Monday 2 November 2020

Top Pandemic 2020 Changes

 What if you woke up one morning, and everything about the way you did your job had completely changed? You still have to go into work, physically, but your PC is now a Mac (or vice versa), half your project team is in the room while the other half isn't (and they're all working at different paces), and you're the one in charge of disinfecting and monitoring correct pandemic procedures in the area (on top of your regular job, naturally).

I mean, some of that could apply, no matter what your profession? Let me know. I can only speak about teaching.

Oh, and for those of us in Ontario, the government has additionally completely changed curriculum, with virtually no training, AND there's going to be online standardized testing for the first time ever (assuming we don't count the fiasco of the OSSLT in 2016) AND math destreaming is coming next year. What pandemic, don't be lazy. Anyway.

There's a really good video here that gets at what teaching is like in 2020, at numerous levels, indicating how burnout will be a real thing.

I thought I'd take a moment to quickly highlight what seem to be three of the biggest changes from my point of view, as a window into one educator's struggles.

3) Everything comes home every night. Everything.

At first glance, this is not much different from a teacher's usual routine. Always bringing grading and prep work home. But I do mean everything. The attendance notes, the curriculum documents, the chromebook WITH its power cable, ev-ery-thing. Only to bring it all right back in the next morning.

Because there might not be a next morning.

This even happened to me once. My young daughter got a runny nose in the evening. We abruptly had to self isolate. I'd left my marking scheme (handwritten for an online test) on my desk. Whoops! Gone. (Fortunately no other symptoms presented themselves, I was back within 36 hours.)

But even for educators without young children, maybe you get cold symptoms yourself. Or you get a call that there was a case in your class, and you have to stay home. Or Doug Ford (our premier) just randomly decides to close schools with under 24 hours notice, the same notice he gave for shutting down restaurant dine-ins, you don't know.

Everything comes home. Then bring your family portrait, potted plant and charging cables right back in the next day.

It doesn't help with the work/home balance. I feel it's a lot more blurry.

2) Teaching three courses? Nope, six.

Where I am, we're teaching in a hybrid model; we see half a class on Monday/Wednesday/Friday and the other half the class Tuesday/Thursday. The days when they're not in class, they're working from home. (There's a whole virtual support system in place with other teachers on remote days, I won't get into it here.)

I set up a Google Classroom. Another teacher I'm supporting set up 2 Classrooms, one for their CohortA and one for CohortB. I think they had the right idea.

Because the problem is, your cohorts get out of synch. The way the schedule runs, at the end of a month, you've seen A for six periods (M/W/F) and B for only four (T/Th). Yes, a full month because there's another class they're doing on alternate weeks.

Meaning, if you wanted to do a test on Day 3, for A that's on a Friday, for B that's on a Tuesday after 12 days of not being in class with you. Slight difference in concept retention. Also likely needs a second version of the evaluation.

And yes, there are ways of working around this like synchronizing lessons on a Wednesday (remote + in-class) which might make sense if you have a (virtual) guest speaker anyway. But we're also not supposed to record Online Meets that contain students (privacy) so how do you get the information out to students who couldn't attend?

The mechanics of it all are... problematic. Meaning you're not teaching the same course twice, you're teaching two of the same course simultaneously.


Me, I've been flagging messages "Cohort A" and "Cohort B". Having two classrooms removes that issue, but creates the issue of now having two separate Google Meets for each Cohort.

And if you have two courses, still double, so you're running four classes... with no prep time to speak of, on top of that.

This is on top of teachers already potentially teaching courses they haven't taught in years. (I have a 3C class coming up, my notes on auto sales are 6 years out of date.) On account of the virtual teaching problem. (Another video, if you were unaware of that.)

So, that's a thing. But it's not the number one thing in my list.

1) No handouts/Revise group work

The previous items have been mostly about the mechanics of teaching. The trouble is, the format has changed too. "No handouts" may have some flexibility, but part of what prompted this post was the fact that I used the photocopier for the first time (since March) on October 28th.

My Data textbook was published in 2003. (There have been subsequent revisions, education is not being funded to the point of affording them.) I normally supplement with handouts rather frequently.

Those handouts and worksheets are now online. (If students are having printer problems, I'd potentially still need to print them.) I had to track down an online textbook too.

My quizzes had to be converted to an online format as well, along with automated feedback so they can be done on a remote day (maximizing face to face time). And I put a number of evaluations online too, for the same reason.

I've lost track of the number of times I've shaken my fist at my Chromebook for not highlighting the correct section that I want to comment on.

(I need to remember the stylus. I tend to forget about the touch screen, until I go to wipe off a bit of eraser dust, and suddenly close five tabs on my browser. Can't blow the dust off, you're wearing a mask, silly.)

Activities also need revision, you can't pair students off by giving one of them a graph and another one an equation, or not in the same way. You can't create a work group of those who had similar errors, unless it's a breakout room in a Google Meet when you're remote, which is also new technology and my brain hurts.

I will say this last isn't even as much of a problem for me as it is for other teachers. I teach more U level courses, I don't have tons of group activities... I tended to create desk pods of three and go from there. (Also not an option, fwiw.)


And all of this is simply for me, a teacher at the secondary level. For elementary teachers? (Who are also grappling with that new curriculum, thanks to Doug Ford and friends?) I can only imagine it's even more of a challenge, given what little I know.

Then there's also the custodians, the office staff, teacher librarians and more.

Everything's changed.

CONCLUSION

That's it - because really this is all I have time for. In fact I don't have time for this, I just wanted to get that downloaded out of my mind. Teaching is not the same, perhaps in ways you hadn't realized.

Or perhaps it was in ways you had realized? Perhaps you're an educator yourself? Do you have any thoughts or comments on what I put in the post? Feel free to drop a comment down below.

Note that I also put up a previous post about Stress Statistics back in August, for further reading. Thanks for getting to the end, we'll keep doing our best out here, enjoy your day.

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