We just sent off vials of saliva to the testing company. We hope to be double-confirmed COVID-free at the beginning of next week. (This is our second test since we may have been exposed via Oliver since the first test last week.) No symptoms. We’re doing well.
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COVID Chart Comparison
My full spreadsheet with a larger chart is here. Weekly data is released on Thursday at 11:00 AM central.
No New News
No change on the home front just yet. Oliver remains free of symptoms. Sarah, Maggie, and I have intermittent sore throats, but nothing that would normally phase us much.
We await our test results as patiently as we can. Today was the first day of the 2–4 day window wherein we expect to hear back. Nothing yet…
This week has been an unusual teaching week for me, involving me teaching classes with students at school while I’m at home. Let me back up and provide a bit of context.
For the past seven weeks at my middle school, students have been in “distance learning” mode on Mondays and Tuesdays. On those days we all stay home and do school via Google Meet, similar to how we did it last spring and for the first few weeks of school in September. On Wednesday through Friday, we’ve been in hybrid mode where most students and teachers go to school. There are lots of policies and procedures to maximize safety (masks, desks six-feet apart, fancy air filters, hand washing and desk cleaning procedures, etc.) but it runs mostly like school used to be.
The only unusual wrinkle is that the students who are at home (for whatever reason—health risks, a family member with COVID, etc.) join the class remotely. We have these funky “Owl” cameras that provide a 360-degree view of the classroom. They zoom in on audio sources (like students or teachers talking in the classroom) and make the remote experience a bit more immersive. Naturally, they don’t always work as intended and there are lots of little issues, but it’s a cool idea.
Until this week, I’ve never really been on the other side of the Owl except when getting some training on them at the beginning of the year. This week, however, since I am in isolation, I attended my classes remotely. It was a strange experience seeing the bulk of my students through the Owl’s camera. We always have another adult in the classroom to help with physical things like collecting work, setting up the camera, managing a break in the middle of class, etc.
With more practice, I expect I would get better at it, but it’s hard to be seated in front of a camera when my students are mostly together in a classroom. I’m usually a pretty mobile teacher, gesturing wildly, jumping around the front of the room, checking on students individually, etc. It’s a lot harder to feel connected when I know that my face is hovering on a big screen at the side of the room.
But, this was a short-lived experiment. Due to skyrocketing COVID rates around the state, my school is going back to full-distance mode next week through at least the middle of January. The metric that Minnesota is using to guide schools is the two-week “cases per 10,000” rate for each county. I’ve been graphing the data for the counties around the Twin Cities (from which we draw the majority of our students). It’s pretty grim. Saint Paul is in Ramsey County and Minneapolis is in Hennepin. (Recently they’ve been nearly identical.)
Chart of cases per 10,000
The state recommends that middle- and high-schools move to full-distance mode if their county rises above 30 cases per 10,000. Elementary schools are also included when they hit 50 cases.
Both Hennepin and Ramsey counties hit 50 by the end of October. Based on daily case figures since then, we are estimated to be at around 70 cases now. In short, it’s a hot mess around here. (If anyone is interested in the raw data, here’s a link to the spreadsheet where I compile the information. It includes a link to the latest PDF from the state.)
That’s it for now. We’ll provide further updates if we learn anything new.
Maggie’s Poem
Dog
Cute, beautiful
Sniffing, running, digging,
Make me feel safe
K-9
Unwelcome Guest
This week we discovered, to our dismay, that we have an interloper in our midst: COVID-19. Here’s how things have played out for us thus far:
- Tuesday, November 3 — receive a call from Oliver’s preschool that there had been a positive case in his classroom. Everyone must stay home for 2 weeks and get tested for COVID in 5–7 days. We’re concerned, but not super-worried.
- Saturday, November 7 — We take Oliver in for a COVID test. He hasn’t had any symptoms, so we’re hopeful that he’ll be negative.
- Tuesday, November 10 — We receive the call that Oliver tested positive. Yikes! We discuss with the doctor how we should quarantine within our house. It sounded more plausible on the phone than it turned out to be in real life. Sequestering an almost-four-year-old isn’t easy.
- Wednesday, November 11 — The rest of the family goes to a drive-through COVID testing clinic. The tests are easy and everything was impressively fast and professional. Results expected in 2–4 days.
