Nine months in
I know I suck at blogging, anymore. Sigh. It's some mixture of feeling like I have a boring life (not particularly because of the 'Rona, really) and ... well, what is or are the other component(s)? The echo chamber of LJ? I think a lot of it is a deep shame at my physical state. My mobility is really bad now. I own a travelscoot -- the lightest battery powered seat-scooter that exists, as far as I know. But it's hard just to walk around my apartment. This asshole computer guy who was here (masked and gloved, I hasten to add) last week did a double take when I responded to him asking me to come look at something on my computer's zombie corpse (more in a bit on that). And although I have actually not faced much of that kind of judgmental bullshit, it's still hard. Every decision about going somewhere is based as much on my calculations about how difficult it will physically be as it is on danger levels of Corona infection. It doesn't seem to matter that I (hope I) internalized fat liberation politics -- or maybe that it is that I really didn't? -- I am deeply ashamed of weighing whatever it is I weigh. Every summer for the past many, many years, the end of the school year and summer break has led to me being ever yet less mobile and heavier, more subject to edema and the strains of torquing myself around. It's hard to be comfortable sleeping, much less walking.
So here I am. Shame is such a useless, fucked up, self-sabotaging emotion. Like guilt.
In other areas... the lockdown has not been at all bad for me, mostly because I am so lucky that my sister and nieces are in my pod, so I have seen them regularly. Rosie slept over Friday night. My friend Dani has also masked up and hung out once or twice, once with gem's toddler (are they still toddlers at three? Juniper seems close to pre-school-ness rather than baby, now). I find Juniper a little stressful, tbh. They are very intelligent and precocious, but ... Dani never says no. About anything. Dani always cleans up after Juniper's ravages, but it's still stressful. I love Dani, but I would like to hang out with gem by gemself. I like Dani's choice of pronoun, though I am not always perfect about remembering to use it. Juniper still has not announced their gender, which is what Dani and River set as the expectation, from birth.
Another reason the lockdown has not been that difficult for me is that my school district is still fully distance learning. That may change in January with second semester, but oh, how I hope it does not. I need to get my Kaiser doctor to write me a right robust letter explaining my underlying conditions, etc. If there is a vaccine by then, does that cancel out the letter? I guess, "widely available vaccine". Or maybe just "available to those with underlying conditions".
I ... I actually really like teaching from home. I don't feel alienated from the kids, using Zoom daily. We're much more organized with it, this Fall, than we were last Spring. Our union did a pretty good job of negotiating our Memorandum of Understanding rider to the current contract -- though of course now that that is done, the district is pressing every opportunity to make our work lives worse, if they can. Before I get to that... so, my super power as a teacher has always been curriculum and lesson planning, and my kryptonite has always been classroom management. The very term makes me ill -- MANAGEMENT. I have never wanted to be the cop of the classroom, and some fundamental part of me feels that you should be able to help all kids naturally love learning, without bullshit. And that you can lead a horse to water, but not make them drink. And distance learning is kind of the apotheosis of that. Kids can't really fuck too much up for EACH OTHER in Zoom. They can zone out themselves, and we're trying all kinds of ways, individually and collectively, to combat that. But they can't interfere with the majority of a class's ability to learn.
My district has said from the beginning (though NOT all teachers have practiced it) that we cannot demand that kids turn on their cameras. Many teachers hate this, and push kids to do it anyway (though they're not allowed to bribe them with points... which is another thing I hate, hate, hate about teaching, anyway: the gross economy of grades, where learning is transactional and monetized by points. Ugh.) Me, I'm not that bothered by it. At the beginning of the year, I wanted kids to make a Bitmoji of themselves and use it as their avatar/profile pic for Zoom. Some protested that other teachers were insisting they use a photo of themselves. I said, fine, do that if you have to, and if you don't, you have a choice between your selfie, and your Bitmoji. I like how kids change their selfies and their Bitmojis. A lot of classes start with me reacting to new Bitmoji cartoon scenes, or new selfies.
