Distance Learning 2.0 Begins

 The lead up to school starting has been very different from all of our other years.  Considering this is Emma's senior year, we've had a bit of experience.  We've done almost no back to school shopping.  No new backpacks.  No clean, sharpened crayons.  No highlighters.  I did order some headphones and a battery-powered pencil sharpener, and we've picked up some composition notebooks.  But if we are just at home, I see no reason to buy pristine new pencils when we have lots and lots of used ones and no one is going to see them.  I have a decent amount of lined paper stocked up.  We did go pick up a couple of Chromebooks from the school district, so we are one-to-one devices and ready to go.  I also got a whiteboard to write reminders on.

This is a completely staged picture but seemed to represent our thoughts on the first day of school.

The kids don't actually use my bedroom and bed for doing school work.  It's my space!  Besides, we have chairs and tables downstairs that work much better.  I decided that the craft table (our old kitchen table), being close to the wifi router, would be the best spot for schoolwork, and the kids can spread out to the couch, or floor, or whatever floats their boat.  I've cleared off a shelf of a bookcase so the kids can store their composition notebooks and/or binders there.  There was a small part of me that was in denial that this distance learning model was going to be a significant portion, if not all, of our school year so I didn't really get things set up until school was starting.

The first day of school went pretty smoothly.  The high schoolers had a single class with their advisory teacher, and my middle schoolers had a "Welcome to 6th Grade!" online assembly and then a class with their new advisory teacher.  Annie and Maddie are in the same classes and are pretty excited about it.  They've wanted that since kindergarten.  However, they each need to be on their own device, on their own Zoom meeting with the same teacher, each using up precious bandwidth space on our limited rural internet.  Hopefully, all 4 girls won't need to stream their faces for all of the meetings.  

Thursday, the second day, was a little more eventful.  Annie and Maddie had the mistaken assumption that they would start right off with their regular schedule, printed and taped to the wall.  Thursdays are "B" days, starting them with PE and not Band.  However, the first week of school had its own schedule with 15 or 30 minute sessions with all of the classes and by the time we figured this out, Band was done.  The second day of school, and already they had skipped first period. Not off to a strong start.  This was partly my fault.  I had wanted to get my exercise in before school started, and I hadn't given myself enough time to deal with interruptions and finish before 8:30.  ("Just 5 more minutes!")  But this was just the beginning.  Each teacher gets to choose Google Meets vs Zoom, and everyone has a different place to store the links for the online class.  Sometimes the best link is found in an email (with sometimes three different emails from a teacher proclaiming "Zoom Link" and "Updated Zoom Link" and a 2nd "Updated Zoom Link."  Goodness, where to start?).  Sometimes the link is found on Google Classroom either in "stream" or "classwork."  And sometimes the link is found on Schoology, easily visible, or hidden in an attachment.  Emma and Elizabeth had headphones, but Annie and Maddie didn't yet so the middle school teachers voices distracted my high schoolers.  Emma was self-sufficient, but Elizabeth needed my help a couple of times to find her links in addition to Annie and Maddie, and high school and middle school classes start at different times.  I did not intend to hover, but I didn't feel like I had a choice!  I got a few of my own responsibilities done during this time, but it was heavily interrupted and stressful, and couldn't this just be done already?  We all heaved a sigh of relief when the scheduled meetings were done.  Homework the kids could handle, and there really wasn't much.

Friday was much the same.  Hidden links, was this the right meeting?, and Emma ended up missing one of her classes because she was never "let in" to the Zoom meeting.  Was it because Zoom was having an issue?  Was it because she clicked the wrong link?  We'll never know.  Annie and Maddie, having no issue getting to PE the day before, struggled Friday.  They got into TWO Google Meets with students in each, but no teacher.  After 12 minutes of waiting and trying to figure things out, another student dropped a URL in the chat, and that was the one that took them to the right meeting.  Whew, 3 minutes to spare.

Please excuse me while I go beat my head against the wall.  

But the first week is done, and that is a reason to celebrate.

We miss regular school so much!