Month: September 2020

Check In On Them

It started so innocently. Just a couple of things that made me smile last week.

That happened in the chat in the middle of class, and reminded me again that I am exactly where I’m supposed to be. Then later on, a parent email. It was beautiful, and I tweeted about it.

And the floodgates opened. I don’t have 1200 likes combined on all my posts in my 10 or so years on Twitter. But this one touched a nerve I guess.

Teachers responded with the names they had given their files (“In Case Of Existential Crisis” was my favorite). Several teachers replied that this year they read their file of notes every day. One said she keeps it in her desk at work and oh how she wishes she would have brought that file home in March.

Woah.

It’s the year of Plan B and Plan C and..

Source

Much is made of self-care these days, with good reason. Teachers, parents, and students are all trying to navigate an impossibly challenging terrain. The days are endless, the weekends short and filled with their own brand of stress. Everybody has their own methods of getting by. Saturdays off. Running. Music. Or a long drive to look at leaves.

And so forth.

While we are checking on each other though, we need to keep in mind that maybe our kids need a check-in too.

From that article:

As for my daughter, we ultimately decided it was time to implement some rules — especially as we enter a new school year: when she isn’t studying at her desk, she must be in a family space. She must spend time outside everyday. Screen time is limited, with all devices turned in at a set time each evening. While it hasn’t been easy, the payoff has been good for her mental health, and for our relationships.

In a related story, I got to hang with some middle school kids this week, supervising a service project for our middle school youth group.

I spent a little time reflecting on those couple of hours after reading the Laura Evans piece. The kids who worked on the courtyard project are all back in face-to-face school full-time. They haven’t been shut in their room away from friends and fun for the last 8 months. Maybe the quarantine life hasn’t had the same effect on them as on others. Or maybe they were just super-happy to be outside with their friends, doing something “normal”.

I’ve been teaching & facilitating classes and session for the youth group and religious education at my parish for over 10 years. I don’t see that group of kids nearly as often as I see my school kids. Once a week or once a month, tops. So I’m probably not close enough to know how they are doing. Even when I do a “check-in” question at the start of class they are a little reticent. And if there were issues I think we’d hear from the parents if they weren’t OK.

But maybe not. One of the things middle school kids hate worse than school is being put on the spot. It really requires a relationship and trust before they open up to an adult.

So all I can really do is be sincere, and keep checking in. And when they have something to tell me, they will.

Sometimes all it takes is finding out that someone else feels the same way you do.

Ask my group of online teacher friends this week.

Source

Let’s Go

There was a time when I thought if I could just win the lottery I could do so much good with that money, give so much of it away to organizations I believe in. But I’m a math teacher, so I know the odds. We don’t play the lottery.

So at some point the rather obvious conclusion set in that I was never going to have $5 million to give away but I could give say $25 a week or a month, or give of my time or talent, and that would matter. Some days/weeks/years I’m better at that than others. But it matters.

“It’s all right to tell a man to lift himself by his own bootstraps, but it is cruel jest to say to a bootless man that he ought to lift himself by his own bootstraps.”

The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (Source)

A couple summers ago I had the opportunity to sit in on a conference session on Latinas in Tech given by Hammond High & Rose-Hulman graduate Angelica Rodriguez. She’s now a software engineer in Indianapolis.

Coming back to her hometown, letting teachers know how thay can support their current students on this journey.

Our kids are out there trying to break barriers, only to find out there are more roadblocks in their way. Financial, especially.

I once interviewed with the principal of a school in a green leafy suburb. In the midst of the conversation, he said, “Our students are the children of doctors and lawyers.” He was trying to make a point about community expectations and the need to upgrade what he considered aging facilities in his town, where he was a high school basketball star before I was born.

He made a point all right, just not the one he thought he made.

But look, doctors and lawyers make more doctors and lawyers. Because the process isn’t cheap. From the web page of the Las Vegas Latino Bar Association:

The Las Vegas Latino Bar Association is committed to helping diversify the legal profession and increase the number of Latino lawyers serving our community. Through discussions with various education professionals, members of the LBA Board of Directors learned that a significant barrier for many Latinos who wish to pursue a legal education is their inability to afford an LSAT preparation course. With this in mind, the LBA founded the ¡Andale! 5K to raise funds for the ¡Andale! Scholarship and provide financial support for college students and graduates to pay for LSAT preparation courses.

https://www.lvlba.com/scholarship

The ¡Ándale! scholarship covers an LSAT prep class, the examination fee, and various and sundry related fees. It’s a package worth $1750. And last year the LVLBA started a 5k to fund that scholarship. They awarded 17 students this package. That’s close to $30,000 in scholarships from one race. It’s worth supporting in whatever small way I can. I’ve got lawyers in my family and in my circle of friends. I taught in Vegas. I teach kids now who dream big dreams and could maybe use a boost.

Source

So I’m in. When word of the race hit my timeline last month, I signed up. On Saturday I did the virtual 5k.

