Month: March 2021

Spring. Break.

I live in the kind of place where families go to Disney or Florida beaches or skiing somewhere fabulous for spring break. I work in the kind of place where you don’t go to school for nine days for spring break.

I get that, because that totally was my family growing up. Vacations were for summertime. Spring Break trip? Just not a thing we did, is all. My first spring break trip was as a senior in college. I’ve joked for years about spending”Spring Break In Sunny Highland”, and maybe make some side bets on whether it will snow and how many days will have sub-freezing temperatures.

“Unseasonably cool”. Typical. From the NWS Chicago.

Last year spring break came after two weeks of Emergency Remote Teaching as the schools shut down due to the coronavirus pandemic. We sensed then it would be awhile before we saw each other again.

This year, I’ll spend my spring break mentally preparing to teach in a classroom with students present for the first time in over a year.

We’ll have about 25% of our students back in person (varies by class, obviously – I’ve got one class with only one kid who is coming back to the building), so we’ll join so many of our teaching colleagues who are Dual Mode. We’ve all heard the horror stories but my instructional tech coaches are on it, hosting a series of virtual PDs including video of our district’s dual language teachers who are already teaching to both groups simultaneously. Which of course led me to hatch a plot.

So a group of us met during our planning week back in the building to roleplay it out, and hammer out a plan. (No pizza tho).

If you want the details: dual devices. Teachers will start the Google Meet on their chromebook, and share their doc cam through a window. The teacher’s desktop workstation is connected to the Promethean board. Teachers join the meet from that machine and pin the meet to their screen. So students in the classroom see and hear the same teacher work on the big screen that at-home students see through their Google Meet. During work time, in-person students can be paired with remote students in a breakout room so neither group is ignored. We wanted to make the experience of class as equivalent and student-friendly as possible, and to meet the needs of both groups. I think we have been able to do that. Obviously we can tweak it a little after next week when we see what works and what doesn’t. And I have no doubt we will because this department excels at collaboration and sharing ideas.

Also:

  • distance between students
  • portable desktop barriers
  • required face coverings
  • sanitizing desks at the start and end of every class
  • bathroom breaks during classtime rather than passing time.

The anniversary date of the last day of in-person school, March 13, brought a flood of memories: A year of… whatever that was. Chalk The Walk, and sunset walks, and grading from the outdoor office, and making the good green stuff, and trying to keep our favorite taqueria in business, and helping to raise money for nurses and teachers, and starting a mask collection, and drive-through parades for our padres, and teaching a teenager to drive, and the year Indiana named all 60,000 of us Teacher of the Year, and collecting masks, and going back home (with that sweet view of the neighborhood from my classroom). Good thing I saved my spiritwear.

Where were we? Oh yeah, spring break. So, spring break this year. My youngest and I no longer have the same week off so we planned on a long weekend… somewhere. Within driving distance, preferably. Chicago? Nashville? Detroit? Cleveland? Milwaukee? Minneapolis? We eventually settled on a Michigan weekend in Frankenmuth, known as Little Bavaria, and home to The World’s Largest Christmas Store. Mrs. Dull has German ancestors and I’ve got Germany in my extended family (plus, you know, Pope Benedict XVI) so there was a built-in attraction for us. What’s there for a teenager? Honestly, not much. Mostly, passing it on. Heritage, I guess, both on a family and geographic, Great Lakes region-level. I mean, I’m a teacher, that’s what we do, right? Pass on collected knowledge to future generations? So let’s go. Also: There’s certain places that every kid growing up around here goes at some point. And in truth I’m in danger of losing my Chicago-area Dad Card – my boys have never ever been to Mackinac Island, the Soo Locks, or Wisconsin Dells. For shame. But we did some hands-on stuff this weekend. Blacksmithing. Pretzelmaking. Shopped in cheese stores. And cheesy stores. Bought fudge. Crossed a river that has attracted humans for centuries. Had dinner in a 160-year-old brewery.

There was another thing though. Peacefulness. It’s a little hard to describe. The founders of Bronner’s make no secret of their faith. It’s there from the signage to the products on offer to the people. It reminded me a little bit of being a student at Our Lady of Grace School: daily Mass, nuns for teachers and administrators, the whole world was Catholic. The Bronners are Lutheran but they definitely speak the language. Where it hit me was the Silent Night chapel, a replica of the chapel built in Austria on the spot where Fr. Joseph Mohr and Franz Gruber wrote and performed the beloved Christmas hymn. The chapel contains a replica of the altar at St. Nicholas Church. And it is gorgeous.

Photo cred: Mrs. Dull

Perfect replica of a side altar in a Catholic church, down to the kneelers in the pews. Sat there for just a minute and let it all wash over me. The chapel is not consecrated and is not designed for services of any kind, but that didn’t matter. I couldn’t have felt more at home if there was an actual tabernacle there. The word that was infused at that moment was “unity”. Which is fitting, because the walkway to the chapel entrance is lined with signs containing the words to “Silent Night” in dozens of languages.

Catholic means “universal”, y’all. Sometimes I just need a not-so-subtle reminder.

The drive up was pretty tense. It’s pretty damn dark at night in that part of Michigan, and the roadways could use a re-striping and maybe those reflector things. An 18-wheeler escort through a construction zone helped a little. Coming back it actually snowed for a couple of minutes interrupting bursts of rain near Kalamazoo. We white-knuckled it for a bit both ways. But in between, bliss. If the point of spring break is to stop & rest & refill your tank for the stretch run, I think we did it. Plus, even though Sammy is back in school, I’ve got the rest of this week to make Quizizz, and Desmos activities, and get my first dose of the Moderna vaccine, and get my brakes done and an oil change, and celebrate my youngest’s birthday, and other assorted at-home kind of things.

