I set up my classroom in my tried-and-true method and created the first set of lessons with my tried-and-true plans.  Normal school year was ready to go!

And then, on Tuesday at 9:00 PM, we got the announcement that the county was handing down a mask mandate.  All students and staff must wear masks at school and on the bus.

I should probably say that I support mask wearing, especially with the Delta variant of COVID putting children into the hospital with shocking regularity.  But I would much better prefer that the Health Department hand down a VACCINE mandate.  No vaccine?  No school for you.  Then we wouldn't NEED masks.  Too many politicians are cowards, though, so were stuck with the masks.

So now I can't see my students' faces, and I'm faced with the attendant problems--I can't tell who is speaking if someone calls out in class; I don't know who is who; I have to police mask wearing.  Day One, and we're already stressing.

At least we don't have to use the barriers.

Now we're coming up on Week Two. Let's see what happens...

The Washington Post's editorial board is complaining about the teacher shortage for summer school.  The short version: teachers burned out from pandemic teaching have no intention of teaching summer school, meaning students will have no way to "make up" for lost learning.

The editorial goes on to mention some of the incentives districts are using to entice summer school teaching--mostly bonuses.  But it's not enough to get teachers to stick around.  My own district couldn't afford to meet my salary requirement for summer school, thanks, though they've posted more summer teaching slots than I've seen in my 26 years teaching there.  Just yesterday, they posted about ten new summer teaching slots for special education.  I doubt they'll fill them.  The special education teachers are more burned out than any of us.

The Post also advocates ending the long summer vacation in favor of year-round schooling (with breaks seeded throughout).  It won't happen, certainly not in Michigan.  Michigan's economy depends on summer tourism, so we need to ensure everyone can go on a summer trip whenever they want, instead of when the schools dictate it.

And anyway, this summer, we all need the time off so very much. After a year of huge class sizes taught in the awful hybrid model under curriculum we can't control and teaching toward state-mandated tests no one values while being called lazy and living without raises for more than ten years, we're done.  You want to get summer school teachers, address the problems in the previous sentence.  Then we'll talk.

A year ago, the coronavirus (as we called it back then) appeared in Michigan with two recorded cases.

No one was wearing masks in public much.  We were avoiding handshakes and doing elbow bumps instead.  But no one seemed overly worried.

I was terrified.  I remember watching it show up in China and spread quickly.  Cruise ships filled up with plague victims and were refused docking.  Still, everyone, including Donald Trump, was saying it wasn't a big deal, and I was saying, "This is horrifying." Diseases like this spread like crazy, especially in a world of quick, cheap international travel.  It only takes a single case in an airport to send a virus all around the world.

The latest (and ultimately false) information we had back then was that the virus spread on surfaces, like the flu does, so I set my students to work.  Twice a day, every day, I sprayed my classroom tables down with bleach cleaner and had my students wipe them dry with paper towels.  They grumbled and complained that it was stupid, that there was nothing to worry about.  I ignored them.

On Wednesday, I brought in a giant bottle of hand sanitizer and told my students that everyone who entered the room needed to use it, even if they said they'd just washed their hands.  This excited some commentary, especially from "Moe," a nasty-minded student from a right-wing family.  Moe was a big kid with a loud mouth who had clearly been raised to believe that if a big person just shouts at people, they'll be cowed into submission.  He was a bully and weasel both, who tried to get me into trouble by peddling false stories about me to the principal. These stories ended in showdowns in the office, and Mick upped his attempts to get me into trouble.

So after a bathroom break, Moe strode into the class and bypassed the sanitizer.  I stopped him and told him to use it.  He made a huge, vocal deal about it. "This thing is a fake! It's nothing! This is stupid."  I ordered him out of the classroom and told him not to come back until I'd heard from the principal.  He stormed out, vowing never to return.  As it turned out, he never did.

The following day--Thursday--Moe wasn't in class.  I marked him absent and taught as usual.

Meanwhile, I remember a palpable feeling in the air, similar to when a blizzard is on the way.  The numbers were shooting up in Michigan, and we'd had a case in our school district.  Fewer of my students were scoffing at the virus now, and the big discussion was whether or not it qualified as a pandemic.  The CDC was hesitant to call it one because they were afraid of panic.  This struck me as an idiotic policy, and was the first among hundreds of bad calls, missteps, and utter incompetence on behalf of the CDC in handling COVID-19.  This was The Big One, the event they'd been preparing for over decades. And when it finally arrived, they screwed it up from beginning to end and side to side.

