Mental health check-in

I have several friends who are teachers and the whole distance learning thing is slowly turning into a absolute waste of time. Several of the districts announced that teachers were not allowed to lower any grades, so if you started into this with a 'C' you get a 'C' even if you do not do any assignments for the rest of the year. That was stupid - one of my friends said that over 30% of his students have just stopped even logging in. He tries contacting the parents and generally they are unwilling to do anything....which explains the students attitudes pretty clearly. Stuff like that is tough on teachers who in some cases are struggling to keep motivated in this as it is.
 
Denverdave said:
I have several friends who are teachers and the whole distance learning thing is slowly turning into a absolute waste of time. Several of the districts announced that teachers were not allowed to lower any grades, so if you started into this with a 'C' you get a 'C' even if you do not do any assignments for the rest of the year. .
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That is my school. One of my difficulties is that I had to take over classes from a teacher who gives everyone an A because he is nearly 90 years old and does not know how to enter grades into the online grade book. Now that I'm teaching actual graded material it won't matter what grades the kids earn because their grades were frozen at "no lower than March 12" levels. For my own classes, there is an actual incentive for the kids who are doing poorly to do the work because anything they do can only bring their grade up.
 
Denverdave said:
I have several friends who are teachers and the whole distance learning thing is slowly turning into a absolute waste of time. Several of the districts announced that teachers were not allowed to lower any grades, so if you started into this with a 'C' you get a 'C' even if you do not do any assignments for the rest of the year. That was stupid - one of my friends said that over 30% of his students have just stopped even logging in. He tries contacting the parents and generally they are unwilling to do anything....which explains the students attitudes pretty clearly. Stuff like that is tough on teachers who in some cases are struggling to keep motivated in this as it is.
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the same thing here, grades can’t go down. Both my kids said almost everyone was online in their classes though.
 
My 14 and 8 year old have been busting their asses to complete the work and get good grades. My 8 year old's morning zoom meeting lasts about 30 minutes and they do stuff like sharing a story they wrote or whatever the journaling prompt was for the day. The rest of the work is done independently on a website called Canvas. I was actually home for one of the Zoom meetings and noticed that most of his class was there and that every one of them had a parent home except us on a daily basis. It has been a real struggle that my 14 year old in all advanced classes now has to home school his 2nd grade brother too.
He is being a real champion about it and when this is all over he is getting a huge reward of some sort. Poor kid. We don't know what else to do though.
It irritates me that some kids can just not do the work and keep their grade when mine are doing their due diligence and would love to slack off if they had a choice.
 
My wife and I were talking last night about that 'back to normal' really will look like.

It sounds like a lot of people she knows think there's just going to be a day we're given the all clear and just go right back to doing whatever it is we do.

The signs are already there that as businesses start to re-open & folks circulate more, changes will need to happen to maintain social distancing and masks are going to be with us for quite a while. Some businesses are not going to re-open & some jobs will not be rehired. There are going to be folks struggling for a while and a couple stimulus checks aren't going to float them. This will be a critical point where the local/state/federal politicians we elect this upcoming election will act on our behalf.

Personally, I'm really optimistic. We are going to have a ton of people who are ready to go back to work when the opportunity presents itself. Hopefully we'll also have a lot of small business loans and support online to get new businesses up and hiring. Those who have maintained an income or have liquid cash will be ready to spend it. People will need to think about their interactions with others on a daily basis and hopefully that will make us all somewhat more considerate.
 
I've been very impressed with the ad hoc online learning our district has set up. (Disclosure: my last corporate job was working to help districts set up online schools).

Regarding grades, rigor and educational value, I think there ought to be an understanding of the social role that education plays. Tuesday, during my 'online office hours' a gay student stayed and showed me the engine she and her dad put into her pickup, and introduced me to her dog. Kids need connection, and this is very stressful to them.

Also, they've been doing work! I'm fortunate to have worked for a very established and thoroughly developed online school system, but even though we're making it up as we go along, we're doing the important thing: trying to help our community get through a bad time. Someday this will be over, and we need to start the work now.

Re: online meeting security, it's an issue. We use Google Meet and have some serious permissioning/oversight via district-issued login credentials, but still: they're teenagers. One of them has actually been forwarded to the police for their actions. But as I always tell people about this job - you know what? Most of my kids are great people, and if you're good to them, they'll be good to you.

Sometimes, just having a homework assignment is an anchor for a family who are dealing with a load of problems.

Anyhow, I got my document camera hooked up, my webcam on my receding hairline, and I'm gonna help some kids with math in a half hour. Or just vent, what the hell.
 
I'm officially to the point of being really, really sick of this. I envy those of you who can watch movies and drink beer all day. I still have to do the same amount of work, except now my work is complicated by million little inefficiencies.

