O Brave New World...

You know, I was not aware that the Bay Area, including my county, Alameda, was the first place in the US to declare Shelter In Place, and send everyone (almost everyone... not essential workers) home. I thought it had already been done elsewhere. It's already a little hard to remember every step along this path. That was... March 16th. [NB -- I am going to put photos in here, but not until it is posted on LiveJournal. I can't stand the finicky way I have to do it here.]

Six weeks later. Like a lot of my friends on here, I am lucky in this lockdown. I'm a teacher, so I am still being paid, and am working from home. I live alone, but with my cat, Devlin (thank fuck, man it would suck to be completely alone) -- no kids to teach, entertain, feed, reassure, keep from climbing the walls, etc. I have a nice apartment and a huge balcony, so I don't feel claustrophobic at all, though I don't really have much that is green, except on that balcony. A big jade plant. Some not terribly healthy rosemary and lavender. I have literally not been outside since March 16th... I've got enough of the underlying conditions that I am not doing that, and I am making about as much use of delivery services as I did in the Before Times, since my mobility is not the greatest. The luckiest thing for me is that my sister and nieces have (after at least three weeks of being symptom free, and no new contacts) visited me despite the quarantine (cannot decide between those three terms -- Shelter in Place; lockdown; quarantine). Ruby and Rosie have together and separately slept over several times, especially during my Spring Break, which was very late -- it ended April 19th.

Teaching from home is weird. In some ways, there are things that are easier (and, hilariously to me, our district superintendent referred to the main one of these on his becoming-routing video broadcasts... today he looked like a slightly younger Elijah Mohammad of the NOI, bow tie and black suit and all. No fez, though. -- anyway, he talked about how we should count our blessings [as he does each time] and mentioned a teacher who said that something she hadn't thought about as a positive was that... and here he goes on a long aside about disruption in the classroom that interferes and requires teachers to redirect students and waste instructional time... "now if a kid gets off topic in a disruptive way, you can just mute them on Zoom!") -- my version, since I am only doing my first live Zoom class meeting this coming Thursday, is that there is no face-to-face student antics. The same kids who were horrible to deal with all year long in the classroom are the same kids I have completely failed to be in contact with despite emails, phone calls, etc. I don't know what etc. is... I guess posts in Google Classroom, and zeros in Aeries, our grading platform. Of my 81 students, 17 of them are AWOL, and nothing I am doing is managing to reach them. I've talked to the parents of about four of those students, and that has made no difference either. So classroom management is basically unnecessary, and that is delightful.

Other positives: I have so much more time to give detailed, granular feedback on student writing, often in comments on Google Docs, but also on Social Studies assignments which my workmate and I figured out a way to assign in the form of editable Google Slides. And I am in really really frequent touch with a lot of the other 64 students, mostly via email. A LOT of email. Luckily, I like writing emails, and I respond very very quickly, if I am not in a work meeting or a PD (Professional Development... these days mostly on using endless new varieties of tech... new to teachers who have been reluctant adopters.) I am somewhere in the middle of the range of tech adopters... I've used Google Classroom for several years now, but more as a supplement with instructions and models and resources to help kids when they were at home working on stuff we'd started in class, especially projects... I didn't really use the Classwork settings -- with actual assignments to be turned in that way -- until now. And video delivery is new to me, as is Screencastify and its ilk... I was even slow to use Kahoot, but am now trying. But believe me, I'm in the top ten percentile compared to most of the teachers at my site. Only half of the teachers at my site even have teacher pages on our school website, so far. We were asked to do that last week (the half that didn't have one). I hadn't even known they existed, but I have one now. It's strange, because I had a fancy individual one for years on, I think, Wordpress? But I didn't know we had a clunky version by Edlio on our site. We've also had to learn clunky new platforms for reporting data (ugh) such as which students have NOT done something, week by week. I am blocking with my fellow teachers and only using "No" for students who have never, not once, been in contact in any way. I'm not making that "No" mean no work turned in that week, fuck that.

The bad side of it is, so far, more meetings than ever, endless PD, and truly gargantuan amounts of emails and grading and lesson planning. I work pretty closely with two other colleagues, one of whom teaches the same thing I do, and we plan together a lot. We were both working last night until 10:30 PM, I kid you not. Twice last week, I was working full on until 7:30 PM. I try to be sure I log out of my work email sometime after 4 PM and that I do not log on during weekends, but it's hard not to.