"Do you think they'll close the schools?" students and teachers often asked.

"I think they will," I always said.  "We won't finish the school year."

"Nah!" scoffed my colleagues.  "It's a flu. We might miss a day or three, but that's it."

Also on Thursday, Darwin got the news that his brother had died down in Arizona.  I made sub arrangements for Friday so I could be home for him.

That evening, Governor Gretchen Whitmer called an emergency news conference.  She announced that she was closing places of congregation, including bars, restaurants, and all schools for the next two weeks.

This set off a flurry of work.  Darwin was dealing with long-distance arrangements surrounding his brother's death (no one else in the family seemed willing to get involved, strangely) and I was dealing with work.  Wherever Schools announced that on Monday, we teachers could come in and get stuff from our classrooms that would allow us to set up virtual teaching at home.  After that, we were forbidden to return.

I didn't get a final class with my students because I was out on Friday.  I noticed the sub had marked Moe absent.  I wondered grimly what he was thinking of hand sanitizer now.

On Monday, I rushed into my room, snatched up my school laptop and other portable technology, along with copies of textbooks, and drove home.  The district gave us one day--ONE DAY--to figure out how to use Google Classroom and put lessons up for our students.  Everyone was floundering, even panicking.  The big concern was how to use Zoom.  I didn't want to touch it, and never did that year.  Other teachers tried it, and got Zoom bombed.  One teacher got porn bombed--a Zoom bomber shared a video of hardcore porn with the class.  We were told to put up assignments and home-recorded videos for the students, but assignments couldn't actually count or be graded.

I worked for hours and hours and hours, recording and editing videos of myself, converting materials to Google Classroom.  Darwin was still working in Albion at the time, and I ended up spending half the week down there.  It was the strangest thing, teaching in Wherever from 50 miles away.

The end of the two-week closure coincided with the beginning of spring break.  Everyone was saying that three weeks of closing down would give the epidemic (as the dumb-ass CDC was still calling it then) time to ebb, and we could go back to normal.

"No," I said.  "We won't go back.  This thing is just getting started."

I hated being right.

In the middle of spring break, the governor announced that schools would continue to be closed, first for the month of April, then into May, then until the end of the year.  Graduation for everyone, including Max, was canceled.  This was the single most upsetting part of the pandemic for me up to that point.  After all the hard work, the arguments, the fighting, the coaching, the shepherding, the watching, the twice-yearly IEP meetings, I wasn't going to see Max walk down the aisle to get his diploma.  It still upsets me.

We teachers were hailed as heroes due to our attempts to create workable lessons for at-home students, but we were too busy putting in twelve-hour days to notice.  (Later, when schools were still closed for the fall, we were suddenly denigrated as lazy and incompetent because the teachers refused to risk their lives for their jobs.)

I never did see Moe again.  I was too busy to care.

In June, my uncle Indul died from COVID-19. 

Mask mandates were finally introduced, and became a political flashpoint because Trump stated he wouldn't be wearing one.  The Republican party stood behind Trump and resolutely blocked methods that would slow or halt the spread of the disease. 

A few months later, my uncle David and his step-daughter died from COVID. 

Here we are, now.  I've gotten both doses of the vaccine, and Darwin's had his first.  Numbers are finally going down.  We may be back to some version of normal by July.  And it's never been more clear than ever that the Republican party wants nothing but power. They don't care about lives, they don't care about their constituents.  They don't care.  They must never, ever be allowed control of the government again.

And now we need to move forward.

A while ago, Michigan declared that teachers were Class 1B for COVID vaccines.  This means teachers are basically second in line after healthcare workers and seniors.  I learned about the health department's vaccine registration web site going live for 1B patients by sheer accident, when a friend mentioned it in passing.  When I visited the site, it took me six tries to get registered because the site kept crashing under the pressure.

