Category: School Closure

Don’t try this at home!

Week 12. The TV in our household has been quiet for most of the Covid-19 period. This isn’t unusual, since I grew up in South Africa, we only got TV when I was 9, and it was a little black and white thing to boot, so the habit never caught on. Since my son is doing film, we’ll occasionally watch something that he’s seeing for film together, or the odd Netflix series. I switched on the TV the other night and stood amazed as a home-schooling mum told a reporter about how she managed everything, the brilliant schedule*, her children diligently working at whatever was laid out, the chores everyone was merrily doing and sighed. And felt inadequate. And laughed a little hysterically. (And switched channels). And remembered that I’d never chosen homeschooling, ever, at any point of my parenting existence. In fact sending my kids to school was a sure way of ensuring that they survived past childhood.

I think a lot of us “educator/administrator / parents” are feeling the pressure that somehow we should have more a grip on online-learning – well spoiler alert – this one certainly doesn’t.

This past weekend I closed my laptop and only lightly touched my phone to connect with friends and family. Because my son needed my help. He had a film assignment to complete and I was the only warm body able to be camera-person. He needed synchronous conversation and meals with me, as we’ve been completely asynchronous all week with him waking up just as I’m at the end of my physical and emotional tether with all the work I’m doing online. We needed to have some meals together. Go for a walk. Get in the car and visit our local vegetable farmer to stock up and try a local farmer who had a meat self-service stall.

I still consider myself to be fortunate. One 16 yo in the house with me, one 18yo stuck in the UK with her guardians, trying to discuss university options and counselling not to feel despondent that the first choices were not achieved. Single and remote parenting isn’t something I’ve chosen but has been thrust on me with a husband still in China.

It was a tough week. Our landlord refused to extend our lease for even another year as she had $$ signs dancing in her eyes (good luck with that), and we needed to virtually find a new place (my husband can’t return to Beijing without 14 day quarantine, and he can’t be away from his job that long, as life is back to normal where he works). Thank heavens for kind colleagues who were leaving and prepared to have a long conversation about the place they were vacating. Now the ROTW (rest of the world) has joined the online party every single system is creaking and groaning and, more often than not, just lying down and dying. Professional stress plus personal stress are not a great combination. My son had a terrible week last week – 11 weeks of online learning for an extreme extrovert with ADHD is not a joke. Plus a physically absent father and an emotionally absent mother – or at least not present at the hours that he was present. He did a lot of sleeping. And cooking. And neighbour’s dog walking. And panicking. So did I, except for the sleeping bit.

As with most things these days, it seems like online-learning while parenting is a binary thing. On the one hand there are the perfect parents with their schedules and advice, and on the other there are those shouting out for help, discussing tantrums and refusals to cooperate. Or those like me occasionally whimpering that it’s not easy.

The other binary seems to be the “refuseniks” who are taking a stand against any online learning as an affront to their authority in the home, or who say it should take a back-seat to emotional / physical wellness vs the group who want it to all be “business as usual” and are reactive to any hint of a slackening of pace.

I suspect all and any responses are responses driven by culture, experience, financial means and dare I say anxiety. While on the one hand I do think this is the ideal opportunity to rethink so much in life, there is the constant sword of Damocles I feel hanging over my head. Single parts of a machine that change, run the risk of being flung out. Will a term out of school really matter? This article based on the Christchurch experience argues it won’t. NWEA – who is selling a tool, but does have the data that so many crave during uncertainty compare the Covid-19 slide to the summer slide. And some private schools are already preparing to mitigate against any slide. I know that working and learning in our household does create the semblance of a structure and the idea that there is some lurching forwards towards academic goals, or at least well-trodden pathways.

It is of course a privilege thing above everything else.

romanticising quarantine - .jpgThe people cited in the first article weren’t sitting around doing nothing while their children were un-supervised, left to their own devices and anxieties. The loudest voices in the “I’m going to do nothing” won’t really be doing nothing. They’ll be playing games, cooking, gardening, reading and a plethora of other stimulating activities in the (larger) indoor and outdoor spaces they have at their disposal. They’ll know what to do because their background and privilege will allow them to make choices that mean things will turn out OK. Structured schooling is unfortunately one of the few options for many other students to do the school and life learning that will make their futures more bearable.

