Year 10: Week 29 - Lost In The Woods

SPRING BREAK!!!!

Well, let me explain. So when my school closed ,we started off with a week of break to give the teachers and families time to transition, and then we started up with distance learning. Other schools shifted their spring breaks earlier to give teachers the preparation time.  Many other schools had spring breaks, which were earlier.  This meant that these schools only had to get through a short chunk of time before going on break.

My school decided to not mess with the timing of Spring Break, which was this past week, so here we are on my last day of Spring Break.

If this pandemic wasn’t happening I would be on the way the back from Seattle after spending time with my parents, my brother and his family. I would be going through preparations for my 5th grade Middle Ages presentation, which happens soon after spring break while planning for the spring band concerts.

This is a stressful and exciting time of the year. Even though I’ve done these performances for the past ten years, there are always things that come up and unexpected challenges. There are also things that I look forward to every year in the process of putting these performances together. I love seeing the three 5th grade classes come together for the first time to rehearse, and seeing the incredible improvement over three days of work as a grade. I love being able to watch my band students get excited when they sit up on the stage and they hear the resonances of their sound surround them in the auditorium. And I love collaborating with the other music teachers in the department and being part of that team.

Instead right now, I’m trying to figure out some new technology to help with teaching. Also, I need to figure next steps in my curriculum. I was pretty much going week by week before break. When I look at what I usually teach, and curricular goals, many of them I had to put aside because they were not practical to do with distance learning. It’s really hard to know how to build and pace this curriculum without knowing for sure when we are going back. Yes, we have a date of April 30th to return, but this is the third return date that we’ve gotten. I suspect that it’s not going to be the last.

If it was safe for me to be back at school with my students, of course I would love that. At this point, I’ll take any time I can get with my students. However, not knowing for sure what I got with them is making it really hard to plan. I’m looking forward to having a solid plan for the rest of the school year so I can move forward with confidence as a teacher. Right now, it just feels like I’m taking a couple steps forwards with no clear direction where I am going, lost in the woods.

I'm looking forward to seeing my students online next week.  This has been a hard situation as a teacher, but it's also been an adventure, and an opportunity to grow.  Will this fundamentally change my job in the long term?  Not sure, but that's a question for later. 

Right now, I have to prepare for my students next week.