Kids are also super NICE this year. Now, that is quite possibly just the tendency of this year's group -- but some of it may be the slack we are all giving each other in these weird times. Kids are patient with Zoom fuckups. Kids share tips, with me and with each other, on hacks and fixes. Kids put questions in Chat eagerly. Kids write me constant emails and comment constantly in Google Classroom. My rate of work return (for "asynchronous assignments" as we now call them) is pretty steady around two-thirds... which is not that much worse than face2face, tbh. Relying solely on Google Classroom for assigning work and grading work is better than I thought it would be. I may keep to that once f2f returns, really. Except for some notes and classwork. I definitely comment much, much more in feedback with G Classroom. Which makes grading take a long, long, long time. I guess I can only really keep to it if the district ends up giving the checked out Chromebooks to students. I fucking hope they do. They can buy more for the schools, so it's one-to-one at school AND kids all have them at home. There's nothing else (along with school funded hotspots) that even approaches the beginning of equity not only during this lockdown but IN FUCKING GENERAL.
So, I've been trying to digitally adapt the work I habitually give every year, the assignments I am wedded to. The most difficult part for me is working in art, which I do naturally in the f2f classroom. But I am getting there. In seventh grade Social Studies, we are coming to the end of the European Middle Ages, for instance. I spend most of the time on life for peasants, and we read Karen Cushman's The Midwife's Apprentice in English/Language Arts, to go along with it. (And there were some fun assignments getting them to illustrate the book from the internet, and a final project where they cast the book as a movie and put internet heads of actors on the cartoon figures I supplied in a Google Slides show, and found appropriate text quotations for each main character OR wrote a three-or-so-slide sequel, imitating Cushman's literary style). But now we are on to the 1% -- knights, lords, ladies, kings, and queens. For this, I rely on William the Conqueror, a quick descent of his family tree, and Eleanor of Aquitaine. I kind of fell in love with Eleanor of Aquitaine when I was given a paper doll of her, from a book of Famous Women in History paper dolls (the kind of present I was always being given by my parents) around age ... 11? Maybe 13? Not sure. But I colored it in, and was fascinated by her (I didn't realize until I just found on the internet a photo of that paper doll book's Eleanor of Aquitaine page that it actually had primary source quotes about her by Marie de France! That's hella cool, since I use Marie de France as a historical personage in my culminating assignment).
Anyway, the culminating project for the Middle Ages is to have the students write an Illuminated Manuscript Letter from one of Eleanor's circle to another -- they can be or write to Eleanor herself, too. The historical personages I use, with a little historical fudging: Eleanor, Louis VII (her first husband), Henry II (her second husband), Marie (eldest daughter), Alix (next daughter, both with Louis VII), Young Henry (eldest surviving son with Henry II), Matilda, Richard, Geoffrey, Young Eleanor, Joan, or John (all children with Henry II), Sir William Marshall (a knight and eventual Earl who served Eleanor, Henry II, Young Henry, and Richard I and John I), Petronilla (Eleanor's younger sister... sadly actually dead by the year I decree the letter must be written in... but oh well), Rosamund Clifford (Henry II's most flaunted mistress), Abbess Marie of Shaftesbury, whom some identify with Marie of France, and who many historians believe is a half sister of Henry II, and Abbess Hildegarde of Bingen, who there is no RECORD of as a correspondent of Eleanor's... but who knew Abbot Bernard of Clairvaux and who left literally hundreds and hundreds of letters behind in one of the treasure troves of the medieval period.
In the classroom, we spend a fair amount of time learning techniques for creating the illuminated initial letters and borders -- I teach them a bunch of Zentangle doodling, and provide parchment paper for the final drafts. I was depressed to lose this project... but then I figured out that I didn't have to use a clunky Google Doc (it is no fun to try to manipulate images in one) but could change the size of a Google Slide, in Custom, to 8 1/2 by 11. So now kids could Google image search initial letters and various frames or parts of Celtic interlace, etc.
Now all of that is replaced by feverish Google Image searches, flipping, resizing, rotating, and cropping. I will not know how theirs have come out (in terms of the LOOK... I've given feedback on their rough draft CONTENT already) until after Thanksgiving. I did two this year as models to show them what I mean.
and
They're very different from one of my handmade copies of years past...
(I think this is now the longest entry I have written, or illustrated, in a long, long time)
I wish I had my last year's model at home with me, but apparently I did not take a photo of it, sigh. It was Abbess Hildegarde to Eleanor, and I illustrated it partly with medieval herbal drawings, kind of like the Voynich manuscript, but real.