Not just privilege but also assumptions – they’ve not really changed – the idea of homeschooling presupposes that there is someone at home to do the schooling. Now there may be somebodies at home – but those bodies may be working pretty darn hard to keep their own jobs, or in fact be the ones pushing out the online-learning while juggling the education of their own.

A few of the articles I’ve found interesting this week are “prepare for the ultimate gaslighting” That counts not only for consumption of goods, but also I think for the consumption of learning. What will happen when we go back? The universe hates a vacuum. Will it be swiftly filled by more of the same?

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*There are circles of hell for online/remote/home schooling schedules – and the ones closest to the fire are the ones that are colour-coded and for sale on TpP (Teachers pay Teachers – for the uninitiated) ! schedule.jpg

The troops are so very tired

Week 11. And while partial opening has been announced at most schools in Beijing for G12 and G8, this probably going to result in more stress, uncertainty and questions rather than less.

Even more than ever before I am convinced we will need to radically change our teaching and learning practice. And now I’m not talking about the students but the adults. Everyone I’ve spoken to today has been really exhausted. In my conversations I’m trying to get to a better understanding of it – since we’re not feeling the joy right now. It’s wintertime in the trenches and the troops have foot-rot.

The reasons I can find are related to the need for some kind of assessment and evidence of learning. Which means assignments and marking. And lots and lots of feedback. I sense a huge reluctance on the part of teachers towards giving group feedback. Or even to let go of one-on-one emails in favour of using discussion forums to address anything – even banal requests for links to a document or small questions on assignments.

All this comes from a very good place. A very kind and caring place. And it’s really harming our teachers. Someone confessed to an 18 email exchange with a student on uploading a video file. I remarked that it could have been solved with a 2 minutes conversation with myself or the IT department but the person said they “wanted to work it out themselves and learn how to do it too”. Teachers are fiercely independent folk. I’m a fairly independent type myself, but I’ve re-qualified into one of the most collaborative parts of the teaching community possible – Teacher Librarianship. We have no shame in asking for help in our PLCs and (except for a few not so admirable souls, mainly found on TpT) openly share anything we create freely.

Independent, soldiering on with being too proud to ask for help is not going to help this. As my esteemed colleague Stephen always says

“We need to take time to make time”.

In my morning chat with my husband this morning – he’s been thrust into the hotel business this year in a managerial capacity – he reminded me of a saying in that business:

“Tell Everyone, Everything, Everyday”

when he first told me it months ago I thought it was a bit patronising. But I’m thinking it has some merit now. Bear with me.

Tell Everyone

With asynchronous online learning, people spread over the globe it’s easy to lose sight of who is or isn’t at meetings or training and who may be missing out on important communications or PD. Weekly updates tend to have content creep which means that there is so much to read through and absorb and so little time in which to do so that messages get missed or suffer from the consequences of the idea of “I’ll go back to that later”. Who are our messages missing and why? Just like we attempt dual coding and multi-modality in our messages to our students are we doing enough of that for all staff?

Everything

Everyone is overloaded. Too much content, too long emails, too bloated libguides, too many FAQs. But there are seasons to online learning too. What everything looks like this week as teachers are preparing for online meetings with families and students looks different to when they’re introducing new concepts or doing formative or summative assessments. I mentioned Atul Gawande’s “The Checklist Manifesto” to a colleague this morning and suggested we perhaps need to create one for the “hot topic” of the week. I mentioned it again to another colleague struggling under the weight of marking – I’d attended a great webinar (one of many that Microsoft is hosting – you just need to register to be able to view it) where Esam Baboukhan showed how he uses self- and peer-assessment checklists before student return their work for grading. I don’t think we’re above following the lead of pilots and surgeons in this regard, and found myself saying to someone I was helping today, “slow down, slow down, let’s just do this slowly and carefully and then you can use it as a template for the next thing.”

Notebook self and peer assessment

Everyday

In Atomic Habits, James Clear talks about the “compound effect of hundreds of small decisions”. When everything is topsy turvy and no one really has a proper routine (despite the plethora of nice looking examples all over twitter and on TV and in media) it’s probably less about having a schedule and more about having habits that can exist independently of time and space. I’m thinking it’s more in the nature of “when I’m doing this, I do it like that” It’s consistency and predictability that wins this battle. You can always find this information in this place. Things are always named in a certain way. Meetings are always found on the relevant shared calendar. Recordings are always found in a certain channel and named in a specific easy to find way. Because there is so much it is so easy for things to get out of hand. It’s easier to quickly reply to a student than to ask them to post the same question on the forum. It’s easier to troubleshoot the same question with a quick email than to do it the first time it arises and then commit that answer to a knowledge base. I remember when we moved over to https:// for all our systems. People had all their bookmarks and caches with the old http:// for things. It worked fine while at school but didn’t work for them at home. We got the question why all the time. In the end we put it on Yammer and “bumped” it up every day for weeks on end. People forget. Things slip their mind. Minds are overflowing.

