Coronavirus Remote Education and Dancing 

Day Six March 26, 2020 Thursday

Good Morning! Sorry for the delay in posting this but yesterday Thursday March 26^th was truly the most surreal day yet in the midst of this entire situation and today has started out entirely frustrating.

SO SELF CARE FIRST!  I need to keep reminding myself because, other than shopping, I did not take care of myself at all. Between meetings with colleagues, monitoring my elementary classes, and my virtual meeting with my evening college class for 2 and a half hours, and then preparing my assignment posts for today, things just got away from me.

So right after I post this I am going to check in on my classes, and then take my early morning prep period to chill, have breakfast and do my “at home in a tiny apartment workout” in my kitchen and then I am going to take a bath, which is in a tub that is also in my kitchen. Then hopefully all will be right with the world, even if it isn’t.

The surreality of yesterday. 

Number one: being told that they would like to see us go live at least once in a while with our classes. Okay, I toyed with this idea and how I might do that  with 22 classes that meet once a week at all different times with students whose parents are working at home, maybe have only one computer, etc… My arts colleagues met and brought up some very real issues about the reality, logistics, and concerns about doling this live meet up. So we decided that we would not go live in real time. For those of us that felt comfortable videotaping ourselves and sending that home as instruction, that was fine (some of us were already doing this) and if we didn’t want to videotape ourselves but possibly do lessons with our voice over, that was fine, and if we didn’t want to videotape at all, that was fine. We had a discussion, heard everybody’s  voice (venting, because sometimes that is necessary) and made a decision that everyone could feel comfortable with doing.  And we all agreed NO ONLINE LIVE FEED.

Here is the problem, we were told that they ( admin and parents) would like us to go online  once in a while to check in with our kids. Some of our classroom teachers had already started doing this. Again understandable, as they are only teaching one class, not 20 – 25 classes a week, and they miss their kids, we all do. 

So we all had a meeting about this in Zoom, all 50 + of us and we vented, discussed and talked about what some members of the cluster team discovered about the platform that we were asked to use for these meet-ups. They discovered that it was not very secure and that students and/or parents could go in after you left and continue to chat live with each other, they could also give the code out to others to join in, and..., you can see where this is going. Issues about, privacy, inappropriate behavior, potential abuse, and the worse scenario someone trolling the internet and enticing your kids into whatever were all discussed. 

Don’t we have enough to be paranoid about. You would think that this would be discouraged but the official statement is that we should do what we felt comfortable with and that there is no mandate to go live but if we wanted to we could. This coming from an institution that micro-manages and mandates all kinds of behavior. As long as we were comfortable opening up our personal lives to over 500 (for classroom teachers 25- 25) students and their families it was oaky with the higher ups. 

This is where we crossed over into SURREALITY!!!!

After that meeting I thought I wanted to be done for the day but I still needed to push on to one more class that was going live as it is a Graduate level college class and I need to see these students to the end of what is their last semester. Everything else has been cancelled on them, no graduation ceremony, no dorm living, no close contact with peers. These live meet ups are important and useful. Luckily the college has a “secure” remote learning platform and we are all adults and can agree on certain protocols and totally understand the pitfalls of online learning. We can then make a decision about how much we are willing to risk and how much we can and/or will participate . There was a process to get us there. One that involved surveys to see where people were and what was available to them to connect online as well as what kind of space they would be in and how much room they had to move around as we would be doing some limited movement activities. All worked out fine and I ended my evening on a very positive note.

So I prepared my classes for today, went to bed way too late, remember, I had not done any self-care other than going shopping, which is its own surreal experience.

OH! I almost forgot, I was reminded that it was our Anniversary. 8 Years legal going on 42 actually.

So I posted it online, then I went to bed, set the alarm for 7:00 o’clock so I wouldn’t miss our DAILY morning meeting, which we were told was how we were checking in every morning.

So I login and no one is there. I started to get a few text messages and we all realized that they had switched our daily meeting into a weekly meeting that would happen on Mondays only. The e-mail was sent out Thursday, March 26 at 1:50 pm. As it was Friday I assumed Monday meant next week and we would still be on for today as it was our first week online. But no! because in the fine print next to the time was the date and it said effective Monday 3/23/2020.

And here we go back to surreality!!!!

Peace Out, Mr. Jannetti (The Dancing Jedi)