Yeah, well.
Mar. 14th, 2020 05:24 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
maeve66I think my family is kind of worrying about me in this whole mess, because a) I've had pneumonia three times, bronchitis twice, pleurisy (how is that even a thing, after about 1890?) once; b) age (I'll be 54 in May); c) underlying conditions, baby, from Type 2 Diabetes to low-level asthma; and d) the last not-as-apocalyptic rodeo, I actually got H1N1 and was out of school for three weeks, miserably sick and actually confined to my bed most of the time, cracked a rib coughing (second time in my life for that) and came back to soon to work, fainted, fell and hit my head! Fun times. Anyway, most phone calls with my sister or my father and stepmother now begin with "How are you feeling? Any symptoms?"
Which is depressing. I haven't seen my nieces and won't until they've been asymptomatic for at least nine days (?). Boo!
In the US, it's all so fucking patchwork -- my school district announced Friday night that it's closing for a week, "though we should stay tuned for further news on that". Most other districts around here are closed for three weeks, whether that includes their Spring Break or not. Our Spring Break is still four weeks away. We were given one day's notice, on Friday, to make distance learning/independent learning lesson plans for all our classes for fifteen days which we could post on Google Classroom or another platform, but which also had to have offline equivalent assignments. Said assignments are required to: be grade-level appropriate, standards-aligned, and rigorous. They are also required to: take about 20 minutes each, not involve any new ideas or concepts, and mostly be skill practice. And they cannot count (much if at all) in students' grades. I understand the equity issues, I do, of course. But it makes it all seem like so much make work, both for our students, and for us.
Lowlights of my lesson plans: straight bookwork from the history textbook they all have a copy of at home, enlivened a tiny bit with some sketch requirements; straight "StudySync" lessons from the online curriculum we were forced to adopt three years ago. Two years ago? Some relatively recent time ago. (During the summer after its adoption, the principal literally came to the seventh grade English/Language Arts and Social Studies teachers' rooms and removed the single class set we'd each kept of the former literature anthology so we could still do a few greatly-beloved lessons). (Most of those lessons have been quietly resuscitated by finding illegal PDFs online of the various texts, like "Seventh Grade" by Gary Soto, or "The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street"...)
Highlights of my lesson plans (at least in my mind): a couple of art projects for Social Studies -- one involving creating a paper version of a West African symbolic pattern, with instructions and also links to various YouTube iterations. I apologized for the poor voice modified choices made by one of the artists. It was damn crazy. An extra credit project where I ask students to BE Samuel Pepys and keep a daily diary of mundane events as a FUTURE PRIMARY SOURCE for future historians. I made a sample page with the hours from 5 AM to 11 PM along the left side, and, in a fake handwriting style font, entries for one full day, including things like "Needed a break, so I watched three YouTube videos of MrBeast" and "Texted Julio to see if he gets this Math assignment. He doesn't." and "My sister wanted Mac 'n cheese for lunch. I made Mac 'n cheese. I told her she had to do the dishes. She broke a bowl." I really enjoyed making that. Oh, and the final assignment for the three weeks was a link to (and I'll have to make some hard copies of) a) some reputable not too difficult articles on the coronavirus and how it's being dealt with (or, instructions to get a couple of newspapers and read some similar articles) and b) two primary sources on the Spanish flu epidemic, a letter from an Army doctor stationed in Boston, seeing thousands die, and writing about it graphically, and a piece about local experiences including the news that in many places, schools were closed and teachers had lesson plans printed in local newspapers. I ask kids to read those and think about their experience and write a similarities/differences one pager.
My older niece is home from college now (which is a matter of two miles distance for her) and doing coursework online. My younger niece apparently went on a Boccacio-like binge of socializing last night -- sushi with friends and then a weed-fueled (I assume; she didn't actually say so, but I think I take it as read) sleepover with her four besties. She's home now, assuaging her boredom with Buzzfeed quizzes and phonecalls to me.