Learning new tools is hard. Learning new ways of teaching is hard. Everyone is tired. I’m just not sure what it will take to get off this very fast spinning wheel. We’ve not yet reached cruising altitude and we’re about to go into another tail spin.

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Photo by Guillermo Latorre on Unsplash

How long will it take to rethink online learning?

Tomorrow marks 74 days since we saw our students face-to-face. Since we had the luxury of physical indoor and outdoor spaces. A library. Fields to play in. Classrooms. We’re at the point of the year now where we’ve started talking about assessments and report cards and student led conferences. Where there are fewer days left until the end of the school year (67 days) than we’ve been doing online learning. And everyone I speak to is so very tired. Students, parents, teachers.

If this becomes our new normal, even in some kind of hybrid online/off-line model as articles such as this from the Atlantic Get Used to It: This Lockdown Won’t Be the Last  suggest that we may be moving between the two for a while to come, then we’re going to have to rethink online learning in a major way.

I listened to an interesting podcast with Sam Harris and Matt Mullenweg little over a week ago, on the New Future of Work wanted to blog on it but then had to do some more thinking and revisiting the points, but it was nearly a 2 hour podcast and I didn’t have the time to re-listen to it (even on my usual double speed), and there was no transcript – so the hack I employed was to open a word document and activate dictate, play the podcast in the background and use Microsoft’s pretty impressive assistive technologies help me.  I can read way faster than I can listen which is why video-based education always annoys the heck out of me. Podcasts are ok as I can do them while walking, cleaning, cooking etc.

Levels of Online Work:

Getting back to the point. Mullenweg identified five levels of online working. And I think this is probably true of online learning.  He also had a great little anecdote about the early days of radio drama in the 1920’s when people didn’t take advantage of the medium and tried to recreate plays including costume etc and then broadcast it. Online everything is a bit like that – we take the physical and try to recreate it but online, not fully adapting to the medium.

The levels are:

Level 1: Occasional at home work for example due to emergencies / illness using basic equipment like phones / internet

Level 2: Attempt to recreate the office environment at home without taking advantage of the medium – i.e. synchronous, mandated online hours, surveillance by company, little freedom and agency.

Level 3: Take more advantage of the medium – e.g. shared documents, real-time editing for example during meetings for clarification and shared understanding, better home equipment, companies investing in hiring people with really good written communication skills.

Level 4: Going asynchronous giving agency to people to design their day and productivity. Performance is judged on production / output not on how it’s produced. The baton is passed on over time zones. Decisions take longer but allow for longer and better contemplation, less power dynamics and give space for introverts and people for whom English is a second language.

Level 5: Nirvana with better work and more fun. Environment is designed around health including mental health and wellness. People operated at a higher level being “heroicly productive”. A sense of a world of “infinite abundance” and where there is a noticeable divergence between peers in terms of their deliverables/output. The biases of online environments such as dress / self-presentation / image disappear.

In their “The Remote Playbook from the largest All-Remote company in the world” Gitlab have their own levels:

  • No remote
  • Remote-allowed
  • Hybrid-remote
  • Remote, biased towards one time zone
  • All-remote, asynchronous across time zones

Document everything

I really like some of their suggestions – including the one about documenting everything and having a single source of truth. Honestly that was one of the most time-consuming things I did initially and it remains tough to keep it updated and relevant, but our Middle School online learning guide (7,745 views) and the more detailed Teachers guide (5,476 views) remain the best time-investment I’ve made so far.

