Back to School Season

 

School starts this week for my students. Tomorrow is the supply pick up, termed Meet and Greet by my principal, where families will drive through the carpool lanes to turn in forms, pick up supplies teachers have prepared in individual bags labeled with students' names, and drop off food for a local food bank. On Wednesday students will log on and Zoom with their new teachers for the first time.

My to-do list is shrinking, but the items that are left are a bit daunting. My classroom still looked like a construction zone late last week, and I haven't been in since the floors were cleaned enough that I could finalize arranging furniture and scrub the grit of the past six months and cabinet removal process off of every surface. The previous teacher had not yet removed her posters because her new room was in even more disarray than mine, and furniture was stacked to the point she couldn't even access her walls. 

I need to get in and actually set up my room to be a fourth grade classroom, ready to receive students, because the plan is to return to the schoolhouse as soon as the county's numbers decline to the target number. But since my classroom space is not yet set up, I have created a space in my home from which to teach. My Zoom teaching day will end before noon each day, but I am scheduling 1-1 family meetings this week and 1-1 student check in meetings and holding "office hours" in the afternoons starting next week. I honestly don't know when I'm going to be able to make time to get into the school to make my new room student ready. I guess it'll be on a weekend.

I have created slide shows and posted drafts of assignments for the first "week" (three days) of online instruction to Google Classroom. I'm ready for the community and relationship building activities of the first days of school. I created a series of questions I want to ask families during the 1-1 meetings. But plans for the second week of school are far from finished and I got stuck on the curriculum night slide show. Of course, there is a curriculum map of the expected units by subject already in place, with only a few minor tweaks needed. I looked at it today, and should be able to use it to create my presentation but this year is just so different that I need to spend time in reflection before actually putting the slides together.

My brain feels very full this fall. I'm thinking about bullet points I want to include in an email to families, a list of items to be sure to bring to school tomorrow, or another set of tasks to add to my to-do list when I'm supposed to be drifting off to sleep. I'm tired. At least the back to school tired is consistent from year to year!

Summer 2020 Preparations

 

What a crazy time to be alive. It's been months of life during a pandemic and yet I almost left my house without a mask today. Given that I spent yesterday working on a Bitmoji classroom to use with virtual learning, and disassembling/rearranging furniture to create a space from which to teach in my bedroom, I don't know how I left the house without one. Thankfully the used masks on the passenger seat of the car clued me in and I ran back inside to grab a clean one before I actually left.

Two teachers at my school have been compiling a list of online resources and platforms we might want to use in our online teaching this fall. We have two extra days of PD scheduled for next week to navigate these resources in addition to the regularly scheduled three days of meetings that will be the following week. I have homework to click on several links on the shared doc and watch some videos. It's easy enough homework that will help me get more out of next week's PD, but so far I haven't been motivated to actually do it. I feel more than a little overwhelmed at all that I don't know.

My new team is amazing. They have already created an impressive amount of curricular specific docs and slides to push out to students when we begin teaching. Many of them were created prior to COVID-19 but since beginning to teach remotely last spring, they dove into the deep end and are working to simplify parent and student access as they continue to create even more docs with hyper links for students to watch videos and complete assignments. It's both awesome and anxiety provoking. I feel like I have a lot to learn about what they've created and the apps they will be directing students to use. I need to create accounts and/or figure out the teacher end of Padlet, Flipgrid, Epic, Jamboards, MobyMax, Khan Academy, and Mystery Science in addition to the platforms created by the math and ELA textbook companies whose materials the school uses.

My husband is amazing. We are in the process of clearing out an old desk with leg room and monitor viewing angle issues and replacing it with a new sit to stand desk. It's very fancy with lots of leg room and an infinitely adjustable height that will help ease neck and shoulder tension as I spend more hours in front of a computer screen than I ever believed I would each day. He even got me a huge monitor that allows me to use my laptop screen as a second monitor so I can view more windows at once. Given that I'm running two Internet browsers each with multiple tabs open on a regular basis now, having the ability to keep many windows visible at once has become invaluable. But maybe I also need to learn to close tabs I'm no longer using.

There is so much for me to learn in order to keep student engagement and learning high this fall. When I feel anxious or overwhelmed I try to take a deep breath and bring myself back to the mindset I had on the eve of my school closing in mid-March. I remember myself walking into a staff meeting after we had spent time with our grade level teachers coming up with a remote learning plan. I enthusiastically stated to the entire room of assembling teachers, "I'm learning so much!" If I can just hang onto that growth mindset, the possibilities for this fall will be limitless.

This Just In...

The decision is made. Now to plan.

I just heard that I will be starting the school year teaching remotely. The Archdiocese put out a statement today after the governor announced guidelines for the start of the school year yesterday. Upon reading the news, my body literally flooded with relief. I hadn't realized how much anxiety I was living with, both in the not knowing and in the possibility of having to navigate teaching in a physically distanced, PPE'd classroom. But as I read the announcement, I felt tension ease in my jaw, neck, shoulders, stomach. Perhaps I will be able to sleep without melatonin tonight.

Don't get me wrong. I can't wait to get back in front of a classroom full of students, dancing, jumping, standing on table tops, and doing what I love to do. I see and feel all the ways remote learning falls short of what I have been doing in classrooms for the past 20 years. But over the past month I couldn't stop thinking about all the ways in person learning was going to fall short this fall. Thinking about maintaining/policing six feet of distance, mask wearing, no sharing... and all of the CDC guidelines for re-opening was going round and round my head - always landing on the same thought: All the reasons that make in-person learning superior to remote learning are off the table until the pandemic ends. Add the risk that is inherent in bringing students and school employees together, and I was having a hard time getting excited about the start of the school year.

For a someone who knew from the first day of kindergarten that one day I would be a teacher, that was a huge problem. Every time I thought about setting up my new classroom or welcoming students on the first day, I literally pushed the thought away.

But with today's announcement, I can hunker down and begin planning for real. For really real. I can focus my attention on the online platforms I will be using, and dig into the resources that have been provided by my new team and the online conference I attended this summer. I can have conversations with my partner teacher about how to establish community and build relationships remotely. I can set up my home office thoughtfully (not quickly, like I did in the spring). I can stop watching the evening news with the lens of what might happen to my school, my classroom, myself when school opens.

I had a stranger on the Internet ask me what I need to see before I feel safe returning to the classroom. I can't answer that comprehensively, but my knee jerk response was that I'd like to live without a mask wearing mandate when in public before heading back to work. I doubt schools will actually wait that long to re-open, but a girl can dream.