Conrow Christmas Vacation

 

For only the second (third?) time in my teaching career I am neither traveling nor hosting family for my two week Christmas break. One year my husband was consulting, and had a gig across the country between Christmas and New Years. There might have been another year in there when we stayed home and no one came to visit, but if so, I can't remember it.

In recent years, we've traveled much more than we've had visitors. My brother and sister in law have six and seven children each. Even when we had two foster children, it was much easier for our family to find place to sleep in their homes than vice versa. My parents usually come up for Christmas when we're not planning to be with my in-laws, but I'm glad they are choosing their health over holiday travel this year.

This year, we are adhering to government guidelines and having Christmas at home, just the four of us. My husband is taking the second half of his sabbatical this month because we couldn't travel last summer when we had originally planned to visit Europe, Australia, or my dad's native Peru. So the four of us are home, with no schedule to adhere to for the next two weeks (my husband and college student have five and three weeks, respectively, but my high school student and I only have two weeks off).

Today is the first official day we have all had off, though the break mentality did begin on Friday when I drove to school to pick up Christmas gifts delivered by my students' families. Friday also included my virtual staff party, complete with a door dash delivered lunch and Zoom games. The party was completely different from previous years, and not as much fun for me, a decided introvert in large group settings. But my school's "sunshine committee" did an exceptional job given the constraints of 2020.

I'm doing my best to enjoy this low key holiday season. I did all of my shopping online, mostly on Thanksgiving weekend. The delivery boxes stacked up under my desk until this weekend when I finally wrapped everything and set up a little indoor holiday display. With the addition of two kittens to our home this month, we opted not to bring our whole artificial tree inside. I was worried that the kittens would trash our display overnight, but so far they have totally ignored it. 

Staying at home makes for a much more relaxing break for me. I like not worrying about when I will grade the assignments that were turned in during the last days of last week. I felt this over Thanksgiving as well, when I was able to write my report card comments from my at home work space without worrying about how much time they were taking or who I was ignoring while I was working. 

It's only Monday, and I am not sure how I'm going to fill my time over these next two weeks. I have an itch to travel, and would love to have a tropical locale booked, on the calendar to look forward to in the near-ish future. But sitting with a napping kitten in my lap, thinking about holiday movies to watch, and the possibility of baking some ill-shaped holiday cookies this week feels quite relaxing.

Even in the midst of a pandemic, I am blessed. I am truly lucky that the biggest disruption to my life has been to curtail travel. Teaching from home is a pretty big difference, but it's not a disruption.

Teacher Grief

 Today I attended the funeral of a former student, who was in my fifth grade class four short years ago. It's only the second time I've attended an end of life celebration for a former student. Even though I attended today's Mass via Facebook Livestream, it was just as emotionally gut wrenching as the first.

Amos* passed away on the first Sunday of Advent, after fighting leukemia for over a year. I thought I was fine, that his death really didn't impact me because I had been outside of his community for the past three years. Even though I vividly remembered his bright smile and positive leadership as a ten/eleven year old, I felt on the outside. I hadn't been a part of the school and parish wide prayers for him or even known much about the progression of his illness. 

Of course my former co-workers (who are once again my current co-workers) had told me when he was hospitalized and gave me sporadic updates. When I came back into the building for the first time after getting re-hired this summer, his class photos were in every room with the caption, "Praying for Amos*." I think that's when I started to feel "outside" of the ongoing community wide support system for him and his family. While I had been his fifth grade homeroom teacher, I had missed his seventh and eighth grade years and his illness had not been a part of my daily consciousness.

Listening to his mom and sister, who is also a former fifth grader of mine, and his classmates, all former students of mine, offer up words of remembrance brought memories of his fifth grade year flooding back. I have been off and on crying ever since. This young man had his whole life in front of him, and by all accounts it would have been an amazing life. He was a talented soccer player, a natural leader, a brilliant student, who sang with a strong, confident, clear voice.

I don't know how parents cope with the loss of a child. I am barely functional and I hadn't seen this kid for four years.

*Not his real name.

December 2020

 Into this climate of fear and apprehension Christmas enters,

Streaming lights of joy, ringing bells of hope

And singing carols of forgiveness high up in the bright air.

The world is encouraged to come away from rancor,

Come the way of friendship."