This project is a lot of work for kids, but I have gotten some really, really cool projects in the past. Some beautiful art work, and some amazingly thoughtful letters. One of the best broke the rule that the letter had to be set in 1175, two years into Eleanor's castle captivity. The student made an illuminated manuscript with fake blood spatter, written by Thomas à Becket to Henry II in 1170 AT THE ALTAR as he is interrupted by being assassinated. Hat tip to you, past student. I will admit that I do a Google Slides show as we start the project of a TON of images from the medieval world of manuscript illumination, starting with initial letters and ending with a) cat cartoons in margins (the cat memes of their day, no kidding at all) and b) true medieval crime, with multiple images of Becket's murder from different medieval times and places. Next time I do a handmade model, I am totally working at least one cat in.
I was going to write about the computer mess and also folk music. But this entry has been long. Maybe I will actually do another sooner than nine months from now.
So here I am. Shame is such a useless, fucked up, self-sabotaging emotion. Like guilt.
In other areas... the lockdown has not been at all bad for me, mostly because I am so lucky that my sister and nieces are in my pod, so I have seen them regularly. Rosie slept over Friday night. My friend Dani has also masked up and hung out once or twice, once with gem's toddler (are they still toddlers at three? Juniper seems close to pre-school-ness rather than baby, now). I find Juniper a little stressful, tbh. They are very intelligent and precocious, but ... Dani never says no. About anything. Dani always cleans up after Juniper's ravages, but it's still stressful. I love Dani, but I would like to hang out with gem by gemself. I like Dani's choice of pronoun, though I am not always perfect about remembering to use it. Juniper still has not announced their gender, which is what Dani and River set as the expectation, from birth.
Another reason the lockdown has not been that difficult for me is that my school district is still fully distance learning. That may change in January with second semester, but oh, how I hope it does not. I need to get my Kaiser doctor to write me a right robust letter explaining my underlying conditions, etc. If there is a vaccine by then, does that cancel out the letter? I guess, "widely available vaccine". Or maybe just "available to those with underlying conditions".
I ... I actually really like teaching from home. I don't feel alienated from the kids, using Zoom daily. We're much more organized with it, this Fall, than we were last Spring. Our union did a pretty good job of negotiating our Memorandum of Understanding rider to the current contract -- though of course now that that is done, the district is pressing every opportunity to make our work lives worse, if they can. Before I get to that... so, my super power as a teacher has always been curriculum and lesson planning, and my kryptonite has always been classroom management. The very term makes me ill -- MANAGEMENT. I have never wanted to be the cop of the classroom, and some fundamental part of me feels that you should be able to help all kids naturally love learning, without bullshit. And that you can lead a horse to water, but not make them drink. And distance learning is kind of the apotheosis of that. Kids can't really fuck too much up for EACH OTHER in Zoom. They can zone out themselves, and we're trying all kinds of ways, individually and collectively, to combat that. But they can't interfere with the majority of a class's ability to learn.
My district has said from the beginning (though NOT all teachers have practiced it) that we cannot demand that kids turn on their cameras. Many teachers hate this, and push kids to do it anyway (though they're not allowed to bribe them with points... which is another thing I hate, hate, hate about teaching, anyway: the gross economy of grades, where learning is transactional and monetized by points. Ugh.) Me, I'm not that bothered by it. At the beginning of the year, I wanted kids to make a Bitmoji of themselves and use it as their avatar/profile pic for Zoom. Some protested that other teachers were insisting they use a photo of themselves. I said, fine, do that if you have to, and if you don't, you have a choice between your selfie, and your Bitmoji. I like how kids change their selfies and their Bitmojis. A lot of classes start with me reacting to new Bitmoji cartoon scenes, or new selfies.
Kids are also super NICE this year. Now, that is quite possibly just the tendency of this year's group -- but some of it may be the slack we are all giving each other in these weird times. Kids are patient with Zoom fuckups. Kids share tips, with me and with each other, on hacks and fixes. Kids put questions in Chat eagerly. Kids write me constant emails and comment constantly in Google Classroom. My rate of work return (for "asynchronous assignments" as we now call them) is pretty steady around two-thirds... which is not that much worse than face2face, tbh. Relying solely on Google Classroom for assigning work and grading work is better than I thought it would be. I may keep to that once f2f returns, really. Except for some notes and classwork. I definitely comment much, much more in feedback with G Classroom. Which makes grading take a long, long, long time. I guess I can only really keep to it if the district ends up giving the checked out Chromebooks to students. I fucking hope they do. They can buy more for the schools, so it's one-to-one at school AND kids all have them at home. There's nothing else (along with school funded hotspots) that even approaches the beginning of equity not only during this lockdown but IN FUCKING GENERAL.
