A rolling thread where we are teachers

Schools were closed here through January, so I had my first supply job since before Christmas today. I retired as soon as I could because I'd hit the wall with reports, interviews, meetings, and the rest, but I do miss being in the classroom (which is that much more fun when you don't have to worry about that stuff). I found out today from one of my grade 3 guys about a YouTuber with 39 million views who says that 80% of your weight is supported by your two big toes, and also that zombies are real. The first actually seems to be in the neighborhood (it's a bone below the big toe, and 50%). I'm just glad for the warning with the second.

Something else I miss: I didn't even know what a YouTuber was till six or seven years ago. I used to do an art lesson where they'd sketch a famous face; I had a slide show and printouts with about 40 people I really liked--Janis Joplin, Jackie Robinson, Warhol, etc.--and they'd do one of mine, and then one of their own choosing that I'd print out for them.

"Can I do Petey Pie?"
"Who's Petey Pie?"
"A YouTuber."

"Can I do Tree Stump?"
"Who's Tree Stump?"
"A YouTuber."

A lot of recent talk here an elsewhere about in-class learning. I didn't really feel any more vulnerable today than before Christmas: the classes are even smaller now, from 10-15. But the big thing is the variants. On the way in, the radio said there were eight new variant cases in Toronto (I was next door, in Brampton). Also, I was in for coverage, so I saw six different classes--obviously, the complete opposite of bubbling or cocooning or whatever.

Just had an observation that didn't go great, and now I have to wait until Monday for my post-observation meeting. Ugh.

I hate being observed, it makes me nervous and I overthink both my planning and my teaching.

observations are, in fact, Bad

I've got my first interview in 23 years this week to get on the supply list where I live (rather than driving crazy distances to the school I retired from). One of the main reasons I stayed there forever is I hate interviews, and they hate me. It'll be done online. I'm assuming I'm not expected to wear a jacket...I will change out my pajamas.

Observation is such a bullshit concept. We've moved to a coaching model, mercifully; we pair up, pick something you want help with, then get some useful feedback on what you might do differently. There is no grading and it's basically half hour per term.

I had my first week back this week. It was, to be frank, fucking mental. After three months of a (relative) quiet life, I couldn't cope with the sheer amount of input and questions, particularly from adults. The testing has been managed really well, but it does mean huge disruption to staffing, as it's manned by LSAs and PE teachers. We had a positive case late on Friday and we're a teacher down in the English department.

The main issue is around Y11 (15/16 yr olds) who should be doing their GCSEs this year. It's all teacher-assessed, which is fine, but there's an 'appeals process' in place, which has already been advertised. It means we're going to need as much evidence as we can, to beat off angry parents and Ofqual, so we're basically putting them through a whole round of assessments. These are 'optional' apparently and won't actually be sent out to schools until the end of March so we have no idea what we're actually preparing them for. It's so stressful - for us and the kids. Bollocks to all of it.

Good luck with your interview clemenza. I'd go into like Red at the end of Shawshank Redemption.

Appreciate that. I've decided my "strategy" will be to emphasize what mattered to me re supply/substitute teachers when I had my own class--I won't even try to fake my way through jargon.

By "observation," I take it you mean what would be called performance appraisal in Ontario, which happens every five years. Is this your first? The deeper you get into your career, the easier principals are about that. When you get to the last couple, I figured they don't have much choice at that point but to let you skate by. The alternative--"After letting this person teach for 15 years, we've finally decided he/she isn't very effective"--don't look good.

Man, I wish this were the case where I am:

As of Monday, teachers and educators in all 50 states will be eligible to receive Covid-19 vaccinations. The eligibility comes as the US ramps up vaccination efforts in hopes of curbing the spread of coronavirus variants and setting a course toward some sense of normalcy again.

https://www.cnn.com/2021/03/13/health/us-coronavirus-saturday/index.html

idk what the administrations are like in Canada (you're in Canada right?) but when there is a new administration, you do indeed need to watch out for being told you aren't good enough and being sent on your way IN SPITE OF your commitment and experience.
just sayin -- time will not protect you, at least not in the USA

Canada, yeah. I'm just guessing and inferring there from my own situation--maybe I just got lucky with my principals. The last one especially--I was inside five years from my retirement date--I didn't think my appraisal lesson went particularly well (geometry, I remember, comparing/contrasting shapes), and there was a glaring problem with how I conceived the comparisons, but it didn't matter at all in the end.

Just found out I have to wear a face shield tomorrow, even though I wear glasses--my board made new rules as of Friday. A year into this, this seems like a strange thing to do.

