It’s been a while since I have posted. I had grand plans of starting a daily journal during the COVID-19 quarantine. I thought I would have all this wonderful time that I don’t normally, since I was no longer spending an hour and a half commuting to my teaching job, not to mention the 10- to 11-hour workdays themselves.
I was wrong. The quarantine meant that instead of teaching in my classroom, I would be teaching online. Prior to this, I’d never even heard of applications like Zoom, and even though I’d heard of Seesaw, I’d never used it or seen it used. Now, I would not only have to know about them, I would have to lead my class of first graders and their parents in how to use them! No pressure! I found myself spending every waking moment on my laptop trying to teach myself three different applications simultaneously so that I could turn around and proficiently teach a class using them. Most days, my head was spinning long before I laid it on my pillow at night.
As if that weren’t enough, I didn’t have a lot of the tools I needed at home. The last time I was allowed in my classroom, it was with the understanding that we would only be shut down a couple of weeks. I never dreamed I would be teaching school virtually for the rest of the school year. I did my best to piece together resources not only for my students, but for myself as well. I got creative. I experimented. I learned a lot.
On top of all of that, the instructions and advice we were being given from our government and school district authorities changed practically on a daily basis. At first, we were supposed to have daily meetings with our class, but no more than 45 minutes total. Then I found out I was the only one doing that. So I changed my format…and my plans…again for the umpteenth time.
Then there were the meetings. Oh my, the meetings! More meetings than I’ve ever had in my life. There were the usual staff meetings, but then there were also the Professional Learning Community (PLC) meetings, plus the meetings we had to have with the Title I and Special Ed teachers, plus the normal (and usually only beneficial) meetings with my grade level, plus the meetings with our cohorts at another school, plus the meeting appointments one-to-one with parents and students every single week.
I did my best. We survived. My kids learned things. I learned things. We made it to the end of the school year.
I heaved a sigh of relief, took a few weeks to recover, then decided I was ready to blog again…only to discover that for some unknown reason, my site had been deactivated at some point. There was no warning, no email notification, no nothing. It turns out that there was some technical issue that could only be cleared up by the host, so “Thank you, Bluehost,” for getting me up and running again. I’m back!