End of Week 1 “with Students…” The end of last school year was so weird because there was no real change from my daily routine of working at my computer in my living room/workstation from when the school year “ended” and the theoretical beginning of Summer “Break.” Of course I began my “break” by attending a weeklong virtual robotics conference. Then to continue this theme of lost-time, the last week of July I had another weeklong virtual training (robotics) for one of the three classes I would be teaching. July becomes August and we were “given” two and a half weeks to prepare for this most unusual year. But so much of the time was spent in meetings and training that there really wasn’t a lot of time to actually create the content needed to begin the school year. So, for the past two weeks I’ve been getting up at 6am and getting back to bed after midnight. I know that I cannot keep up this pace, but I’m hoping, as I get more comfortable with the new content and more fluency with the technologies, that I won’t have to be at my desk around the clock. I should know better.

Don’t get me wrong. I love what I do and having to do it all online is right in my wheelhouse. In some ways the challenge of remote/online teaching is giving me cover to use more of my technology skills and give me some time to wrestle the curriculum so that it does what I want it to do. Also, working from home I don’t have to be in-authentically social when I don’t want to be. I got no time for BS. This pace is forcing me to really cut out anything that distracts me from my mission (I’m looking at you FaceBook!). Sadly my podcast, “JBB’s Final Thoughts” has stalled out, at least until I can find a way to better integrate it with all the other media I’m having to create to do the paying gig (you know, teaching…).

So this video popped up in my feed. I had watched one of her tutorials when I was considering using Google Slides based interactive notebooks with my students (I just decided today to not use this idea with my media students, but still considering it with my robotics students… can anyone say “Robotics Engineering Notebook”!). Her honesty balanced with her striving to remain positive and come up with solutions and not just or dwell on the negative… all of this reminds me of my first years teaching in 1995 when I would come to school at 8am and generally stayed in my classroom well past 9pm grading papers and prepping for the next day. Damn, this is the beginning of my 26th year teaching and I’m still trying to do the impossible around the clock… crazy. Here we go!