I haven't had any negative parent stuff since this all began, even though I am not yet doing Zoom classes... our union's Memorandum of Understanding rider to the current contract does not mandate doing live/synchronous teaching at all -- just lists it as one of a variety of ways to deliver instruction. I really don't want kids freaking out and feeling stressed by school. The MOU also wants to "hold students harmless" and is therefore only binding us to Pass/No Mark grade for this quarter. So far that (it's visible in my electronic gradebook) has not led to any diminution of work turned in... I hope it doesn't. I'd love to wean kids from this market economy of grades where they feel that an "A" is more money as a reward for their work, rather than that their work is intrinsically at all satisfying, in itself.

I am watching less than I thought I would in these circumstances? I made a long list (some of which is, I think, in my last entry?) but have not checked a TON of it off. But I added some beyond that, and have watched stuff I didn't know about, like Unorthodox and Repair Shop... and VillageCharm found Passport to Pimlico on The Internet Archive (which I guess is like the Way Back Machine?) so I was able to watch that! It was as enjoyable as I thought it would be. Will someone else take up the challenge of finding the 1950 Brit comedy The Happiest Days of Your Life??? Pretty please?!

I'm reading at least as much as normal... reading and re-reading. Right now I am working my way through Philip Kerr's Bernhard Gunther German noir mysteries, which hop back and forth from the beginnings of Nazi Germany in the Weimar Republic, through WWII, to the postwar shadowy struggles of Argentina, Cuba, Germany, and Greece, in the second to last novel he wrote before he died two years ago. These are a re-read... maybe my fourth or fifth time through? Maybe more. Except for Metropolis, his last published novel, which is a prequel set in the Weimar republic, and which has many atmospheric things in common with the German series Babylon Berlin, which I am rewatching for a third time "with" a friend in Evanston, Illinois. I guess what we do is like a Netflix watch party, which he and I should try. The way I do it, I have to make the main window small enough that I can have an even smaller, taller Facebook window open to chat in.

Cooking report: much bread, but all of it made by my niece. Some large pot cooking -- lentils and fennel and sausage stew, cabbage-bean soup, vegetable curry, split pea soup... but a lot of delivery and eating from my newly reorganized pantry shelf (done by my younger niece Rosie, who is fucking amazing. They're both amazing and in very different ways... older niece Ruby is reading State and Revolution FOR FUN, and asked me seriously what my favorite Marx writings were. Apart from The Communist Manifesto, which I think she read when she was 14 or so. Actually, I think she still has my Marx for Beginners by Rius, which I read when I was 12. I want that back! Anyway, it wasn't hard to reel off the Marx titles: The German Ideology, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon, The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844... and Engels' The Conditions of the English Working Class. That should keep her going for a while, anyway. A little while. She just finished War and Peace for her second Slavic Lit seminar. She hates distance learning (so does Rosie... Rosie is 16 and Ruby is 19) and plans to take off at least a semester if that's what Cal is doing come the Fall.

On politics and the 'Rona (thanks, VillageCharm). I hate Trump more than I can say. No, people probably won't actually ingest bleach or swallow UV lightbulbs (are there such things?) because of his pig ignorance, but yes, he is dumb enough to think there could be some sense to it, jerked by whoever his most recent right wing puppetmaster is... I guess, in this case, some Evangelical scammers with a fake church who promote drops of bleach in water to "cure" autism. His dogwhistles to Astroturf groupings to protest quarantine policies also make me ill. And the glee with which this administration takes advantage of the crisis to further gut environmentalist policies, to demonize and demolish the USPS, and to scapegoat people of color whether they're African Americans, Asian Americans, the Chinese, Central Americans and Mexicans, whoever. Oh, and that whole ring-around-the-rosie Death Cult Texas lieutenant-governor thing about letting the Old sacrifice themselves on the pyre of the economy, er, I mean, to light a bonfire that re-ignites the economy? Something like that. I hate him. I hate them. I am terrified that Biden is such a worthless candidate that he won't be able to beat Trump.

Last... how many of you cannot stop checking the numbers to see how cases and deaths mount, day by day? I can't stop. It's horribly compelling.

I 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.