A lot happened quickly in the last few days. Yesterday as I sat in my room, conducting my first day of online teaching to middle schoolers, I felt a sense of... like I was reeling just a bit. The whole country shut down in a matter of days. Stores are out of everything and we can't go shopping or to restaurants. People are scared. Others are buying up all the hand sanitizer and gouging customers online. Memes on Facebook joke about the rarity of toilet paper. Leaves anyone? Too bad it's winter here so we can't actually go pick some leaves. I guess dead grass? Will probably itch. ;)
Mom said something good that she heard in an online sermon, you can either be scared, or pray. I liked that because in times like this, we should be thinking of others and praying for our relatives and older family members who might suffer.
Two weeks before school actually closed, we started preparing for that eventuality at school, although I didn't think it would really happen. Our principal asked us to assign each student a chromebook in our "home room" class (called Academic Enrichment or AE). We wrote their names on labels and used silver sharpies to write "property of..." the school district on each computer, so the kids could take them home. I kind of thought this was a lot of work for a plan that might never happen.
I started doing "silent classroom" practice with my students where they would log in and find instructions on what to do for classwork in a Google doc. Then they could also use the message feature in docs to ask me questions. Turns out that middle schoolers have a REALLY hard time with self-motivation and reading instructions without a teacher holding their hands. So it was good practice.
And then last Thursday night, March 12, we got the official announcement that school would shut down on Monday. Friday was a flurry of activity, making sure all students had a computer to take home and preparing them to learn online. On Monday, teachers came to school one last time to get any resources or last minute supplies, and to clean up rooms for a deep cleaning while we're gone.
We have gotten emails nonstop from various organizations offering free premium services to their educational products like Zoom, Loom, Kahoot, etc. That part has been amazing and I'll have to experiment with some of them.
Students checked in yesterday. I saw about 15 of 40 kids or so. They asked me questions and attempted to do their work. I made a whole bunch of calls this morning through a translator to get the rest of the kids to log on.
My school had its first staff meeting this morning through Zoom.
This whole thing is a lot! Parents teaching their kids, the whole nation suddenly homeschooling, people layed off or working from home. It's left us all reeling and it will be challenging to recover from this. I pray for everyone and whatever they're going through. Leave me comments here about what it's been like from your end... Sticking together is how we get through this.
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