The web site scheduled my first vaccine for January 22--the day I'm writing this--and my second for February 15.  But here's the thing: Wherever Schools decided to start face-to-face instruction for all secondary students on Wednesday, January 20.  I was (am) very much against this decision, and feel the schools should remain virtual until at least teachers and staff can be vaccinated.  I'm frankly terrified that I'll pick up the virus somewhere--especially at work--and bring it home to Darwin, who is in a highly-elevated risk group.  This is a serious, wake-up-sweating-in-the-night kind of fear. 

I couldn't see taking the risk.

And so I elected to stay home Wednesday and Thursday, using my personal leave time.  And the district grants 10 extra COVID-related sick days.  Getting vaccinated falls under those days. So I'd only be losing two days of my own time.  Okay, then.

My thinking is that once I get the vaccine on Friday, I'll have the weekend to start building immunity.  The Pfizer vaccine has a 50% immunity rate after the first vaccine (though it take several days to get there).  So when I go back to the building on Monday, I'll have at least some immunity, and get more every day.  I intend to maintain strict protocols in my classroom as well, which will also help.

I don't think my principal was very happy when I told him I'd be out for the first three days of the semester, and I got the impression that substitutes are already difficult to come by, but he didn't fight me about it and he said he understood why I was doing it.  I think for a moment he thought I was quitting, which would have made his life really difficult, but that wasn't the case.

Today--Friday--I drove out to the vaccination site, which is the fire station in Holly about 20 minutes away.  Signs near the station directed me to go around back, where I found a line of about twenty cars.  I joined it, and it moved briskly ahead.  When I got close to the front, a masked lady approached the car to get my information and check my ID.

I suddenly realized I hadn't grabbed my wallet when I left.  Several frantic moments followed.  The woman wasn't sure if I could get vaccinated without showing ID first and was going to find a supervisor to ask, and I wondered if I would have to drive back home and potentially lose my vaccine.  Then I remembered that I keep an expired driver's license in the car just in case.  I dug around and produced it, and the lady said that would do.  Whew!

Then another snag: the lady told me that although I'd been scheduled to get the Pfizer vaccine, the fire house actually got a shipment of Moderna vaccine.  This wasn't a big deal, except that the time frame for the second dose was different.  I would have to reschedule that by calling the health department after February 1.  Well, great.  After the Great Web Site Challenge, I didn't think it'd be easy to get through to DHS by phone.  But there was nothing for it.

The lady gave me a sheaf of papers with vaccine information printed on them and directed me to drive into the fire house.  I was expecting (hoping) that a bunch of hot firemen would descend on my car like the pit crew at a racetrack to give me the vaccine.  My hopes were dashed.  A roly-poly woman in a tie-dyed mask leaned into the car with a syringe instead.  "I have mad skillz," she told me, and poked my arm.

I drove to another parking lot where I needed to wait fifteen minutes under the eye of another set of medical staff to make sure I had no adverse reactions.  While I sat there, I did a web search for the efficacy of a single dose of the Moderna vaccine.

Hello!  The studies reported that the Moderna vaccine has a whopping 80% immunity rate after the first dose.

Suddenly the snag didn't seem so snaggy anymore.

I drove home after the allotted wait time.  Later in the evening, the injection site became sore and I felt a little off, so I took some Tylenol.  Now I'm feeling perfectly well.

And . . . 80%.  I feel a lot better about returning to work.

It's been in the news.  Wherever Schools were attacked by a computer virus.  Ransomware.  The district refused to pay, and the criminals brought down the network for the entire district.  No Internet, no phones, no network drives, no email, no grading, no attendance records.

So while we're under siege for the coronavirus, we got hit by a computer virus.

It was (is) bad, bad, bad, and the only thing that kept us functioning on an educational level was the fact that we're all delivering instruction through Google Classroom, which was unaffected.  However . . .

Nearly all us teachers keep our materials on our network drive. Everyone has their own section of the network, and I've been keeping my lesson plans and instructional materials on it for years.  In the old days, everyone kept a master copy of worksheets and projects and tests in a filing cabinet.  I still have my filing cabinet, in fact. It's monstrously huge.  And empty.  Years and years ago, I scanned all my paper materials into PDFs and when I create new materials, I do so on a computer.  And everything goes into the network drive.

When we're within range of the district's WiFi, we can access our network drives through any computer, using the file explorer.  Very easy.  At home, we can access the network drive through the Internet by downloading files to our own computers.  Very clunky.

