Coronavirus Remote Education and Dancing 

Day Nine March 30, 2020 Monday

So, Sunday went by without too much fanfare. Self-Care First. Well I actually started the night before as I did my exercises at 11 pm and welcomed the new day at midnight with one of our cats, Simora, joining me as I was finishing my last stretch.

In the morning: Senior Shopping at Whole Foods before 8am, then a hot breakfast prepared by Ken, my very own live-in cook, otherwise known as, my spouse. Ken loves to cook, so there are always great meals in the making and very good ones, at that. Touching base with friends and families by actually talking with them and not texting. As New York is an epicenter for this virus everyone wants to know if we are okay.

So the next step was preparing for today. Creating the first video for my college level Beginning Ballet class and redoing the syllabus and timeline to reflect our new normal. Preparing the post for my elementary school Monday morning classes and grading their assignments from last Monday. Getting Tuesday’s assignments ready to make it easier for me on Monday when I need to be online and available for whatever might happen with my classes. Remember, I see 525 students a week, which is a little over 100 a day and then another 30 college students both Undergraduate and  Graduate. Needless to say I went to bed at 2:30am. For some reason I tend to work really well at night. Not such a good trait when you need to be up early in the morning.

Well I got up at 7am, made coffee, had breakfast, prepared myself for the day and went online at 7:57 to meet with my principal and entire school staff for our morning meeting, which we will now be doing only once a week instead of daily. And then back to the craziness, students and parents not understanding the assignments (see, teachers really do know things that parents don’t), Zooming with colleagues to compare and prepare lessons together on a platform that we are all still learning how to use, chatting with students about what to do and how to do it despite having given them very explicit and detailed instruction (I think they are  just missing the human contact), glitches in the platform that loses info that was put in, texting colleagues on my phone with questions, while grading students’ assignments. I am getting exhausted and I haven’t even left my desk chair for what is now pushing 4 hours.

This is all so unnatural to me. I am used to teaching 4 -5 classes a day, moving and stretching with each class, going to the gym after school (self-care) and/or to my college classes, where I demonstrate more movement activities. I promote that no child or person should be sitting for more than 20 -25 minutes without a movement break and here I am sitting for hours and feeling like I can’t keep up or catch up. There are so many windows open on my screen and so many e-mail accounts that I have to navigate that I could use an administrative assistant just to help me organize the clutter because that is what it looks like to me. Navigating through all the open apps and windows is like entering a minefield and if I make one wrong click “BOOM” it all blows up in my face. AARGGH! This is so frustrating!

AND then I remembered what a friend, who is a parent ,said to me. What is so bad if the students don’t get the instruction that you had planned for them. So they lose a month or two, maybe that time should be about “realizing what they know”.  This sounded so right to me. So how do I help them to realize what they know.  Instead of sticking to my lessons and trying to adjust it to this whole new platform maybe I should keep emphasizing what they already know, practicing what knowledge they already possess, sharing that knowledge with their families, making them the teachers. Is that so unusual, isn’t that what we want for them. You know what maybe they could use a break to discover on their own what they know and what they don’t know. Maybe helping students “realize what they know” is what we should be doing all the time.

Peace Out, Mr. Jannetti, The Dancing Jedi