Meanwhile, also starting on November 3, I noticed a bit of a scratch in my throat. Not quite a sore throat, but it wasn’t 100% either. Sarah had similar symptoms. I reported this in my health monitoring app for school and they told me to stay home on Tuesday (which was a teach-from-home day anyway). On Wednesday, I felt 100%, so I went to school. Same on Thursday. By Thursday evening, however, my mild sore throat had returned. I attributed it to the dry air, but I reported it on the app in the morning and, out of an abundance of caution, I stayed home again. Sarah was in a similar boat but we weren’t too concerned. This sort of thing happens as winter kicks in.
Once we got the call about Oliver, of course, we started wondering if our throats were indeed related to COVID. Indeed, every stray itch seems like it might be an ominous sign. We can’t be sure until we receive our test results.
At this point, we feel grateful that we are all healthy. Oliver has no symptoms at all. The rest of us have a few mild question marks, but certainly don’t feel sick. We are hopeful that we are either negative or that we’ll be in for a mild brush with the virus. Of course, we are 100% quarantined. I’ll post more as the situation evolves.
And, to my delight, as someone who appreciates a properly dark joke, a friend and colleague from the Bahamas shared this meme with me today (the Bahamian flag is at the bottom):
Halloween 2020
Our COVID Halloween wasn’t as bad as we might have expected. Indeed, at one point today, the kids exclaimed, “This is the best Halloween ever!” A few weeks ago we reluctantly told the kids that we weren’t comfortable going trick-or-treating this year. But, since Halloween was on a Saturday, we could spend the whole day doing Halloween activities. To our surprised delight, the kids were like, “Yeah! Let’s plan a schedule!” And they did. Starting with pumpkin pancakes in the morning. Then making piñatas, hanging lights in the yard, making rice crispy treat monsters, building a fire in the backyard, having our bubble-friends over, eating dinner, smashing piñatas, and finally watching the Over the Garden Wall animated series in the backyard curled up in blankets around the fire.
It might have been my favorite Halloween too…
October Sunrise
Arrrrr!
Pampered Pup
Piper is finally tolerating my grooming of her! We went to the woods and she was covered in burrs. It was necessary, so she got a peanut butter bone and I got to work. I think she finally realized that it actually feels kind of good. 😊
Begin: Weird School
Some schools have been going for a while. Others are delaying even longer. My school began with orientations this week for each grade level. In the middle school, we had each grade on a different day, spread out throughout the building in the largest classrooms. Students were grouped in their advisories and stayed together all day aside from an outdoor, socially distanced recess. Most advisory groups had one or more students who remained off-site—for medical or other reasons—and connected to the classroom virtually. I had three such students in my group of eleven, so I shared the room with eight physical students.
Orientation ran from 8:30 to noon. The time passed pretty quickly, though the adults were certainly worn out by the end of it. My own mask became incredibly irritating after the first few hours. It would have been smarter for me to try wearing a mask for four hours at home to really learn what type is most comfortable for me. As it is, I’ve rarely worn a mask for more than 30 minutes at a stretch (usually while shopping).
In the pictures below, you can see the fairly insane tech setup that we had running in my room. (It’s not actually my normal classroom, and none of us have been in during the summer, so things are pretty messy.) I had two computers and three screens running simultaneously. The laptop in the middle had the camera and microphone for the Google Meet with my virtual advisees. The laptop was also connected to the huge smartboard where I could display slides or videos. I had that Chrome tab shared in Google Meet with the remote kids. The third monitor, on the right, is attached to a separate computer that was also connected to my Meet so that the virtual participants were visible on a larger screen for the rest of the in-person class. My in-person kids were spread out with at least six-feet between each desk, so some of them were quite far away from the monitor.
We spent the day getting to know each other, discussing our summers, and laying the groundwork for the coming year. Regular classes begin next week. They will be fully distanced (remote teaching) for at least the first three weeks. Then the school will decide, based on infection numbers in the Twin Cities, whether to move to fully in-person teaching or some sort of hybrid model. It was great having this time to get to know some of our students before beginning classes next week. Just having them in the building (even virtually) made it feel more like school was really starting.
I have no idea how things will play out in the coming weeks, but I’m glad that we’re finally diving in. While there were many wonderful things about this summer, the hours of planning, worrying, scrapping plans, and worrying more was not my favorite thing.
Below is a copy of the introductory video that I shared with my advisees. It features some pictures of our new dog, Piper, and a few screenshots from my summer role-playing games.