The face shield is not a big deal at all. Very lightweight--don't even know it's there.

xp I'm in my second year of teaching, so I have to be observed and evaluated on the official Danielson framework three times this year. It's actually much more chill than it was at my last job. There, they didn't tell you in advance when you were going to be observed, it could happen any time, and your job really depended on it because the contract was year-to-year and they wouldn't renew it unless you did really well. Here you get advance warning and you're in the hiring pool for the district no matter what, so you'd have to do pretty badly for it to actually affect your job. I just have a lot of anxiety about it left over from two years ago, when I really did bomb an observation and miss my window to get rehired by my school as a result. (I eventually had a good observation and made it into the district hiring pool, but by then most of the jobs were gone.)

The post-observation debrief actually went fine in the end; I think a lot of the problems with my lesson were things that were much more obvious to me than to an observer. Like, they were definitely there, and a language teacher would have noticed and dinged me for them, but my evaluator mostly missed them, so it worked out okay.

Have you had your interview yet?

Friday morning. I grabbed the first spot, as it were--not sure if that's good or not. Someone who's been doing this since 1991 shouldn't be this nervous.

Glad your debrief went well. I think you're right about evaluators zoning out a bit--which is strange, because whenever I had a student teacher, I was amazed at how observant I was, how I'd notice almost everything (including stuff I did all the time, too). I was always very critical of myself as a teacher, but I actually think I was a good associate.

Always good to stop on the middle Saturday of the two week Easter break, when school is distant enough to take on a rosy glow, and remember, ah yes, this is another reason why being a teacher is great.

They should have take two weeks here, too--for reasons that mystify me, they decided to go online for four days between Easter Monday and delayed spring break.

We only get one week, because we also have a midwinter break in February. Break just started today, and I'm looking forward to it, but at the end of break we go back to in-person teaching and the schedule we've been given makes no sense and is entirely unworkable. The principal literally told us, "We expect you to do the impossible." So I should probably set aside some of my break for figuring out how to do the impossible.

Fuck that. Don’t do any work over your break! We all just need to make it through the year.

I felt bad for enjoying my two weeks, then remembered y'all get three months off in the summer!

And totally don't do any work over the break. Last term, despite only being 3 1/2 weeks was utterly insane. It's legitimately taken me 10 days to recover and feel vaguely human again.

I have to, though! We've been fully remote all year, and in nine days we go to a schedule where we have remote classes for all the students, plus 70 minutes of in-person "asynchronous time" per class where we have a group of students in the classroom but we're not allowed to teach them anything because that wouldn't be equitable for the students at home. Nine days isn't enough to figure out how to handle that; I'm not sure nine years would be enough.

They are asking you to do an impossible thing; it can’t be done! They’ll just have to deal with you figuring it out on the fly.

The way school districts are doing teachers right now makes me deranged-level angry.

"They are asking you to do an impossible thing" --

This thread should be retitled: They Are Asking You to Do an Impossible Thing (A Rolling Thread Where We Are Teachers).

Freud called it the 'impossible profession' (along with healing and governing).

Fuck that. Don’t do any work over your break! We all just need to make it through the year.

― horseshoe, Saturday, April 10, 2021 10:11 AM (three hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

this is my m.o. this year

https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/alternative-teaching-modalities-in-hell

I've done my first three days of remote supplying. My internet went down for a half-hour the second day. Happily, it was towards the end of the day--they were working on some art, followed by a catch-up period. That it'll happen again is in the back of my mind now.

Starting to stress out about the danger to my students from being back in school in-person. My classroom door opens to the outside of the building, but we are supposed to close and lock our doors because we have a student who likes to escape from his classes and hide in random classrooms. Our in-person sessions are 70 minutes long, and I think most teachers just have their kids on the computer, working silently, during that time. But I've been having them talk to each other at a distance of six feet, since it's a language class and what we've been missing all year is the chance to talk in the target language. I'm starting to worry that I'm putting them at risk by having them talk, when that generates more particles and presumably more risk of infection. But I would feel awful if they came in just to sit at their computers - they wouldn't be getting any learning in exchange for the risk they're taking. Either way I feel like I'm doing harm.

We just finished our first week of classes, and one student who was in my Tuesday class mentioned yesterday (during remote class) that she now has a sore throat. It's hard not to feel a sense of dread and guilt: what if she got someone else sick while I was letting my students face toward each other and talk? I hate having so much potential weight on my tiny teaching decisions.

To state the obvious: it wasn't your decision to reopen. And even with the variants, I'm pretty sure serious illness in young people (I forget--I think you teach high school?) is still rare. They put you at risk.

