As the school year kicks off, I’ve been spending more time on my laptop, and I keep running across files that I intended to post over the past year. (It was a very busy year!)
Attached below is a scanned copy of Griffin’s handwritten admission “essay” that he filled out last January when he first applied to St. Paul Academy (where I teach). I love it that he filled it out on his own without any input from Sarah or me. It’s a great snapshot of his thinking in the middle of a his sixth grade year. At this point, he hadn’t been at an in-person school for ten months.
You can view it below or click the download link below to view it in a larger window.
Griffin is joining me at SPA (St. Paul Academy) for seventh grade. We will be driving to school together each day in our electric car. Although I don’t teach him, I will see him around school regularly. We are both quite excited.
Sure enough, last night she emailed me a lesson plan with a 350-word mini-lecture about the June Rebellion of 1832, including images to share with the class and a short video. I honored my end of the bargain. at 1:45 sharp, we ended our regular social studies class and went to Paris to learn about the unrest there. At 2:00, filled with revolutionary zeal, we tore apart the classroom and built a barricade. (I did have two recommendations: don’t break anything and don’t get hurt.)
Here are the pictures my student shared followed by a picture of our 8th-grade version.
As mentioned in prior posts, Oliver was in preschool this year for a few months at the beginning of the year. Now he is back at an outdoor preschool for three mornings a week.
Griffin and Maggie, however, have been in full distance-learning since last March. They’re used to it now, but it has been a major blow. A normal day in their Montessori school would involve 6-7 hours of constant interaction. Working with classmates, moving around the classroom, attending mini-lessons from the teacher, playing at recess, lunch, the school bus, etc.
Now they’ve got Zoom meetings, independent work, and an occasional minecraft game with their friends. I’m not knocking the school; they’re doing a great job. But the social gulf between this year and last is enormous.
It is with joy, therefore, that we dove into a program at their school where individual classes come to campus once-a-week for a few hours of all-outdoor social time. Maggie had her first day yesterday and Griffin went in this morning. (We only have a picture of Griffin at this point.) Hopefully this is the first step on the long road to normalcy.
Griffin with his friends at school together for the first time in 11 months.
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.
Owl camera
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.
This week was pretty good. I did my human body systems work which is a project that I’ve been working on for a few months that is about the eleven human body systems and I’m on my final draft.
I also worked on my conference prep essay. This is an essay which we have to write about our year and work habits and big work and lessons and lots of that stuff. Normally we would have written this by March 19 (I’m pretty sure), but it’s different this year because of the coronavirus. We already had the conference but for some reason I still have to write this.
I also did a lot of TerraCycle work. We’re trying to create a presentation slideshow that will teach people about TerraCycle and how it will help save the Earth. Here’s a PDF of our current draft of the presentation:
It was hard to stay focused because Oliver and Maggie and Daddy and sometimes Mama were always loud somewhere. Especially Oliver because he’s always asking me to do stuff.
I also went to a few state parks and I learned a lot at them. We saw a garter snake at Lebanon Hills and Mama said that I could try to pick it up but it got all coiled up like it would try to bite me. We looked it up later and learned that it will poop and make it really stinky if you pick it up. Also they’re really fast. I’m adding this because I learned a lot of facts there, so it counts as school.
This week, I worked on grammar and mammoth math and I read a lot. For grammar I had to figure out what part of speech different words were. For math I did all types of math, like clock work, and pluses and minuses, and figuring out what numbers are even and odd. I read Goodnight Stories for Rebel Girls, I and II. I got online for about a half hour to an hour every day with my teachers and classmates. I liked sharing at the end of the week where you get to share something special. The first time I shared a rock. It reminded me of state parks. And the second time I shared a plastic polar bear that I made in a Mold-A-Rama at Como Zoo. I don’t get to go to the zoo a whole lot now and I like the zoo.
A completed example from Maggie’s Daily Grammar packet.
I’m starting my second week of distance teaching today. Not loving it thus far. Admittedly, there are some neat aspects to it. I thought I would dislike having to record all of my class meetings, but it’s actually pretty convenient. If I’m having a one-on-one discussion with a student during our “quiet study” period, I can share the video with them afterward so that they don’t have to worry about taking notes. Similarly, if a student misses a class meeting, the video of the class will be posted within about 15 minutes… so that can be useful.
But, and this is huge, the connections with students are so much weaker. I see all their tiny faces on my meeting grid, but I can’t really tell if they are with me or snoozing or confused. Normally I can walk around the room and read everyone’s body language. If the energy is sleepy, I rev things up or insert a quick oxygen break. If students seem confused, I slow down and go over things more carefully. All of this is much harder when mediated by a video conferencing app. Even doing a “whip share” where everybody shares something feels slower and less dynamic on the computer. I find myself losing focus before we make it around the circle (and when I’m zoning out, I know that most of the class is long gone!).
I’m confident that I’ll get better at this as I gain more experience. I hope to solicit plenty of feedback from my students, too, about what’s working for them. I haven’t been at it long enough to see how the quality of student work changes. I’m curious about that.
Below are two artifacts from my first week. First is the Welcome Back video that I sent to my eighth-grade social studies students before our first class. It took me forever to make and I have a million criticisms, but it’s safe to say that it was the best I could do in the time that I had. The second is a cartoon created by my good friend Nate. He’s a teacher on the east coast and used to draw illustrations of our high school D&D adventures. In my classes so far, I’ve seen all of his archetypes except the skateboarder.
Griffin is in fourth grade. Maggie is starting first. At a Montessori school, this means that they’re both in new classrooms with new teachers and a new mix of students. They couldn’t be more excited to go.
Not quite old enough for school, but may start preschool in January.