Document Everything
From: The Remote Playbook by Gitlab – see more here: https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/handbook-usage/#why-handbook-first

Get off email

The most impressive statement Mullenweg made was:

“sometimes I .. get under 5 emails per month, well and some months it might just be one or two basically all I get with email is like private HR stuff things that need to be one to one private communication everything else happens on these internal” (discussion boards / forums)

One of the most stressful parts of online learning I think for everyone has been the continual flow of single-purpose single-person emails all asking / saying the same thing. From the EdTech / IT side of things we’ve taken a load off with Libguides. I don’t get the feeling that’s happening so much in the various subjects. We’re not at Nirvana yet – or even close because there is still some pride in saying how many emails you have / have sent / how many hours you’ve been working. I had a really bad day on Friday. I’d been up late giving online PD to some educators in North America, followed by finishing off some points that had arisen from the PD plus internal stresses as our permission to stay is becoming an issue as we can’t return to China and my son and I were creating home-made application photos and filling in forms (in French – thank you Google translate) into the next morning. Then up early to do the first grocery shop in 3 weeks at 7.30am before the shops got busy. And then I was dead. I checked the most important emails and dealt with them – often just pointing people to our knowledge base. I left a bunch. And by the end of the day got “don’t worry I managed to solve it” from a few. The more robust our knowledge base can be, the easier this is going to become. I also need to make a huge investment in getting everything to ASK.wab.edu and then pointing to individual pages / boxes.

That’s going to take a huge investment not just in putting it all in “ask”, but also in getting our whole community to check there first as a habit. 

Rethinking it all

But I diverge from the real point of this blog and that is the increasing realisation that perhaps we need to rethink teaching and learning. I attended a Zoom webinar with around 50 MYP educators last week, led by the indomitable Lenny Dutton and the consensus seemed to be converging around the fact that huge scaling down of the curriculum and content expectations was occurring – with 50% being the most common number suggested. (Side note, it also made me incredibly proud of the leadership, foresight and guidance of WAB as we’ve been asynchronous from the start).  Perhaps it’s my A-type personality, or perhaps it was the question from my son “will all this result in the IB changing its exams next year to take account that we’re missing so much this year” that made me wonder what the heck we’re doing? Yes I’m not uncaring and I know all about Maslow vs. Bloom etc. I also know that there is less room for anxiety, worry and endless media scrolling when there’s useful and engaging work to be done.

I have to keep wondering if there is a different way, besides the asynchronous and slower pace to do this. My colleagues know I have two phrases of our greatest enemy in education that I repeat all the time “continual partial attention” and “switching costs“. I think education does particularly badly in helping students to find their flow or in adhering to Daniel Pinks’ tenants of motivation “autonomy, mastery and purpose”

I’m a veteran of (adult) distance learning, having done two back-to-back masters’ degrees remotely over four plus years. It was hard. Really hard. And it took a while (at least 3 subjects, lots of tears and feedback) before I managed to work out the best way to organise myself and my work flow and to find the balance between (part-time) work, full-time motherhood with a spouse who was on the road a lot and being a student.

The sweet spot for me was only two subjects per semester, and only working on one subject at a time each day.

Granted these were masters level subjects with an enormous course load and tons of academic reading to do. But then again I’m a highly literate adult, with hopefully more defined study skills and work habits. So if we’re asking students to do 8 or more subjects and teachers to be teaching 5 block – sometimes of different grades/subjects (middle school) is it any wonder we may be over-reaching? (The poor completion record of MOOCs is also something at the back of my mind).

004-teamsAs you know, I’ve also been grappling with that beast called Teams, and I’m trying to think out of the box and learn from all the questions and webinars and videos out there. One completely out of the box idea I had was perhaps we’re thinking of it the wrong way around – this is in particular to my thoughts about student agency, self-directed learning, portfolios and evidence of learning/mastery.  What if instead of having class/subject teams, each STUDENT had a team they were owner of. They’d have channels for their various subjects, and they’d choose which two or three subjects they’d focus on at any time and when they’d do it. Subject groups would have department teams with all the teachers, the curriculum and curriculum content that then could be pushed down to students and mentors would help guide students in their choices. Instead of semesters, for this age group we’d probably have to look at shorter periods of time to ensure that the “forgetting” curve didn’t kick in – especially in continual practice type subjects (I’m in dire danger with my Chinese according to my memrise app, not to mention muscle loss on the fitness side of things).

combating-the-forgetting-curve

What are you thinking?

