education

Teaching From Home: One Month In

Good news!  A month of teaching from home has not killed me. It came close in Week Three, with my resting heart rate mounting from stress and an allergy medication contributing side effects of anxiety and depression.  But the doc released me from the allergy med and we got –dramatic pause– Spring Break!

I don’t know that I have ever so much needed to step back from the craziness and unplug.  Oh, I did a little schoolwork, but it was good to stop running at full speed and recharge for what will most likely be the long haul to the end of the school year.

One weird result of the break from teaching during Coronapocalypse was that I actually missed the structure and busy-ness of the teaching week.  An unending list of potential indoor and outdoor projects did not disguise the fact that I was stuck at home. Other than a grocery run and a disguised outing as the Easter Bunny (complete with mask and gloves), I had a lot of time to be with myself.  And I was pretty boring.

When school resumed this week, my students felt the same way.  They had to admit that without anything else to do, they missed the structure of the school day and the strange disconnected connectedness of meeting online. And so, in the absence of our old normal, we tentatively begin to accept the new situation.

Here are a few things that are making life doable:

Orderly work space

A critical project during the break was to deep clean and organize my office. Windows and curtains are clean. New blinds hung. A huge bag of clutter went out in the trash. All my curriculum materials sit in organized stacks on the shelf. A new microphone headset arrived. The command post is in truly functional order. The room looks good.  I actually like being in it. And guess what? After a week of teaching it is still in functional order! Order in my space does wonders for keeping the craziness at bay.

Plan for the week

The worst part of the first week of Corona Teaching was reworking each of my five lessons every night for the next day.  My normal routine had been to work out the week’s road map by the Friday before.  The last thing I did every Friday before leaving school was to post the week sheet on the class page.  Then I left the building, drove an hour home, and enjoyed my weekend.  Now, teaching from home, it is not sustainable to spend every waking minute thinking  about school when the “classroom” is just behind a closed door.

A major Corona Teaching Victory came when I posted my week sheets on the class pages at the end of the day before spring break. It was a huge relief to resume that normal rhythm.  My students and I are used to that.  It saves all of us time and frustration–one document is posted and we all know where to find it.  Of course, we can get derailed during the week. But we can address the changes the way we always did– in (online) class and by posting announcements.

Plan for the new reality

I teach foreign language.   I can’t just assign pages of reading and comprehension  exercises followed by a quiz. Language learning is a skill. While the students have access to technology to enable them to read and write and listen and speak assignments to me, it cannot really replicate what goes on in class.

Even with live online class meetings, we are not physically in class.  The give and take online is not the same as in the classroom.  So, the regular lesson has to morph into a new thing.

Mini-lessons

My lessons are morphing into a simple pattern:

  • Things we need to do together
  • Things they can do on their own

Live classes start with a mini-lesson where I present or explain material that is new or challenging.  That will segue to an oral activity.  I assign each student an example in an exercise, give them think time, and then call on them just as I would in class.  If it would have  been a partner activity in class, I play the role of the partner when I call on them.  Not ideal, but at least, I can hear where the problems are.  Then, that activity is often assigned again as a written activity.

Live classes end with everyone understanding their marching orders. If students have no questions, they are free to leave. Students who want answers to questions hang around.

Connecting students to my homescreen

I felt like a magician when I figured out how to display my homescreen on the students’ screens during a live meet.  It opened up all sorts of possibilities! So far, I have tried the following:

  • Displaying the online textbook page while I explain a topic.  It is so much better to have them staring at the page while my cursor squiggles around pointing to things than for them to stare at my face talking about it.  And when we work on an exercise in the book, I can point to the words the student is struggling with.
  • PowerPoints. It is so much better to move the slides for them, than to talk at them and tell them to move to the next slide on their device.
  • Kahoot! I use Kahoot a lot in class and immediately began using it as a self-paced non-timed comprehension activity. But now! Now, we can play a Kahoot together.  It doesn’t have quite the same rowdy effect when everyone is sitting in their own homes, but it is still interactive.
  • Online video/YouTube.   I successfully showed students a video from the curriculum, just to start a lesson.  They could have watched it on their own, but I wanted to “watch” it with them.  In another class, I had a epic fail trying to watch a YouTube video.  I watched it fine on my end, but they saw and heard absolutely nothing.  I’m pretty sure I clicked the wrong screen when I did that.  Oops.

