too many triggers

I tried to plan my lessons for the week yesterday and found it so upsetting I had to put it aside for a while.  There are just so many things I'm usually doing with my students at this point in the year.  We've worked hard all year, and now we're supposed to be doing the really fun stuff together, like making models of the solar system that are accurate for size and distance (that's two models, doing a combined one would be very tough!), or making wet mount slides and getting in some good time with a microscope so as to be familiar with how they work... that is certainly not going to happen.

I was so distressed because I couldn't read my students "The Microscope" that I actually made them a video.  It's a minute long but it probably took me more than an hour to make. I do love the poem though.  It's sweet and funny and even a little educational, and yesterday I couldn't bear the thought that my 8th graders wouldn't get to hear it.  Many of them still won't hear it, of course, because there's no way I can make them actually click on it, or listen all the way through.

This week I'm taking a side tack into Cornell Notes with them.  I'm not there, I have no idea what they're actually doing, so I figured I would give them more responsibility for their learning than last week.  So I assigned: here's a lesson I made you on taking Notes!  And here, practice taking notes from this power point.  After that, take this online quiz thing, using your notes.  The only thing I'm grading here is completion of the online grading thing.  We'll see how it goes. 

Tuesday, both 7th and 8th are doing "skills practice" in a new-to-me platform called iXL.  It looks pretty solid and it is nicely coordinated with my lessons, so I'm not having to re-invent the wheel.  Yay for not having to develop new material. 

We've got slightly less than 2 weeks of school before Easter and our spring break, and then I'm hoping maybe we can be back to normal by that point or we'll extend our spring break to the beginning of May so we can all have a good cry and then actually go back to school.  This is just so very, very weird and every time I think about what should be done it makes me sad because I know what I want to do but that's not at all possible right now.

And then I end up spending an hour making a one-minute video that no one will probably watch.  But my heart feels better.  Plus next year, when kids are absent, I'll have all this material to give them for make-up work!
***
Today was DH's birthday.  I almost forgot, but remembered late yesterday when I was updating the menu.  We have a weekly calendar and as I was writing in the days I stopped short.  Wait a minute, the 29th?! Fortunately I remembered yesterday and could therefore actually make him his favorite dinner (chicken parmesan)  and his particular favorite dessert (he really isn't a dessert guy), cheese cake.  We had a nice dinner and even gave him the night off from the dishes.  We tend to go low-key on celebrations these days anyway, and I think he enjoyed his day.  None of the boys (including DH) seems remotely as traumatized as I'm feeling, but that might be because they are better at hiding it.  I just want to cry all the time.  I don't actually cry at all.  It's exhausting and now I am up too late again.  Perhaps after sleep I will feel better, but I am grieving this loss as though it's permanent even though I know it's temporary.  I never deal well with uncertainty.

The boys & I make a great team. I love them so.

laugh to learn

Among the things my administration is insisting we do: video lessons for our students so they can have "face" time with us even if they can't attend a Zoom meeting we hold during school hours.  I can't believe the amount of new technology I've absorbed and deployed in just the past few days!  Today I made four little video lessons (hosted on my own [private] YouTube channel, a thing I never imagined saying before).

Here's my favorite of them -- a brief and silly-on-purpose demonstration of the difference between rotation and revolution of objects in space.  I have found that truly goofy things will stick in students' brains, and I have developed a little repertoire of items over the years.  I didn't want to deprive this year's 7th graders of this particular bit of goofiness on my part just because we can't be in a classroom together.

DH was my camera man, and my sweet girl kitty, who hadn't seen me all day, decided to join in:

I'm having trouble getting streaming to work, but it plays just fine on YouTube: Demo, with cat

Thing I would say if I tweeted

I'm the only person in my house who changed out of my pajamas and left the building today.

I am not entertained.

There is a complete lack of diverting stories out on the web these days, not that I have time for them anyway.

I spent all weekend paralyzed and obsessively following the news, which made a little bit of sense back then because things were developing so rapidly.

Now, I'm home, moving my curriculum online and dealing with co-workers and students and admin, many of whom are just so upset that they're not thinking at all, much less thinking straight. 

Everybody just needs to stop and take a breath. Pause a moment.  Say a prayer, reflect, or just empty your mind, whatever, but do something so the mental hamster wheel your brain has been on for the recent past just stops, or better yet, disappears.

As with any big emotional event, I eventually suffer emotional fatigue.  In this case, concern fatigue or anxiety fatigue or whatever.  I can only spend so much time being keyed up before I just can't do it anymore.  It's like my emotional state is a muscle pushed past it's limit. and it can't hold any more.  That's where I'm at right now.  It's not that I'm not worried or anxious or concerned, because I am.  I just can't sustain it as my primary focus.  I have too much work to do.

I have scheduled assignments for tomorrow and Thursday for my science classes, and dealing with religion class should be relatively quick; I'll do that tomorrow morning.  The rest of the day is reserved for grading and entering grades, because I still haven't done that.  It seems kind of stupid at this point, but these are grades from before the quarantine order, so they actually mean something, and I'm dreadfully late putting them in.  Of course, I have a good excuse.

Perhaps if I get caught up on my grades, I can start a book?  Dangerous territory, given my historic lack of self-discipline when it comes to reading.  But I just might go there anyway. Or perhaps pick up my knitting again...that might be safer.

two weeks of limbo

AZ schools are closed through March 27 to help slow the spread of COVID-19.

I've spent the last 3 days reading obsessively any little scrap of news, and texting with co-workers and family.  On Friday, we were still going to open next week.  This morning, we got the word we were closing for the week, but by this afternoon, that changed to two weeks.

