From Week 1:
Wow. Talk about trying to take a sip of water from a fire hose. There are just too many moving parts for the first week to not feel like an intentional train-wreck. Really. I originally thought that I’d do a day-by-day breakdown (appropriate choice of words…), but doing the job and recording the experiences was at least one job too many. So, the best that I can say is that we all survived the first week.
After last Springs highly experimental remote for most of the year and then hybrid with weird alternating schedules every day, the worst that could be said about week one was that it went way too fast and very little subject matter teaching could be done because everything was about getting bodies in and out of classrooms while avoiding something approaching herding cattle. It wasn’t that bad, but I was asked over and over by my students when are we going to do robots!? Ugh.
From Week 2:
Yeah, I was so “running on empty” that I didn’t write a damn thing, except things that were pumped directly into my classes…
From Week 3:
Shit! I cannot believe that I’m already at the end of week 3 (only 34 more weeks left in the school year! [sarcasm!!!]). Well, I had my first (ever) in class altercation/fight this week. Wifi was pretty much non-existent this week, making it a real struggle to figure out how I’m going to teach media and technology with no interactive connection to our school’s platform or services. But hey, when I mentioned my frustration to a vice-principal she offered that they are planning on upgrading the system in November. November. It was very precious when I had a “trouble-shooting” session with my students following several “no connection” days and we brainstormed possible solutions/workarounds and I mentioned the “November” upgrade. The WTF expressions on their faces was priceless.
So, this became another teachable-moment and we talked about what to do when their Chromebooks refused to connect. I mean, we’re learning about engineering and the whole point is learn how to troubleshoot problems and find solutions or work-arounds. One student suggested smashing all of the equipment. Clearly, this one is under the influence of those silly people who think that things were better before we were overrun by the Internet and other Technologies. Right. Funny. It’s hard to talk about the “good ol’ days” with someone not old enough to remember the last time Haiti suffered a devastating earthquake or the grounding of airlines following the eruption of the Eyjafjallajokull volcano in Iceland or the Bush Jr. economic crash. So, it turns out that smashing the equipment is no solution to our bad wifi. Who knew?
Fortunately by the end of the week we were back online… mostly. But it’s all about do we find a quick work-around when wifi sucks or do we “take advantage” of things not working and act out and basically waste the first fifteen minutes of the class period? I said, before the wifi “fixed itself,” that if wifi continues to be an issue, I’ll distribute old school composition books and they will do their work in the composition books if the wifi fails to connect after ten minutes, so that we can move on without turmoil. Ugh.
Yeah, Week 3 is now in the books. Damn, this is going to be a very long year… and, yeah, I wasn’t able to sit down and finish writing this until now, three weeks in… it’s gonna be a hell of a long school year. Ugh.