When we shifted to virtual school back in March, I was forced to download my files, one by one, to my home computer through the Internet.  It was slow and laborious and tedious.  I finally had enough of frustration and solved the problem by taking an external hard drive to school (eerie empty hallways) and downloading the contents of my network drive to it.  Much easier!

Then the computer virus struck and the network drive went down completely.

Like everyone else, I was scrambling to deal with this new problem.  Without our school email, we shifted over to using our GMail accounts, which took some configuring.  We couldn't upload grades from Google Classroom to the school's online grading program, and Google Classroom's grade book isn't accessible by the parents, so the parents had no way to know how their kids were doing.  I had no way to contact parents, since email addresses and phone numbers are stored on the network.  Grades dropped sharply as kids realized no one was overseeing their progress except me, and I was just an image on a screen.

At least I had access to my materials.  Most all the other teachers didn't.  They had to start all lessons from scratch and find or create new materials in an already stressful and difficult environment.

The network was down for about three weeks.  We teachers got very little in the way of information about it.  We got a couple-three carefully-worded emails from the administration that basically just said we were hit by a computer virus and they were working with a tech company to restore what they could, please sit tight. 

The district didn't say it was a ransomware attack.

The district didn't say that our personal data, including social security numbers, was compromised.

The district didn't say that the personal data of a pile of teachers and students was posted on the dark web.

As of this writing, the last communique we got about this from the district was a sheepish email that basically said, "Well, it looks like some teachers' information got out. We're sorry about that. We'll let you know in a week or so who it was."

A blog that tracks ransomware attacks learned of the attack and found the teacher information on the dark web.  It showed some of the files, with names and other personal information redacted.  If this site knows about it, the district must also know.  But still we haven't been told anything.

(Small side note: when I registered the boys as students at Wherever Schools, they asked for their social security numbers.  I refused categorically and asked why the wanted these numbers. The registration person said it was routine to collect them, and I really needed to hand them over.  I refused again.  "We keep them safe," the registration person said.  I refused a third time.  When the registration person grew a little belligerent and made noises about my refusal delaying or stopping their registration, I said, "State law says you must accept my sons into the school system, no matter what. I don't have to give you a damn thing except their address and birth dates.  Drop it."  She dropped it, and the boys were registered.  Without their soc numbers going into the school computer.  Looks like a damned good decision on my part, dunnit?  Never, ever give that number to anyone who isn't giving you money or extending you credit.)

I'm already registered with two credit- and data-protection services. I get an alert every time someone tries to do anything in my name.  I don't keep a list of my personal passwords on the district software anywhere.  I think I'll be all right.  I hope I'll be all right.

The network is back up now.  I had to bring my school laptop to the high school and hard-line connect it to the school's network to update the virus protection.  The grades and email were restored.  I didn't think to check if my network drive was restored, but I haven't heard howling from other teachers, so I'm assuming it was.

I'm hoping.

We're back teaching.  Sort of.  And it's exhausting!

The Wherever district elected to go for distance learning only this year. At minimum, we'll be doing this for the first card marking, which ends November 1, but with the provision that we =may= be doing it for the entire first semester.  (I'm actually betting we'll be doing it for the semester.)

They also changed the schedule for high school.  Instead of having six one-hour classes per day, we're having three 105-minute classes per day. On "A" days, hours 1-3 meet, and on "B" days, 4-6 meet.  And the instruction is all on-line in Zoom and Google Classroom.

This created a flurry of activity before school began.  We teachers had to set up our Google Classrooms, created online lesson plans, and contact all the students to let them know how to find us on Zoom.  I had to set up Zoom meetings.  I had to email and re-email students who dropped my classes or were added to them. (This latter thing went on until late Sunday evening.)  It was a hella lotta work.


I stressed over running class on Zoom.  I didn't use Zoom much last spring and still didn't feel comfortable with it.  Not with a large group of students.  I worried that we'd run into tech problems that would derail class, or that the students would have trouble, or that it wouldn't be effective, or . . . or . . . or . . .

On the plus side, classes start at 8:05 AM instead of 7:15 AM, a major bonus for a non-morning person like me.  My commute time is literally zero.  I don't have to drive through a harrowing gauntlet of student drivers in the morning and again after work. I have more break time at lunch because I don't have to go anywhere, or wait for students to leave the room.

My life wouldn't be in danger because of my job.