I teach middle school. I worry more about their families, since Seattle only just opened up vaccine eligibility to everyone. I know it sounds like I'm finding reasons to stress out, but what worries me is knowing that I'm stretching the rules just by letting students turn toward each other to talk. It doesn't seem like it should make much difference, but I just hope I'm right about that, since it's a call I'm making as the teacher.

my school just started forcing kids back en masse two weeks ago and a kid i was working with 1 on 1 for 15 minutes literally tested COVID+ last that day. thankful we were masked and i was also vaxxed bc i remained negative, but there is this ambient dread looming over everything right now.

iow lily dale otm

Yeah but man alive’s kids can get out of his hair now so it’s fine right

lol shhhh you'll wake him

ugh i'm sorry, Lily and m bise. my school is private and has more money to deal with safety concerns than public schools, but i do identify with feeling like i'm in over my head in terms of making minute-by-minute decisions in the classroom to keep my students safe. also everything about social distancing is antithetical to effective teaching--i really struggle to stay in my seat (behind my nonsensical plexiglass).

i think at my school returning to in person has been good for the kids socially, but i think they would be quick to agree that it's worse academically--i cannot figure out how to teach kids at home and in the room well at the same time, and the safety restrictions on the classroom make me feel like i'm trying to teach from a bubble to a bunch of kids enclosed in bubbles (i can't even see some of the kids through the damn plexiglass.

the plexiglass is a joke, i never put mine up

it is absurd theater and i hate it

my favorite is throughout the year how to guy taking temps at the door has had his mask off his nose at various points, its a fuckin joke

*how the guy

We're all back in the classroom so, mercifully, I don't have the lunacy of trying to teach the room and remotely at the same time. I do have the problem of 30 kids in a room though and, half-arsed safety measures aside, the sense that it's basically a lottery. I'm supposed to stay in my two-metre exclusion zone and mask up when I'm circulating (which is to be kept to a minimum) but I do get caught up and forget. Also, we have no mechanism for enforcing mask wearing with the kids, as it was only ever 'strongly advised' by the government. I'd say maybe 70‰ of kids are masked. We're all LFTing twice a week. We've had two cases since we've been back. It'll only increase.

xp That sounds really rough, horseshoe. We don't have plexiglass, at least. And I walk around the classroom as per usual and just try to stay six feet away from everyone most of the time. It may well be that I'm supposed to stay glued to my desk, but the reopening was so rushed and the directions we've been given have are so vague that I honestly don't know. At this point, I'm trying not to ask too many questions.

Chinaski, that sounds nuts, I'm sorry you have to deal with that. We are constantly 100% masked to the point where the kids can't even pull down their mask to eat a snack in between classes, we have cohorts of no more than 15 per class, and I still worry about the risks.

I was doing remote yesterday for the music teacher at my old school. She has some K/1 coverage as part of her day, which includes dance. I hope my neighbor wasn't looking in when I was standing in front of the computer (and window) doing--or trying to do--this.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-LS89QO3U28

I hope the school board reimburses you for the pink cat costume.

Unbelievably stressful: losing the internet when on a remote supply/substitute job. You've left behind ~25 kids who may, at that point, know what they're supposed to be doing or--if you're just about to start something--may not. Lost my connection twice this morning. Much colorful language. At least I'm with 7s and 8s today--even worse if it's young kids.

Essentially, because the government have advertised the appeals process, and made school's liable, we have to have robust data to prove each student is entitled to the grade we award. We've had a month or so to turn ourselves into an exam board, desperately trying to retrofit data for purpose. So this week alone we've been moderating the 480 papers our Y11s sat in mid-May. We've marked them as a department (all anonymised), input the data onto a spreadsheet, moderated each other and changed any anomalies, re-entered data that needed altering, added names to the anonymised data and are now trying to match with data from across the last two years - with the aim of chucking out final grades that won't exceed previous years' by an amount that might trigger an investigation. All alongside our usual teaching and planning load (Y10 are preparing for end of year trials) and obviously for no extra money.

It goes without saying that as an English department we a) are under greater scrutiny as a core subject and b) simply don't have robust data in the way that STEM subjects do. We have student work but it's not marked in a way that generates neat summative data and anyway, it's not marked with this kind of end-goal in mind (and can't be adapted for purpose, really). It's been an extraordinary week already and there's still a shit ton to do before Friday's deadline. And our head could still kick our results to the kerb if he thinks they're lacking integrity or are too advanced on the previous five years.

The scale of stress and rage within our department is amazing.

give everyone a's

That sounds miserable. I'm so sorry you have to deal with that.

I think I taught the world's first trillionaire this morning: a kid in kindergarten who, for his sharing, had a chart with the main units of money from 20 different countries. He could pronounce most of them--Deutsche Mark gave him some trouble.

(Quadrillionaire, that is--my brain and my hands are often strangers.)