Steven Harper Piziks

 Big storm whipped through here. Tornado spotted north of us. 60 mph winds, big rain. We didn't lose power, but big, big chunks of Wherever did lose it, including Nameless High School and the two other high schools in the district (according to DTE's power outage map). Yeek! I wonder if we'll have school tomorrow.

As it happens, several schools in Michigan did a half day or closed entirely because of the heat--95 degrees and higher. Lots of schools have no AC or they have cheap-ass AC that can't handle this level of heat.

A similar thing happened last year, too. Right at the beginning of the school year, we had a power outage that closed school. Meanwhile, we had very few closures for snow and ice. In this changing climate, rain is the new snow.

I haven't posted much about this school year. I guess because it's pretty much been more of the same, despite the new ninth grade curriculum. 

On Friday, I graded the last freshman essays, finished tearing my classroom apart, bid the room good-bye, and headed home. And now I'm on BREAAAAKKKK! 

This is the best part of break: the beginning!

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...

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.

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.

Yesterday we had a slow-motion blizzard. The storm didn't dump a bunch of snow on us all at once. Instead, it was a steady, relentless sifting. Wherever Schools closed, not because the roads were bad, but because they would likely =become= bad. Snow day!

Late last night, Max (who just put a new set of tires on his car) went out for a test drive. He reported the roads were awful, despite the snow plowing. He predicted the schools would close tomorrow, too.

At 4 AM, my phone buzzed. Snow day number two!

I made chocolate chip waffles this morning, just because I could.

Spring break started last Friday. Oh, how we needed this.  Between mid-February and all of March, we had no breaks at all.  You may say to yourself, "Well, =I= don't get a break during that time, and I don't get a spring break, either."  This may be true, but we're a school, and kids aren't adults. They need more breaks and more down time than adults.  And when it's been a long time since even a three-day weekend, you can feel it.  A steady tension builds.  The number of discipline referrals goes up.  The number of missing assignments goes up.  It's harder to hold students' attention and keep them on task.  The winter doldrums make it even worse.  This creates added tension and stress for the adults.

So it was greeted with great relief when spring break finally arrived.

We haven't done much, ourselves.  Darwin is in the middle of budget season at work, so he's extra busy and we can never take a trip.  I've been just resting a lot, really--puttering around the house, doing some extra cleaning, playing Corey more.

When we get back, we head into the downhill part of the year, which is another battle.  My seniors (and I have three sections of them) always figure the year ends at spring break.  A lot of them take trips to somewhere summery, and when they get back, they want the year to be over.  We also have a number of activities that disrupt the usual schedule--state testing, AP tests, senior meetings and assemblies, and so on.

Off we go!