Tossing redundant activities

Once upon a time, during normal teaching, there was classwork and there was homework. Homework generally replicated what was done in class.  Now, there is no classwork vs homework.  There is just work.  As lessons morph, I look at each activity and remind myself:

  • Do not cram too many new ideas into one day.
  • Do not assign the same type of activity twice in a lesson.
  • Assign only activities that actively advance mastery of the topic.
  • Less is more–choose quality over quantity.
  • Let go of the expectation that you will cover everything this year.

Respecting and managing time–theirs and mine

A few ideas are guiding me in respecting and managing time:

  • Set a reasonable workload. Live class plus written activities should not exceed normal class time plus normal homework. Ideally, if redundant activities have been pulled, students should spend less time on my class.
  • Have firm expectations for students. Students should respect our class time and assignment deadlines. I am not  teaching an open-ended correspondance course.
  • But be flexible.  Some students will struggle with doing school this way.  At this point in the year, I know who the most likely strugglers are.  And I know who the lazy bums are, too. Grace to the strugglers.  Zeros to lazy bums.

We are figuring this out. It is not at all perfect.  Some students are still very casual about attending live class and meeting assignment deadlines. Tech challenges are real. Family demands are real. Teenage attitudes are just as real as they ever were.

What am I missing right now?  

This crazy 2020 has become the year of the essential.  The essential worker.  The essential work.  Right now, I am missing the fluff and fun of class.  Movie days.  April Fool’s fish. French restaurant field trip.  I may very well end the year covering most of what I normally teach.  Why? Because I have cut out anything that is not essential.

And that is going to get boring.  I’ll have to think about that.

What am I happy about?

  • So far, the students are scoring as well from home as they did in class.  (Or as bad, depending on the student.) So I do not see anyone suffering academically because of this change.
  • Because I am giving points for everything they do (which would not have happened with spot checks in class), the less-than-stellar students are probably doing more work than they ever did before!  There is nothing so motivating to these kids (or their parents!) as a zero.
  • Distance learning has taken on real meaning as several of my international students went back home and are now checking in to class every day from South Korea!

 

 

Emily and The Tree

Little Emily loves the Japanese maple in the Maywood yard.  It’s over fifty years old, planted by Emily’s great-great grandmother Retta. And it is the perfect tree for little ones to learn to climb on.

The main trunk divides into two very low to the  ground, so little legs can easily climb into it.  The next branch is a short leg swing above that, providing a perfect spot for a three year old to sit and ponder.  Of course, the natural thing to ponder is how to get up higher in the tree.

“Help me up,” she says.  “I want to go up there,” she says, pointing to a branch that is over my head and absolutely impossible for me to reach.  I can’t put her there.  The only way to get there is for her to climb there herself.

“But I want to go up there,” she says.

“You have to do it all by yourself.  You have to think about it and figure out how to do it.”

If you think that three year old Emily thought about it and climbed up to the high branch, you will be wrong.  I turned around to watch out for her little brother and–that quick–she fell out of the tree.

Boom. Right onto her elbow on a stick.  Instant adult panic that she could have broken her arm on my watch while the parents were away.  Instinctive reaction to protect her, take her away from the dangerous tree and go back to the house for a popsicle.

That’s when she amazed me.  She got up, surprised but not crying, and she climbed right back into the tree.

emily & the treeThis time she had real respect for the tree.  She carefully considered where to place each foot, how to hold on.  Her goal was no longer how to get up to that very high branch.  Her new goal was to master the distance from the ground to that first branch.  And she did.  While I diligently spotted her.

Oh, the Winnie-the-Pooh lessons to be learned from Emily and The Tree.  On the way to school Monday, I thought of how I wanted my students to be more like courageous Emily.  They tend to want me to implant knowledge in their brains, like Emily wanting me to put her on the higher branch.  However, they panic when things are difficult, fear making mistakes, and want to bail on the whole learning process when it doesn’t go as quickly as  they want. They also absolutely, positively do not focus on anything for longer than a nano-second.

“I want to tell you a story,” I began first period class.

“Are you going to yell at us?” they asked. (They are so paranoid.)

“NO! I just want to tell you a story!” (Ok, I might have yelled that a teensy bit. Sometimes their way of thinking makes me crazy.)