~Maya Angelou (2005)

I am on the eve of the last week of school before the end of the calendar year. I have so many mixed emotions surrounding the end of 2020 and the start of a New Year. I know I'm not even halfway through the academic year. I knew I wanted to be a teacher from the time I started kindergarten, and I have a late summer birthday; the academic year has been a more important guidepost for me my entire life. But this year, the calendar year upstages the academic year. 

I have no way of knowing what 2021 will bring, and I am fearful that June will bring yet another transition in my career. My current school hired me to help reduce class sizes, enabling six feet of of distance between student desks in all classrooms. Thus far my grade level has not been in the building for instruction, but there are high hopes in my administration that we will be back in the building sooner rather than later. But come the end of the year, I will be a new hire in a school that will almost assuredly be looking to reduce the size of its staff. These thoughts had me scrolling through LinkedIn this weekend. But I cannot apply for jobs yet. I have to finish this school year for the sake of my students.

Building relationships with students has always been a huge part of my teacher identity. This year, building relationships has been markedly different, but it is still at the core of who I am as a teacher. I have introduced my students to my pets and used funny voices to introduce new topics and keep them engaged. I have scheduled weekly one on one meetings with each student and made sure to send missing work emails to students and their families as soon as I discover a missing assignment. I have sent postcards at least once a month with quotes and jokes to my students' homes.

I am rewarded with pictures of student pets, funny comments on assignments, and emails with information about their daily lives.

 

I have one student who sends me tens of chat messages a day and requires me to close my email when I am in meetings because my computer will ring with an invitation to a video chat. If I answer, the student invariable hangs up. But regardless of whether I answer or not, he will leave the Hangout and open a new one, and send another chat message, or even another request for a video call. It's draining. Incredibly so. But he is a very cute nine year old who is just reaching out for some contact, for a relationship with his teacher.

Students this year didn't do anything to cause the disasters that have befallen their communities or the additional stress that their teachers are facing. Even though 2021 doesn't look like it's going to be any easier than the current year these kids deserve the best I can offer. I'll deal with the next step in my career in a way that will not impact my current students.

Teaching Science From Home

 In the Primary Years Programme of International Baccalaureate Schools (and candidate schools) social studies and science units generally alternate throughout the school year in order to allow for enough time each day to take a deep dive into each Unit of Inquiry. My school had a virtual authorization visit in late October, and we are waiting to hear whether or not we will be authorized as an official IB school. As a candidate school, my grade level begins the year with a social studies based unit, and we just recently began our first science unit.

It's a very cool unit on the birth of rocks with a fossil find as an anchor phenomenon. This is why I was able to use my DIG Field School experience, a week in eastern Montana with University of Washington paleontology grad students, as an introductory teaser just before Thanksgiving. After each set of lessons students will return to three questions surrounding the fossil find:

1. How did the animals die?
2. How did their bones end up so far underground?
3. What happened to uncover the fossils, allowing them to be discovered after millions of years?

Students will revise their hypotheses several times as they uncover more information. Next week's lesson is about the difference between shield volcanoes and cone volcanoes and thick and thin lava. In a normal year all students would get a cup of thin "lava" and a cup of thick "lava" to blow into and try to shape into a mountain. Since the "lava" is water and a flour and water mixture, students can still do this at home. But just in case the experiments are challenge for some families, I recorded a demonstration of the process today.

My husband is amazing, and pulled out his camera gear to assist. We filmed less than five minutes of footage, but the whole process took at least half the day. I discovered after we were set up that I have no red food coloring. But I found purple food coloring. I decided that since Mrs. Conrow is known for her crazy purple hair and car, I could have purple lava for my demonstration. Hours later, I hope I was able to splice the video appropriately for the slide show that will be presented to my fourth graders on Tuesday.

It was fun, even if it was incredibly time consuming. I really enjoyed blowing into the thick lava. It was fun to try to shape into a mountain as well. I certainly hope the students are able to complete the activity on their own.

I am grateful I have a husband who is supportive of my career and a household that allows me to film science demonstrations on a Saturday morning. My son took his new kittens behind a closed door so they would not disturb the filming. My other teenager slept through the entire set up, demonstration, and clean up. How many teachers during the pandemic are facing much more challenging situations when they need to do something similar for their students? Even face to face teachers might have had to film a demonstration in order to do this activity in a physically distanced format. This year is so weird... here's to hoping that it gets better in 2021.

Kittens - My 16 year old's birthday present.