The saddest thing so far for me -- not only related to coronavirus, of course, and in fact, his response to that was one of the most heartening and inspiring things I've seen so far, as have been most of Bernie Sanders' utterances -- is that this seems to be the death knell of the Sanders campaign... with no rallies and no door-knocking, the main way to try to convince people devolves to ads, ugh. My many donations aren't going to pay for much of that. If you haven't seen it, though, I do recommend that you watch Sanders' press conference on the coronavirus. He gets it so right.
Which is depressing. I haven't seen my nieces and won't until they've been asymptomatic for at least nine days (?). Boo!
In the US, it's all so fucking patchwork -- my school district announced Friday night that it's closing for a week, "though we should stay tuned for further news on that". Most other districts around here are closed for three weeks, whether that includes their Spring Break or not. Our Spring Break is still four weeks away. We were given one day's notice, on Friday, to make distance learning/independent learning lesson plans for all our classes for fifteen days which we could post on Google Classroom or another platform, but which also had to have offline equivalent assignments. Said assignments are required to: be grade-level appropriate, standards-aligned, and rigorous. They are also required to: take about 20 minutes each, not involve any new ideas or concepts, and mostly be skill practice. And they cannot count (much if at all) in students' grades. I understand the equity issues, I do, of course. But it makes it all seem like so much make work, both for our students, and for us.
Lowlights of my lesson plans: straight bookwork from the history textbook they all have a copy of at home, enlivened a tiny bit with some sketch requirements; straight "StudySync" lessons from the online curriculum we were forced to adopt three years ago. Two years ago? Some relatively recent time ago. (During the summer after its adoption, the principal literally came to the seventh grade English/Language Arts and Social Studies teachers' rooms and removed the single class set we'd each kept of the former literature anthology so we could still do a few greatly-beloved lessons). (Most of those lessons have been quietly resuscitated by finding illegal PDFs online of the various texts, like "Seventh Grade" by Gary Soto, or "The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street"...)
Highlights of my lesson plans (at least in my mind): a couple of art projects for Social Studies -- one involving creating a paper version of a West African symbolic pattern, with instructions and also links to various YouTube iterations. I apologized for the poor voice modified choices made by one of the artists. It was damn crazy. An extra credit project where I ask students to BE Samuel Pepys and keep a daily diary of mundane events as a FUTURE PRIMARY SOURCE for future historians. I made a sample page with the hours from 5 AM to 11 PM along the left side, and, in a fake handwriting style font, entries for one full day, including things like "Needed a break, so I watched three YouTube videos of MrBeast" and "Texted Julio to see if he gets this Math assignment. He doesn't." and "My sister wanted Mac 'n cheese for lunch. I made Mac 'n cheese. I told her she had to do the dishes. She broke a bowl." I really enjoyed making that. Oh, and the final assignment for the three weeks was a link to (and I'll have to make some hard copies of) a) some reputable not too difficult articles on the coronavirus and how it's being dealt with (or, instructions to get a couple of newspapers and read some similar articles) and b) two primary sources on the Spanish flu epidemic, a letter from an Army doctor stationed in Boston, seeing thousands die, and writing about it graphically, and a piece about local experiences including the news that in many places, schools were closed and teachers had lesson plans printed in local newspapers. I ask kids to read those and think about their experience and write a similarities/differences one pager.
My older niece is home from college now (which is a matter of two miles distance for her) and doing coursework online. My younger niece apparently went on a Boccacio-like binge of socializing last night -- sushi with friends and then a weed-fueled (I assume; she didn't actually say so, but I think I take it as read) sleepover with her four besties. She's home now, assuaging her boredom with Buzzfeed quizzes and phonecalls to me.
The saddest thing so far for me -- not only related to coronavirus, of course, and in fact, his response to that was one of the most heartening and inspiring things I've seen so far, as have been most of Bernie Sanders' utterances -- is that this seems to be the death knell of the Sanders campaign... with no rallies and no door-knocking, the main way to try to convince people devolves to ads, ugh. My many donations aren't going to pay for much of that. If you haven't seen it, though, I do recommend that you watch Sanders' press conference on the coronavirus. He gets it so right.
no subject
Date: 2020-03-15 02:24 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-03-16 01:33 am (UTC)Those assignments sound awesome. Hope you stay well.