On the home front, our 1 year old has been a real nightmare. During the weekends I dont work, but have to find some way to entertain 2 kids under the age of 5. Have to cook and clean up dinner every night since were abstaining from the takeout. Do yardwork. Help with laundry, cleaning, etc. Today its snowing and its gonna rain this weekend so I cant really get the kids outside. Wife is working full time and going to school online.

This hasn't been a rest for us at all. We still have the same obligations but a lot of the things we used to use to help out have disappeared. Every minute of every day is a fucking chore.

My only respite is 30-60 minutes/day of exercise. But that's hard work too.

I just want to stop DOING for about 24 hours. Fuck. I'd blow off some steam and get drunk this weekend, but then I'll just have to do the same shit with a hangover.
 
Chad said:
My kids started distance learning on Monday. They already shut it down. They didn’t require any kind of secure login so apparently in a class somewhere, someone who was not a student logged in and showed his wiener. So now they are scrambling to get some kind of sign in process for the classes.
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No login?

The school system my wife teaches at is a one-to-one school meaning every kid K-12 is assigned a laptop (chromebook) that is used a small percentage of each day, but throughout the semester there are scheduled "E Learning" days. Basically a pre-scheduled day off.. but the teachers have online homework in the portal for those kid's classroom (each kid is only allowed in their classroom and administration also tracks logins and IP addresses to see if kids are logging into other people's accounts instead of their account from their assigned device). It's also training to help with snow days... they can convert a bad travel day into an E-learning day to keep from falling behind schedule and going to school until June.

This has been a challenging switch, going from periodic E-learning days to full on group instruction, homework, and grading while remote for the past month. When the teachers aren't doing scheduled Google Classroom meetings, they at least have scheduled "office hours" to handle questions, emails, or even video chat one on one with the kids. My wife can be working anywhere from 8 am until 7 or 8 pm depending on the day. I can't even imagine the struggles for districts that don't even have hardware and software already in place.
 
baimun said:
No login?

The school system my wife teaches at is a one-to-one school meaning every kid K-12 is assigned a laptop (chromebook) that is used a small percentage of each day, but throughout the semester there are scheduled "E Learning" days. Basically a pre-scheduled day off.. but the teachers have online homework in the portal for those kid's classroom (each kid is only allowed in their classroom and administration also tracks logins and IP addresses to see if kids are logging into other people's accounts instead of their account from their assigned device). It's also training to help with snow days... they can convert a bad travel day into an E-learning day to keep from falling behind schedule and going to school until June.

This has been a challenging switch, going from periodic E-learning days to full on group instruction, homework, and grading while remote for the past month. When the teachers aren't doing scheduled Google Classroom meetings, they at least have scheduled "office hours" to handle questions, emails, or even video chat one on one with the kids. My wife can be working anywhere from 8 am until 7 or 8 pm depending on the day. I can't even imagine the struggles for districts that don't even have hardware and software already in place.
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they all have school assigned laptops and logins for everyday school work. The no login was for the live class streaming.

I'm in the 10th largest school district in the country with over 188,000 student in it. The live streaming class was thrown on them fast.
 
Our online learning went to shit almost instantly.

The only ones signed up to Google classrooms (and I checked again this morning just to be sure) were the small amount of kids who hung around until the doors shut for good and we got them signed up when they were in the school and the usual really on the ball parents.

Everyone burst their pans to get materials and instructions online.

And for whatever reason no one can actually sign into Glow which they need to be able to do to sign into Google Classrooms or check e-mails.

1 of my more uptight kids managed to return some work before the issue reared its head but that's it. We're under authority and union instructions that online learning shouldn't add to workload or create new tasks outside putting it online and we're not allowed to e-mail never mind call or video chat with kids so until I'm told otherwise - my stuff is out there, if the kids can't access it there's not much I can do.


In a weird way that kind of works in my favour - it's better having a whole class full of kids all restarting from where we left off than trying to pick up the pieces in a class of special needs kids where the more nurtured amongst them are even further ahead than the rest than they'd already be.
 
Oh yeah and next weeks hub rota has just gone out and they don't need me again. I hadn't really thought of it but my wife observed "maybe that's a sign they like you?" makes sense - sitting around all day social distances from 2 kids where you're not actually allowed to do anything is a drag.
 
