Well, that time went by even faster than usual.
I am once again in the first-year-teacher mode of developing curriculum for every single activity. We've survived three weeks of virtual school, and one week of hybrid, with about 2/3rds of our students in the classroom, and one-third still at home. The amount of technology I have to wrangle for each class is formidable, made worse by the fact that I have to set it up again at the beginning of each class period. The teachers are still moving classrooms this week, with the goal of keeping the kids from mixing too much.
I will not comment on the efficacy of our COVID-prevention methods. We're all doing what we're told, whether it makes any sense or not.
There are some bright spots. I have a completely paperless classroom now, so I never get a paper without a name on it, and I don't struggle to read anyone's handwriting. I also don't have to haul around a bulging expandable file anymore. New student engagement tools I'm using solve the age-old problem of those same 2 or 3 kids raising their hands to answer every question. Grading online work is almost as much of a grind as grading it on paper, but at least Google Classroom does the math for me after assigned point values to questions in a test.
I'm exhausted, though, and the mask is making my face break out. I found soft silicon frames to wear under the mask so I can breathe and speak more clearly, and those help tremendously, but I really, really hate wearing a mask. I can't figure out why we are stuck where we are in the re-opening, because every time I look at the metrics, they've been green since the middle of August, and I heard "two consecutive weeks of all green" before we could move to the next phase. I know I'm looking at the right thing, and it shows 4 consecutive weeks of green, and yet here we are, still wearing masks everywhere, and basically gluing the students to their seats.
And all that technology? Not one of us was ever trained on it. Thank God my new partner teacher is fantastic, and we have been supporting each other through this absolute insanity. I am quite literally praying we only have to do one more week of this maximum craziness, or I may have to take a day off just to sleep!
In other news, DS2 is still here, after a ridiculous amount of incompetence on the part of his surgeon's office in getting the correct paperwork to his recruiter. We believe it's finally straightened out, so maybe he'll hear something... this week? next week? Who knows? He could still be here at Halloween at this rate. It's not good to be idle for so long. DD is mostly managing OK up in Flagstaff and thankfully she is burning out on political involvement as school ramps up -- at least I hope she is. The anarchist stuff is ??? I don't know how to properly express it. DS1 has been working 6 days a week for the past couple of months and is very cranky as a result. He bit my head off today and accused me of all sorts of evil manipulation and I have no idea where all that came from, but it echoed a huge fight involving all the menfolk a couple of weeks ago. I'm trying not to let it get to me, but I often don't know what my role in this family is anymore, beyond menu planning, grocery shopping, and food prep.
I don't have time to dwell on this question right now, so I'll do the same thing I did last time, which is just put it away and ignore it for now. It's not as if anyone is actively making my life miserable here (well, except for today), so we all just go about our lives as usual and it stops hurting pretty quickly, actually, because I have neither time nor energy to spend on it.
