“This is a temporary situation.” This is
an idea that I keep trying to remind myself. I’ve also shared it with my
students as a motivational tool. While it is a true statement, in some
ways, I am becoming more convinced that even though it is “technically”
temporary, I believe this will change the world as we know it going forward,
maybe forever. The Great Depression was almost 100 years ago, and it is
still referred to as a time period that was a huge influential force at least
in the US if not in the world.
On this date in April, those of us who teach in
public schools are living under the dictate that schools are closed until May
1. While there are occasional “wink wink” comments that we won’t be going
back to school during this school year, that hasn’t been officially stated by anyone
in authority yet. There has also been a “hint” floated out there that the
next school year might not happen in the traditional “kids in a classroom with
a teacher” kind of way.
Life as an online teacher has its positives and
negatives. I can sit at my desk or my dining room table wearing shorts
and a t-shirt that I would never wear to school, drinking my cup of coffee and
grading papers that were turned in through Google Classroom. However, I’m
not hearing from all of my students, and I don’t know why. The best guess is they don’t have reliable
wifi or a much-needed electronic device that is easy to type on; however, there
might be other reasons. My district has given us some specific requests.
One is that we turn in names of students that we’ve had no contact with since
we’ve been out of the building. (Our last day “in school” with students was
Friday, March 13.) We have also been asked to let the district know of students
who need a Chromebook, and they will try to provide that for the students.
Our directive about the quantity of assigned work at the high school level is
that the students shouldn’t be given more than 3 hours of work per subject per
week. Ok! I can do that! Our district has been ramping up the use of
technology any way for the last several years, but now we need to take our
technology use to the next level. One
thing on my short list of things to do is to learn how to give direct
instruction on WeVideo, and talk with students through Google Hangouts.
(Sorry, we are discouraged from using Zoom, as of now.)
My English Department has started having Dept
meetings weekly through Google Hangouts, and we are in discussion about
grades. Are we working on a pass/fail basis? They do work - they get credit for it? Do we set due dates and then take off late
points when things aren’t turned in on time - even if we don’t know WHY the
assignment was turned in late? Since our PowerSchool online grading
system is set up for a school year, we aren’t sure yet if we can do Q4 as P/F
or not, and is it fair that Q4 should be averaged in with the other 3 quarters
as if it is the same quality and quantity of work? And then there’s
differentiation for students on IEPs and 504s. How does THAT work? We are all trying to figure all of this out. Some teachers in my dept use Schoology, and
others use Classroom like I do. I guess
all the practice we are getting now might come in handy for next year, right?
So, then there’s next year. Two years ago,
I decided I was going to retire at the end of the 2020-21 school year. I
have been working on that assumption ever since, and I have shared that with my
building admin. Will I be spending my last year before retirement running
an online classroom? So many questions
remain…
Based on the most recent things I’m hearing from
high level medical people is that we are looking at 18 months before there is a
vaccine. If that is the case, then the next year and a half of my life is
going to be spent quietly in my home as I continue “social distancing” and
“sheltering in place”. My husband and I are both in a high risk group
because we are over 60 and I am diabetic. In an interesting personal analysis,
we realized that our private lifestyle really hasn’t been changed by this
crisis situation all that much. We aren’t particularly social people
anyway. We don’t entertain guests in our
home or visit others. We don’t eat at restaurants or walk the mall. We typically do our grocery shopping when the
stores are less busy. We like to walk at
parks and stay at home to do our own gardening and yard work. All of that
is how we live anyway. We don’t have
kids. We don’t have pets. We don’t have elderly parents or siblings to
check on. I was already backing down my
involvement in activities out in the world anyway. I haven’t golfed since before my last knee
surgery in 2018. We don’t travel as a
couple. (Every few years I might fly to New Hampshire for a week or two.) AND
the fact that we have two houses which we keep stocked with TP and food is
giving us a greater sense of security.
Our biggest change has been ordering groceries
which we will pick up at curb-side or have delivered. Before all this
happened, we typically visited 4 grocery stores over a 2-3 week period: Kroger, Giant Eagle, Meijer and Marc’s.
The first 3 are providing both curb-side pickup and delivery. In fact we’ve been using Kroger’s curb-side
pickup for a couple of years because the milk we like to buy is hard to reach
and often not fully stocked when we are shopping there. So we order it
online and pick it up and let THEM try to get it down from the top shelf! Seeing the different ways all of these stores
handle this has been very interesting.
Kroger has, by far, the best website for ordering online. It always works! While we used to be able to
schedule curbside pickup for the same day or the next day, we now have to
schedule 4-5 days out, and if the curbside is all booked, we might have to
switch to delivery which will also probably be 4-5 days later. We have
learned to plan ahead and stock up on our favorites. Giant Eagle’s website works well also, and we
have done both curbside and delivery with them, but their biggest issue is that
you can’t add items to your cart while you wait for the delivery date. Kroger allows you to add to your order until
midnight before your delivery, which is very helpful when you realize you
forgot to put something on your list.
The worst one to deal with so far is Meijer. Their website is PAINFULLY slow, and it
doesn’t always work at all. I have tried to set up delivery several
times, and I’ve never been able to get it to work. My next attempt is to go
through Instacart which has a much better website. I just learned that the Kroger delivery goes
through Instacart anyway, so that gives me more confidence in working with
them. We will be trying the
InstaCart/Meijer combo soon, so stay tuned on how that goes!
The conclusions I am coming to at this point in
The Pandemic of 2020 are that we need to learn from our experiences and that
this situation is going to affect the rest of our lives, probably in both
positive and negative ways. It’s important to try to remain calm and
stable but also not to underestimate the emotional trauma that we are all
experiencing. This experience is
changing us all individually and as a society.
20 years from now, as I sit in my rocking chair at ‘the home”, I will be
able to think back on the Pandemic of 2020 and be able to list the ways this
changed me.
Let’s think about the positives: there is less
pollution now which is helping Climate Change, there are fewer car accidents,
our medical professionals and our political leaders are learning things now
that will help us in the future. When one door closes another
opens….
Thanks for reading all of this, and don’t forget
to WASH YOUR HANDS!!
:)Amy