On Monday, I got up at the late hour of 6:45.  (My usual rising time is 5:50.)  I had breakfast, then shooed Darwin out of bed at 7:30--our bedroom and office are in the same room and it would be awkward for everyone involved if Darwin hadn't gotten up when my first Zoom meeting went live! I got all my files up and ready with ten minutes to spare, then started up Zoom.  And . . . go!

It all went fairly well.  It's not the way I want to teach, and I'd never do it this way by choice, but it beats exposure to COVID-19. 

After teaching four 105-minute classes with a break for lunch, though, I was wiped out.  And I still had prep to do.  I didn't really get done until suppertime.

Today was Day Two.  Things went decently, but I was still wiped by the time it was over, and I had (have) even more prep work.  Next week's lesson plans won't write themselves, and it's better to do them now than do them later, when I'll have homework to grade on top of everything.

I'm assuming (hoping) it'll get easier as time passes, but right now I'm wiped out and trying to focus on the positive side of all this.

At my teaching job, the great debate was raging: how do we grade student work and assess their learning?  There are a lot of issues to consider:

--Not all students have equal or easy access to online learning. Although the district is loaning Chrome Book computers and wi-fi hotspots, some students live in areas with bad connection, or they're competing for computer time with other family members, or they're special education students who have difficulty with a computer, or . . . or . . . or . . .

--It's difficult to administer traditional tests

--Students and their households are under a great deal of stress.  Yes, for many students, their main problem is fighting off boredom in a well-appointed bedroom, but for a bunch of them, life is more difficult. I have students who are taking care of family members who have the virus, or who are sick with it themselves. I have students who live in health care families, and the adult or adults are gone twelve hours a day, every day, leaving the kids to run the household, and everyone is worried the virus will come home. I have students with family members who got the virus and now the family is trying to decide if the kids should be sent away.  Students in these situations aren't in a position to deal with schoolwork at home.

--The state initially said not to grade student work after March 13, the last day schools were open. Now the state has given the go-ahead to assign grades. What do we do with the work students completed between March 13 and now?

--Will the students be given credit for this year, or will they have to make up the lost time over the summer?

--Grading these days is generally divided into two categories: formative (often for homework or in-class practice) and summative (stuff like tests and projects that are a summary of student learning). Many schools also give benchmark assessments, or BAs, which are basically unit tests. In our district, formative grades are 20% of the card marking, summative grades are 50%, and BAs are 30%. Can we give summative and BA grades during the crisis?

--Under the original calendar, seniors only have five weeks of school left. Proportionately, they've lost a lot more time than the other students. Do we extend their school year?

--Speaking of seniors, what about prom? Senior activities (my school hosts a senior all-night party a week before senior finals, along with a senior breakfast on cap and gown day, a senior slideshow, and other activities)?

Last week, we teachers spent all day Thursday and all day Friday on Zoom.  Seriously--the whole freaking day.  We met as faculty in a large group, we met in departments, we met by grade level. It was all working on figuring this stuff out.  It was exhausting.

In the end, the district hashed out a grading system, but also said it was subject to change.

--No summative grades! No BA grades! Everything will be formative.

--The grades the students earned up to March 13 will be 50% of the semester grade. Everything earned afterward will be the other 50%. No final exams!

--Teachers are expected to teach one concept per week.  Each high school subject should require no more than 2.5 hours of student work per week, more or less.

--Work assigned between March 13 and April 19 is not to be graded.  (There's some controversy over that one!)

--Seniors will end school on the usual date.

--Graduation, prom, and other senior activities are all canceled. HOWEVER, the district is hoping we could hold a graduation ceremony in July.  Fingers crossed!

Truly, I've put in more time as a teacher now that the schools are closed than I have when I'm in the classroom.  I can't just upload a worksheet to Google Classroom and say, "Now do this one."  I have to create brand new material that's usable during online learning, or convert existing material.  Almost nothing works as-is. I have to record and edit videos, which is enormously time-consuming.  I have to answer a bazillion more emails in a given day than I ever have before.

And I miss being in the classroom, seeing my students every day, watching them learn, talking with them, watching the seniors get more and more antsy as we get to the end. I miss being able to discuss literature.  (Zoom is awful for large-group literary discussions.)

I hope this doesn't become a new normal.

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.