MonkeyZero said:
My 14 and 8 year old have been busting their asses to complete the work and get good grades. My 8 year old's morning zoom meeting lasts about 30 minutes and they do stuff like sharing a story they wrote or whatever the journaling prompt was for the day. The rest of the work is done independently on a website called Canvas. I was actually home for one of the Zoom meetings and noticed that most of his class was there and that every one of them had a parent home except us on a daily basis. It has been a real struggle that my 14 year old in all advanced classes now has to home school his 2nd grade brother too.
He is being a real champion about it and when this is all over he is getting a huge reward of some sort. Poor kid. We don't know what else to do though.
It irritates me that some kids can just not do the work and keep their grade when mine are doing their due diligence and would love to slack off if they had a choice.
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From the teacher's end, I'm not so happy about it either. I get that these are difficult times and we need to work with each students' particular situation but the last three months of school should actually mean something. Some of my students are doing the work and some are blowing it all off for no real reason that I can discern and they will all get the same grades.

On the parent end, I have one kid who is OCD about doing everything and the lowest grade on her last report card was a 98.5% and another who we have chase after get work done who is doing both high school AND college classes online.
 
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MonkeyZero said:
This week has been good. Did some deep cleaning at the house finally. I envy those that are sitting in sparkling clean houses but I'm glad to be working too.
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I kept annoying my wife today. She's on holiday from work so sitting watching TV and I'm like: "c'mere, c'mere look at this.... the uPVC is so clean I can see my reflection in it." :grin:
 
2manband said:
I'm officially to the point of being really, really sick of this. I envy those of you who can watch movies and drink beer all day. I still have to do the same amount of work, except now my work is complicated by million little inefficiencies.

On the home front, our 1 year old has been a real nightmare. During the weekends I dont work, but have to find some way to entertain 2 kids under the age of 5. Have to cook and clean up dinner every night since were abstaining from the takeout. Do yardwork. Help with laundry, cleaning, etc. Today its snowing and its gonna rain this weekend so I cant really get the kids outside. Wife is working full time and going to school online.

This hasn't been a rest for us at all. We still have the same obligations but a lot of the things we used to use to help out have disappeared. Every minute of every day is a fucking chore.

My only respite is 30-60 minutes/day of exercise. But that's hard work too.

I just want to stop DOING for about 24 hours. Fuck. I'd blow off some steam and get drunk this weekend, but then I'll just have to do the same shit with a hangover.
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Workwise, that's the situation I'm in too. On the one hand, I'm lucky that I can work remotely. On the other hand, working remotely is a colossal pain in the ass. As annoying as some of my coworkers are, there's real value in being able to walk down the hall to have a quick informal discussion. Email, zoom, Slack, etc., aren't great substitutes. I'm working harder than ever, and it feels endless.
 
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Remote teaching has been going surprisingly well for me so far (we're using zoom, and automatically having people enter into the waiting room, then admitting them manually, as well as requiring a password AND an authenticated IP to log in. no random zoombomber weiners so far.) Students are actually engaged and participating (this is undergrads, so the motivation is generally not the same issue it is with grade school).

Outside of teaching stuff, this whole thing is really bringing out my misanthropic tendencies though. Fuck people, they suck.
 
I doubt I'll get a lot of sympathy, but being available at home 24-7 has meant that my workday has been extending to 12 hours and beyond, because people know they can 'get' me. I feel lucky to be employed, but I feel like I'm starting to get burned out, and my neck hurts from sitting at my computer for many hours a day. We have a board meeting later today and right now are going through our first comprehensive resource planning session, so there is a lot of work to do.

Right now, during the week pretty much my only form of entertainment during about 7am and 6pm is listening to my daughter do her telehealth pediatric occupational therapy sessions in the other room. It's kind of hilarious when she talks to her little clients, cheering them on and equally funny when she switches to talking to the (frequently clueless) parents.

OTOH, our son just dropped off a 2016 Maddalena Paso Robles cabernet sauvignon (90 points) and a bug assault (salt) gun, so at least my weekend plans are coming together.
 
Had a pretty good week though felt a bit out of it today around dinner time.

Was outside tinkering with my bike all afternoon. Only had 2 beers so it wasnt that, might be too much sun. Kind of hard to explain, I just felt weird and a bit out of it.

Been thinking a lot about the past too.

Walked by a house I'd partied in once with a guy who drank in the bar I used to work in - all of a sudden I'm wondering if he still lives there and what happened to this person and that colleague and so on.

A pal from KSA posted some old photos from our compound on Facebook and I'm thinking about all the people I knew there and stuff we got upto - ghetto wine and camel steaks anyone :shrug:

I suppose it's just hankering back to nicer, happier more certain times.

One thing that has struck me throughout this is that I miss my dad a lot more than I'd think. I get on great with both my parents (they're still together btw) but for some reason I'm really missing my dad. If the gov't said "k lockdown is staying but you get one free pass to do whatever" having a Sunday pint with my dad at his favourite pub would be it.

And now I've made myself cry :grin: :facepalm:
 
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