I’m terrible at running, but I’ve been able to do a fair amount of fundraising over the last 13 years for some organizations that are important to me. My thing might not be your thing, but you’ve got a thing. Do your thing.

Also: it would be very cool if there was a similar program in The Region. There’s no law school here, but there are definitely law school students.

Thinking last night about the new school year and all of us feeling buried. And maybe we can’t fix it all at once. But we all have one small thing we can do for ourselves or each other.

Maybe it’s sharing our discoveries on our social, or via blog, or by email to an IRL colleague.

Maybe it’s figuring out an appropriate weekend schedule.

Or maybe it’s something bigger.

My district is no different than any other. We’ve got teachers with a wide variety of tech skills and interests. What we all share is a commitment to go to the mat for our kids, and a can-do attitude despite the challenges of teaching remotely for 18 weeks in the middle of a worldwide pandemic.

So out tech/instructional coaches & coordinators at the district level stepped up. Big time. A survey of needs sent to all teachers in the district. Then, acting on that data, the district put together a series of online sessions scheduled throughout the day Monday.

That’s how to get it done. See a need, meet that need. And when you find somebody needing a hand, step in. Go get that pair of boots.

If there’s anything at all we’ve learned in 2020, it’s that this is all a group effort. The people around us matter. And every little thing I can do helps.

So: Let’s go.

A Day In The Life

(There was “A Day In The Life” theme week on the MTBoS blogs maybe like 10 years ago. This is not that. The title of this piece is purely coincidental).

Source

“Teacher Tired” is not really a new thing. Social media amplifies the spread of pretty much everything. I recall a convo in probably 2010 with one of my favorite former colleagues at about this time of year and I off-hand made a comment about Thanksgiving. And he said, “Honestly, I’m just trying to make it to Halloween”.

He was serious.

The pandemic, and remote teaching, or (may God have mercy on their souls) hybrid teaching to in-person and remote learners at the same time, is definitely taking its toll. My timeline is filled with teachers who are feeling it, mentally and physically. And it’s not even the end of September.

Light dawned last night as I was riding home from football practice with my youngest son, who is getting in seat time on a learner’s permit.

My evidence for that last assertion? Let’s go all the way back to last February, literally three weeks before the shutdown.

A few weeks before that my instructional coach found out I was in the building at like 9:30 one night and she told me “Oh my God I have to send you some time-saving tools and ideas”.

I appreciated the sentiment, but, building a course in Canvas from scratch takes time. Making flipped instruction notes videos and worked-out answer keys takes time. Making copies takes time. Curating additional videos and sites for my students takes time. Being a dad and a husband and a human being takes time. And to borrow a line the late Fr. Ned Joyce delivered to Gerry Faust once, there are only 30 hours in a day.

Nothing she could tell me would have made any of those tasks go faster.

So, what’s the solution, Oh Wise One?

I’m not sure I have one. The last couple years I’ve committed to a shut-off time of 10:00. Anything that’s not graded, planned, copied, recorded, posted, or sent by then can wait. It forced me to prioritize my work (most important first), but it also meant that some “less important” items got pushed back and pushed back and pushed back.

Of course, I still occasionally get on a roll, and then:

I’ll stand by that plan though. Mrs. Dull pointed out the other day that I’m alone in the house for about 11 hours a day. Dinner prep (Cubanos and black beans & rice tonight) starts about 4:30-5:00 so I’ve made it a point to work on school from the last bell until dinner. Then I can sit in the sun by the grill, and later on maybe hang with the fam, with no regrets and no lingering feeling I’m unprepared for the next day, or that I’m short-changing my students.

I’m too old for 20 hour days.

I love what technology has done for me as a teacher, and what it has done for my students and their understanding of math and their enjoyment of my class. In Covidtide it has literally made school possible. And Canvas (the last four years), and now Google Classroom, allow me to keep all my resources for class in one place which obviously benefits my students. But all of us who are using an LMS of some sort are pretty much writing our own textbook, one day and one lesson at a time. It’s no surprise we have no time left after that effort.

We get to make the stuff we use, and use the stuff we make. If you got any pride in your work at all, that’s pretty cool. I was reminded this morning of a line I heard long ago from a winemaker, a Chicago guy and a Mt. Carmel Man as he sat at the bar of his winery with us on a Sunday afternoon:

“Finishes with his heart”. Yeah. I love being creative with lesson design. But making 180 days of lessons from scratch, even bringing in Desmos and Quizizz and CK-12 and other tools, is a Sisyphean task.

That’s it. That’s the shift. The writing and publishing of curriculum has been off-loaded onto classroom teachers. It’s not just the pandemic. We’ve permanently changed the burden we’re asking teachers to shoulder.

That’s a lot of weight. And a lot more 16 hour days and late nights and short weekends.

Eventually something’s gonna give.

That tweet of mine up there? The one with me finding ways to squeeze in all the rest of my committments in-between school stuff? It was just one day, but there’s a lot more where that came from. That’s the deal for the foreseeable future. Teaching In 2020: It’s a day. And a life.