It’s been a helluva week. The kids started distance learning, and it’s going okay. They aren’t getting nearly the amount of instructional time the state has mandated, but we’re giving it a couple more weeks before we ask the teachers when we can expect more.
My husband has been off of work and doing an amazing job with the kids. He has created a schedule that really works for them. They seem happy and fulfilled when I come up. Everything is running incredibly smoothly without me.
I’ve been super busy this week. Monday and Tuesday were packed full of meetings and work. Wednesday was my first day teaching. I only had some orientation groups to lead because the elective class lists aren’t ready yet, so the teaching piece wasn’t that hard. I’ve also been tasked with creating the curriculum for our orientation and advisory time, which has been very time consuming. My colleagues are very appreciative of the work I’m doing, and I have to teach these “classes” myself so it’s nice to be doing work that benefits myself and others. But it’s a lot of time and I’m not getting much done for next week when I really start teaching.
I have to admit, it’s been a bit of a shit show at my district. We lost administrators and tech staff and it shows. Families were supposed to get schedules on Friday morning – they were finally emailed Tuesday afternoon. The elective classes didn’t even get populated. I spent four hours putting together my own class lists last week (overlaying two different survey results to separate the students who really wants to take Spanish and the students who are taking it this year because most of the other electives aren’t being offered). No one else did that for the other classes and they just aren’t done. We may not even start on Monday.
So many kids want to take Spanish that I’ll probably be teaching an extra class and working 120% of full time this year.
My district is small and understaffed, but we’re usually on top of our shit. To see how difficult it’s been for them to put this schedule together, and to make everything happen, has been sobering. Our schedule had to be workable in distance learning and if we go back to some kind of hybrid model, and that was really hard to put together. We have a lot of staffing gaps due to budget shortages. The whole thing is a mess and we are struggling to start successfully.
I will say, my colleagues are good people and they are doing good work, but man, this stuff is hard. This year is going to be a big challenge.
Having my husband cover this week has been great, but it’s also been eye opening for him. He’s realizing just how difficult this year is going to be, and he’s panicked. I’ve been panicked about how hard this year will be all summer, and it’s hard to engage him on his newfound realization of the shit show we’re heading into. We did have a good talk about it last night, and I think we’ll eventually find a system that works. But it’s going to be really, really hard.
Oh, and fires are raging everywhere and our air quality is so bad we can’t go outside or open our windows. It’s truly Armageddon.
So that is where I’ve been this week.
Has anyone else started distance learning? How is it going?
We have huge fires to the north, east, and south and terrible smoky air as well.
My kids started school two weeks ago. Our district ramped up rather than start back full time right away. The first 1/2 week was just basically a meet and greet. The first full week was 1 hour per day synchronous, plus pick up of paper materials. This is the first week of full time school. It’s actually going well and I think the slow ramp up was helpful and good for the kids. There have been a few hiccups—E.g. we couldn’t figure out why my youngest couldn’t type on her assignments in seesaw (click click but nothing happens) then it turned out she was “turning in” blank assignments so could no longer edit them. Things like that will happen occasionally bc I can’t be present with them the whole time—I’m in a different room working. But all in all it’s going well. I’m not concerned about mandated instruction time. I’m assuming the district is taking care of that. My kids are liking school and not frustrated which is a relief. They are including a lot of social emotional pieces which is good.
We started this week with just one hour a day, four days a week. While I don’t expect more than that for a while, I have some reservations about the teacher continually making references to when they will be back in the classroom (“soon I hope!”) and basing expectations for the new school year on the failure of the end of the last school year which really comes across as limiting, instead of assessing what we are looking at today and engaging with the new kids where we are today. I hope that this will change to be more about growth in a reasonable and appropriate manner and not about living down to the expectations set by last year considering the end of last year had to be chaotic, and understandably so.
My spouse took the week off to monitor, and I took a turn at monitoring today, and we’re formulating a sense of what we need to do going forward but it’s felt pretty fraught this week. It’s definitely going to impact our work quite a bit in various ways but we’ll figure out how to make it work.
Thinking of you. One child (high school) said day 1 was totally absolutely terrible and there was no hope at all for the future improving. One child (grade school) starts next week. Hoping.
Sending you good wishes. Whole district clearly will need them. It is discouraging.