So, I've been trying to digitally adapt the work I habitually give every year, the assignments I am wedded to. The most difficult part for me is working in art, which I do naturally in the f2f classroom. But I am getting there. In seventh grade Social Studies, we are coming to the end of the European Middle Ages, for instance. I spend most of the time on life for peasants, and we read Karen Cushman's The Midwife's Apprentice in English/Language Arts, to go along with it. (And there were some fun assignments getting them to illustrate the book from the internet, and a final project where they cast the book as a movie and put internet heads of actors on the cartoon figures I supplied in a Google Slides show, and found appropriate text quotations for each main character OR wrote a three-or-so-slide sequel, imitating Cushman's literary style). But now we are on to the 1% -- knights, lords, ladies, kings, and queens. For this, I rely on William the Conqueror, a quick descent of his family tree, and Eleanor of Aquitaine. I kind of fell in love with Eleanor of Aquitaine when I was given a paper doll of her, from a book of Famous Women in History paper dolls (the kind of present I was always being given by my parents) around age ... 11? Maybe 13? Not sure. But I colored it in, and was fascinated by her (I didn't realize until I just found on the internet a photo of that paper doll book's Eleanor of Aquitaine page that it actually had primary source quotes about her by Marie de France! That's hella cool, since I use Marie de France as a historical personage in my culminating assignment).
Anyway, the culminating project for the Middle Ages is to have the students write an Illuminated Manuscript Letter from one of Eleanor's circle to another -- they can be or write to Eleanor herself, too. The historical personages I use, with a little historical fudging: Eleanor, Louis VII (her first husband), Henry II (her second husband), Marie (eldest daughter), Alix (next daughter, both with Louis VII), Young Henry (eldest surviving son with Henry II), Matilda, Richard, Geoffrey, Young Eleanor, Joan, or John (all children with Henry II), Sir William Marshall (a knight and eventual Earl who served Eleanor, Henry II, Young Henry, and Richard I and John I), Petronilla (Eleanor's younger sister... sadly actually dead by the year I decree the letter must be written in... but oh well), Rosamund Clifford (Henry II's most flaunted mistress), Abbess Marie of Shaftesbury, whom some identify with Marie of France, and who many historians believe is a half sister of Henry II, and Abbess Hildegarde of Bingen, who there is no RECORD of as a correspondent of Eleanor's... but who knew Abbot Bernard of Clairvaux and who left literally hundreds and hundreds of letters behind in one of the treasure troves of the medieval period.
In the classroom, we spend a fair amount of time learning techniques for creating the illuminated initial letters and borders -- I teach them a bunch of Zentangle doodling, and provide parchment paper for the final drafts. I was depressed to lose this project... but then I figured out that I didn't have to use a clunky Google Doc (it is no fun to try to manipulate images in one) but could change the size of a Google Slide, in Custom, to 8 1/2 by 11. So now kids could Google image search initial letters and various frames or parts of Celtic interlace, etc.
Now all of that is replaced by feverish Google Image searches, flipping, resizing, rotating, and cropping. I will not know how theirs have come out (in terms of the LOOK... I've given feedback on their rough draft CONTENT already) until after Thanksgiving. I did two this year as models to show them what I mean.
and
They're very different from one of my handmade copies of years past...
(I think this is now the longest entry I have written, or illustrated, in a long, long time)
I wish I had my last year's model at home with me, but apparently I did not take a photo of it, sigh. It was Abbess Hildegarde to Eleanor, and I illustrated it partly with medieval herbal drawings, kind of like the Voynich manuscript, but real.
This project is a lot of work for kids, but I have gotten some really, really cool projects in the past. Some beautiful art work, and some amazingly thoughtful letters. One of the best broke the rule that the letter had to be set in 1175, two years into Eleanor's castle captivity. The student made an illuminated manuscript with fake blood spatter, written by Thomas à Becket to Henry II in 1170 AT THE ALTAR as he is interrupted by being assassinated. Hat tip to you, past student. I will admit that I do a Google Slides show as we start the project of a TON of images from the medieval world of manuscript illumination, starting with initial letters and ending with a) cat cartoons in margins (the cat memes of their day, no kidding at all) and b) true medieval crime, with multiple images of Becket's murder from different medieval times and places. Next time I do a handmade model, I am totally working at least one cat in.
I was going to write about the computer mess and also folk music. But this entry has been long. Maybe I will actually do another sooner than nine months from now.