We have a meeting set for Tuesday morning (Monday is a vacation day for us), where admin will go over what they want us to do in terms of delivering curriculum to the students for the next 2 weeks.  We (the teachers) have many questions which will just have to wait until Tuesday to be answered.  The chief question is, are they going to make us come to campus every day for our online "office hours" with our students?  I have a horrible feeling they will, and that just makes me want to throw up  my hands and utter inappropriate phrases.  But maybe they won't.   We'll see.

I haven't felt this unsettled by something since the election in 2008.  I was able to get over that rather quickly since it basically didn't impact my personal life too much, but this is obviously a different situation.   My head is spinning with lesson plans and how best to present them to the students, and weighing whether or not I should push through to finish Chemistry with my 8th graders or just back off a bit for now?  I don't know.

Plus, about half the 7th graders cheated on a recent assignment by using Google to look stuff up when they were explicitly instructed not to do that, and I'm supposed to be lowering the hammer on them.  I kind of feel like that is counter-productive, or at the very least not a good use of my time right now, but I'll have to discuss that with my colleagues and admin to figure out what to do. 

This is certainly the weirdest break I've ever had, neither relaxing nor productive.  Tomorrow I have a blood test in the morning and then I'm going on a news fast to see if I can't get through my grading (and entering the grades in the gradebook!).  Shopping was surreal this weekend but we have a fridge full of food and no worries on that score.  I wish I could pretend that the world hasn't lost its collective mind, but that's how it seems right now, Lord help us.

another 10 days...

Wow, time is really flying here.  The weather finally warmed up a little and then went straight to hot (85!) but should settle back down a bit for a while, I hope.

School has been incredibly busy: chem labs for my 8th graders.  I love the curriculum, but it is a lot of literal running around, and I barely have time to breathe.  One issue this year is many absent students, all of whom have to then make up the lab at some later time.  I ran make up labs three days in a row during lunch this week!  That was too many.  From now one, only Tuesdays and and Thursdays!

Thyroid medication wise, I guess I'm OK?  I'm doing well staying on top of work, although I have a pile of labs to grade this weekend -- unavoidable, they just finished them! But I have used Google Forms for two tests with essay questions and they make grading so much easier!  I'm having my TA's set up the quizzes and tests for me, so all I have to do is review them for corrections and put in the point values.  Then all the unambiguous questions are scored for me, and when I grade the essays, the form does all the addition for me, too.  It has saved me a tremendous amount of time!  I'm excited about that.

The relationship to thyroid meds may not be clear: the point is, I'm having no trouble concentrating or keeping up with my work.  If anything, I'm doing better than I had in the past, and it doesn't seem like extra effort, but I'm good at deluding myself about these things, so who knows?  All I know is that I'm actually able to relax more during evenings and weekends because I'm more productive when I'm at school.  All that's to the good. 

Not so good?  My digestion is still screwed up.  It has been worse, true, but it does seem to be taking forever to straighten itself out.  I'm taking one Imodium every 5 days or so, so it's not like I'm surviving on medication, but it is annoying. The probiotics don't appear to have any effect, either. More not good: warmer weather has me bringing out different clothes a whole bunch of which don't fit me because I gained so much weight over the holidays (well, really, October through January).  I'm slooooowly taking it off again (finally below 150! yay!) but it will be a while before I can wear the capri pants I lived in last summer. 

What else?  DH and I went to a fantastic concert of the ASU Symphony last Saturday.  Honestly, I was only going to check them out to see if it was worth it go later in April when they play Mahler's Symphony #2, which is my favorite symphony.  The answer to that question was a resounding yes!  Last week's program, from their website:

The first half of this concert presents two thrilling new works by living American composers: the other-worldly Sinfonia for Orbiting Spheres by Missy Mazzoli (Chicago Symphony Composer-in-Residence) and a world premiere performance of a new concerto written for the ASU Symphony Orchestra and Saxophonist Christopher Creviston by Carter Pann (2016 Pulitzer Prize Finalist in Music). The concert closes with Dvorak’s joyous, Bohemian-inspired Symphony No. 8.

Sunday, DS2 and I went to an educator preview lunch performance at the new-ish Medieval Times restaurant up in Scottsdale.  Between the dinner (lunch) and the performance, it was close to 3 hours, and it was... I don't really know what.  Weird, I guess I'd say.  It reminded me of the jousting and tournaments they have at the Ren Faire without the dust and heat and sunburn that you get when you do that.  (You're sitting in an air-conditioned arena, basically).  Also, the 'castle' is set in 14th century Spain, and the horses are all the beautiful and extremely well-trained Spanish horses that look tiny compared to the chargers they use at the Ren Faire.  In addition to the knightly contests, there's a bit of scripted goofiness (obligatory), a falcon flight, and several dressage performances showing off the horses' skills.  I didn't dislike it but I didn't exactly like it, either: I can't imagine going back, but I'm still glad I went. 

So last weekend was lovely and I was kind of sailing into this one thinking it would be nice to have another one just like last week's, but I have that pile of labs to grade, and we have nothing planned.  Perhaps I can find something somewhere... Next weekend, DD will be home for her spring break, so we're thinking about the Ren Faire on Sunday, and I have off both Friday and Monday as a sort of mini-spring break (I'm skipping the professional development on Friday, it's optional, and I need the break!)  Hey, maybe I'll have time to read a book?  DS2 has been pestering me to start Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time series while we wait for Brandon Sanderson's next Stormlight Archive book.  It's either 10 or 12 volumes, but at least I know it's finished!