Reopening Plan

 My school has released an updated reopening plan. It is still subject to change, but if all goes according to plan, my fourth graders and I will return to the classroom by the end of the month. I am nervous about the possible negative outcomes, but the preschool students have been in my building since the first day of school, and the K-2 students were in for several weeks before the holidays. There haven't been issues, in part because our community of families is largely adhering to guidelines. While I do know of families of my own students who have traveled, I haven't heard of any COVID cases among them and I would hope that travel would diminish with a return to the classroom.

Instead of worrying about the idea that I might have to deal with having a student, co-worker, family member, or myself becoming part of a statistic, I want to focus on all the positives that will happen once I am teaching in the classroom again. 

First, I will be better able to elicit student participation. I have three students who always participate and the rest stay muted, waiting for one of the three to respond. A couple do put relevant comments in the chat, but a solid class discussion is very difficult over Zoom. I have one student who claims his camera is broken, even though his parents did get him a new computer early in the school year, and I have seen his camera on for a few minutes here and there. Technical difficulties are the biggest challenge: audio quality during student responses, unstable connections that have kids re-joining all throughout the class, videos buffering on my end as I try to show them, videos that are laggy or have poor audio quality on the student end even when they are smooth on my end... the list goes on and on. But I also have a student who hit a huge milestone when she participated in a class discussion with a direct message to only me during class this morning, and then wrote "bye" for EVERYONE to see after 90% of her classmates had dropped off the call at the end of class today. Her camera is never on. I can't wait to get these kids back into the building!

Going back into the classroom will give me my evenings back. I am done with teaching Zooms at 11:30 every morning. However, I have scheduled 1-1 meetings with students or staff meetings on my calendar until 3:00 or 4:00 every day. I also meet with one student and her family *every* evening at 5:00. In between scheduled meetings I am fielding Google Chat messages from students and trying to stay up to date on my email. There have been many days when I haven't had time to eat lunch. Grading and planning don't even begin to happen until after I eat dinner, and there have been evenings when grading and planning have been interrupted by a slew of email. During a normal year I don't respond to emails that come in after about 4:00pm until the next day, with very few exceptions. But this year, everything is different. In order to make the next day run more smoothly or alleviate family stress, I find myself responding to certain messages until 8:00 or 9:00pm.

It will be cold. We will be teaching with our windows open and air purifiers running. My classroom's vent is LOUD, and hearing timid fourth graders with their masks on or even ensuring I am heard in the back of the room with my mask on and students spaced six feet apart, feels daunting. But my school did purchase air purifiers for each classroom. I did get new bulletin boards installed and aides looking for additional hours are putting up butcher paper and borders for me. My principal got a grant for technology and new Smart Boards that don't use projectors are on order, and should be mounted in place of the old model before I return to the classroom. In working to make my seven year old school issued laptop work with the new Smart Board, my principal sat on three tech support calls with me today, and even though we did eventually get my computer connected to the sleek new board, promised to order me a new computer. 

I can't leave without saying that cutting the parents out of the loop on some assignments will make teaching things like pre-writing much easier. I have spent more time than I could have predicted this week explaining free writes to parents and reminding students of what they already know - free writing is about the flow of ideas and not about worrying about spelling, grammar, or structure of any kind. Over my 20 year career, I have learned to live with the reputation I earned in my first year of teaching, expressed by a student in my second year with the words, "Mrs. Conrow assigns a boatload of homework!" But the problem with remote learning is parents don't see the distinction between what would have been assigned as in class work vs. what would have been brought home to finish if their kids were coming into my classroom. Free writing would never be an at home assignment if we were in the classroom. I wouldn't have parents sending me emails about how much time they spent helping their child edit and revise the free writing assignment or asking for examples of free writing (which were provided in videos the students had access to watch again and again, but parents didn't "have time" to watch to see what I was looking for).

It's important for me to remind myself that the parents of my students are awesome. They are very involved and want their kids to succeed, even as we are redefining what it means to "go to school" during the pandemic. I'm grateful for their support and the fact that they care so much about the success of their kids. But writing instruction would still be easier for me if the students' writing notebooks resided only in the classroom.

I wish I was in line for the vaccine earlier. My state released guidelines this week that put me in a group that they hope to get to by April. It's disheartening but doesn't change my school's plan to bring me back by the end of January. I'm doing my best to remain positive even in the midst of an ongoing pandemic during the week that saw the second ever attack on the U.S. capitol. There is something supremely surreal about living in the midst of historic times that seem to be continuing to unfold.