So I told them about Emily.

“Are you saying that learning French is like climbing a tree?”

Um, yes.  And then I told them what branch they were currently on and how we were going to climb today to a higher  branch.

“Are we going to fall out of the tree?”  they asked. (FYI, these are high schoolers and 8th graders.)

“Actually, yes, some of you are going to fall out of the tree.  But we aren’t up very high.  You will not die.”

That seemed to calm them down.  Apparently they believe that learning will kill them.

Friday, my colleagues and I attended a workshop on Teaching the 21st Century Learner.  The speaker was good and had extensive handouts of his very scripted presentation that covered all the usual blah-blah about active learning, none of which I can recall without reading the handouts.  His presentation did not teach me nearly as much as I learned from little Emily.

  • Students want to climb high.
  • Students want the teacher to put them where they want to be, but…
  • Students have to do the climbing themselves.
  • Students are afraid to make mistakes, but…
  • Students learn from their mistakes.
  • Students need diligent coaching and spotting while they climb.

I’m tempted to assign tree-climbing for homework, but they would fall from their trees, injure themselves so they couldn’t participate on their sports teams, and I would get blamed for such a stupid idea. I guess instead I’ll focus on how to better coach and spot them.  They do want to climb, and I don’t want them hurt on my watch.

 

Spinning Wheels

Let’s start with a poll:

When I came home yesterday, I immediately noticed footprints leading to the front door.  We hardly use the front door, so we don’t shovel to it.  Maywood Man has enough to do with plowing and there’s no reason for me to shovel a walk that no one ever uses.  There has been snow upon snow all month, so we’re just waiting for spring to deal with it.  Hence, my surprise at the footprints.  UPS knows better.

It was my brother-in-law, come to check out locations for tree stands for next year’s hunting season.  Tromping through the snowy woods in March must mean he’s going a little squirrely indoors.  However, he didn’t count on our driveway being a sheet of ice.  That’s another thing about March this year.  If isn’t snowing, it’s coating us with freezing rain.  So Jim and his truck slid down the driveway to within inches of the Weber grill that waits forlornly for warmer weather.  And then he was stuck at the bottom of the driveway with nothing to do after his woodland walk but sit with Maywood Man sipping coffee until the driveway melted.

Where was I?  At work.  With some difficulty and great trepidation, my Camry and I made it up the slippery slope so that I could go to school and manage squirrely teenagers and their Ipads.

I had a parent conference at noon.  The mother shared that her daughter seems to get overwhelmed by too much stimulus.   It’s not that she can’t focus.  She just can’t figure out where to focus.  I totally get it.  I told her about my sister, the one with Attention Surplus Syndrome. (You gotta love the acronym!) She pays attention to everything. Try riding in the car with her while she drives, notices every realtor sign, and avoids every manhold cover and pothole in the road.  She needs blinders, like a horse.

So what am I supposed to tell this mother whose daughter sits in a class with audio files and video clips and online text and online workbook and online classwork submission all in different apps while doing partner work with classmates who can’t even figure out that I want them on page 152?  She doesn’t need more stimulating activities.  She needs blinders.  I explain that the technology of the paperless classroom is actually helpful for those students who lose all their work in a crumpled mess at the bottom of their bookbags or somewhere in the hallway or maybe under their bed at home, but even as I speak, I know that often I am completely overwhelmed by the “too much” of it all. The mom and I can’t even get our days straight as we talk…the umpteen snowdays have the two of us completely befuddled.

Today, while it pours snow, I ponder remedial work for some students.  There are so many resources available to the students online that they did not have last year.  I search for something that will be helpful.  One auto-correcting activity will not work with pop-ups on the Ipad.  Another has so many publisher errors in it, that I will not use it.  I discover video activities.  I regularly use these in class with paper handouts, but–voila!– all the resources are right there on the Ipad!

Or not.

I click on the video pages to discover that the video activity link does not contain video activities.  It contains all the teacher answers to the workbook.

I’ve spent the afternoon spinning my wheels online.  I’m thinking that I need less.  I need slow.

I like the idea of sitting by the fire with a spinning wheel, simple work.  A manual task that is repetitive and yields a tangible product.  If I’m lucky, I’ll prick my finger and a  magic spell will let me sleep for a hundred years.