Only thing missing is a tan, and I’ve got all summer to work on mine. High-school-me would recognize the feeling.

You Get One Shot

Just a little topical humor that graced my TL the other day.

Fridays are for virtual PD by me these days. My district has been remote all year long, but at the start of the second semester we opted for e-learning days on Friday. It provides a much-needed mental break for students and teachers, and once we return to in-person learning it will also allow for deep cleaning of the buildings.

My new school will be a New Tech school next year, so staff has been invited to trainings the last three Fridays, and my district has also offered a variety of topical PDs each week as well.

They’ve been valuable. And real.

Last week I sat in on a session facilitated by my district tech coordinator on the topic of cultivating creators rather than consumers in the classroom. And I was reminded just how much cool stuff students and teachers are doing in my district.

That always makes me want to get better. So does stuff like this:

“Let’s go”. Those are my people right there. Give us a challenge, and the right support, and step back. We got this.

The most recent session it was the math, science, and language departments’ turn to attend the NTN training in-person with the rest of the staff onboard via Zoom. I appreciated the chance to see old colleagues and new face to face.

Then the whole session caught fire. The topic of the training was “culture”.

The feature was a “Block Party” of rotating breakout rooms discussing three questions:

  1. When you walk into a school building, what’s something you notice right away that tells you about the culture of that school?
  2. How would you describe the culture of your current school?
  3. What are your aspirations for culture in your school building?

Then during comments, oh man. From several current staff members at the school that will house the consolidation, the theme: You get one shot to get the culture right, the process of bringing students and staff from different schools into the same building.

They recognize it can’t be something you throw together at a half-day PD in August. In fact, several recommended it be a summer-long project.

We want a welcoming, inclusive place that reflects our student body, where teaching and learning can happen. A couple of teachers talked specifically about race and sexuality/gender identity inclusion. Talk is a good first step. Making it reality, that takes work.

And everything’s on the table, all the way down to the pictures on the walls. One of my colleagues, Region to the core, and a lifelong Hammond teacher, commented during the recap of the breakout that there’s still a photo of her from her choir days on the wall in one of the hallways, and she’s coming up on a 25th reunion. As she said, “does that picture still need to be on the wall in 2021?”

It’s a legit question. Honor the past. But celebrate the present too, and in the most visible locations.

I’ve seen what happens where a certain segment of the kids in a building feel overlooked – it’s bad. Destructive really. And it takes a lot longer to fix after the fact than to work on getting right, from jump.

But everyone in the room and on the video call last week, admins and teachers and coaches and district-level people, everybody is on board. I already know their heart is with our kids. This work just flows from that. It’s as good as done.

It’s clear we’re willing to do the hard work to launch a project-based school. I don’t doubt for a second we will dig in to make sure the right culture for our kids is in place first.

The Part They Don’t Tell You About In School

It’s the biggest cliché in parenting: There Is No Owners Manual. When you are trying to decode the cry, or find the right lullaby (“Holy God We Praise Thy Name” is awesome, BTW), or figure out if it’s OK to buy the discount-priced diapers because you’re on a budget (you’ll regret it if you do), you just have to guess and check and hope you don’t cause permanent damage.

Plus, as I reminded myself often back in those days, I wasn’t the first person to ever raise a child. Read a book, huh? Ask your mother. Or your mother-in-law, as the case might be. They have wisdom to pass along.

When the little ones get older, you just get a whole new set of puzzles to solve. It’s like a subscription service. That lasts for like 20 years.

But fortunately, you get better at working in the grey areas, since most of life is not black-and-white. Use the Colin Powell 40-70 Rule, and hope for the best.

My youngest is hurting tonight. One of his football/wrestling teammates was shot dead last night. He’s not exactly sheltered but it’s really the first time he’s come face-to-face with young death. He’s being a good soldier about it, I know he’s on social with his teammates and they are lifting each other up, but I can see in his face he’s dealing with a whole new set of emotions. It’s not the kind of thing he wants to talk about right now. I know, because Mrs. Dull asked.

Compounding the situation is: this was a student of mine from a couple of years ago, at a different school. It’s far from the first time for me, but it sucks every time and it never gets easier.

There’s a lot of “sitting in the front room silently” tonight. We’re hurting together, separately.

I don’t feel any better about it tonight than my son does. The only difference is age and (unfortunate) experience. I’m there for my son, and I’m processing my own emotions as well. To be honest, the balancing act is a challenge.

I have been fortunate my entire career to get the chance to teach kids who hate math and hate school, and probably hate me sometimes. This student was no different. He did what he had to do in my class, so he could do what he wanted to do on the football field. Which was inflict maximum damage to anyone wearing the other color jersey. He led a defense which finished as a state runner-up his senior year.

He played through injuries and my son, two classes younger, looked up to him for that.

We both were kind of square pegs at that school. We had a relationship in class based on respect. I’m proud of that. It’s a respect I had to earn, and I remember him fondly tonight. He’d fit right in with my current classes, in the district where his mom went to school.

To be honest, it reminds me of why I teach and where I belong.

“Hug your kids tonight” is the second-biggest cliché in parenting. So what. Do it anyway. You don’t need an owners manual to figure that out.

Eternal rest grant unto him, O Lord, and may perpetual light shine upon him.

May his soul, and the souls of all the faithful departed, rest in peace.