In a conversation with a fellow educator last week, he said “Well WAB is just so far ahead in thinking about these things, we’re probably at least two or three years behind even putting theses discussions out in the open” and perhaps that is so with our Flow21 initiatives. I’m also wondering how far away we are from becoming a global rather than location based entity – for example some of our students were at one point enrolled in local schools where they were based and have now returned to the fold – what’s stopping us from enrolling other poorly served students into our programmes?

I’m thinking the IBO is also going to need to be far more proactive to fit the new reality. Personally I was not impressed with the timeline of action (exam cancellation and alternatives proposed) only coming after it was apparent that this wasn’t just a China problem. Value based leadership is essential in these times and that includes checking bias.

FeedbackOnlineMYP.001

I do think the IBO focus on ATLs (Approaches to Learning), particularly communication would remain foremost – again from Mullenweg:

“and writing quality, clarity, and skill becomes more and more valuable I think in all organizations but the more distributed you are for sure. This is going to be a windfall for all the humanities degrees. Absolutely we screened for it very heavily in hiring process. Like I actually don’t care where you went to college or anything like that but we do a lot to screen for writing ability both in the how you apply how we interact will hire many many people without ever actually talking to them in real time or on voice we do it entirely through slack and tickets and other things because that’s how we work”

If we were to explode education what would it look like? Please comment.

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Feedback during Online Learning by Stephen Taylor
Photo by Glen Carrie on Unsplash
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Teamin’ up

IMG_6391

This blog post is brought to you in-between too much stuff to do with online learning but as an absolute PLEA to Microsoft Education with their wonderful but exasperating Teams product to do some more heavy lifting to get Teams for Education into a shape and form that will get us through the next few months of online learning.

Why Teams is great – especially during online learning

Ok, I’ll do a sandwich – Teams has been wonderful for just existing. For making meetings quick and easy. For their integrated class/teacher/student notebooks (albeit they crash way too often and can refuse to sync properly). For their great way of setting up assignments making it quick and easy to have an overview, to mark and give feedback, for the rubrics.  (Although you can’t see assignment dates on the calendar – please vote for this!) They’re doing a really really good job of a lot of what we need.

And now for the BUT.

The big but. And I understand how it happened. It happened like a lot of things to do with education happen, including a lot of LMS (Learning management systems). They do something for the big people, in corporations or in universities, and schools are crying out for a functioning and functional LMS that’s mobile and cloud based and so something gets adapted and pushed down to secondary school or even primary. Ditto the other way, things are made for primary school where you have one classroom with kids and a few specialist teachers / classes and someone tries to push it up to secondary.

So, we’ve been doing online learning for nearly 8 weeks now (I think, I’m losing track, and last week was a week “off”). And we’re really needing to change gear. We can no longer stay in first gear as if we’re climbing a steep mountain while on the flat-endless prairies. So it’s time to take stock and adapt practices for the longer term.

What is not working that in education we actually really really need to work? And pretty fast? (And all the mistakes I made along the way as bonus crash-viewing – hopefully this will help someone else just starting on this path) .

7 tips for video conferencing

Child protection needs to be a priority

Teams was really new this year and has been adding great features along the way. So for a long while, it was an experimental sandpit for us where we were letting our early adopter teachers play around in, create as many teams as they wanted with no real oversight. It was great, we learnt a bunch and all was fine, because we were still having physical classes and mainly using it for assignments. Then Covid-19 hit and we went full stream online. We went from a handful of teams/teachers with regular feedback to over 300 teams and all teachers overnight. Despite having naming conventions (to easily find / sort teams) and requesting that EdTech and senior leadership were co-owners of all teams, that didn’t necessarily happen. Humans in panic and all. We set up protocols for online meetings. We requested teachers to record and save meetings.

  • People forget to record (meetings can’t be set to automatically record).
  • People forgot to put meetings on the public calendar(s) (we have one per grade)
  • Students start meetings before the meeting time/teacher is present.
  • Teams only keeps a meeting recording for 20 days.
  • Meetings in private channels can’t be recorded

These are things that were “nice” to have automated / sorted out before we went online but now are really important if we want to safe-guard students and protect teachers from (potential) unjustified accusations.

Here are the links to Microsoft teams UserVoice to request these things are implemented – please add your voice and vote:

Schools have children in them – they do stupid things!

We have a number of teams for professional purposes, and even we have problems with basic organisation – such as putting things in the right channel, starting conversations in the right channel etc. We were so glad when Teams started the option of private channels, but then so disappointed when they didn’t have the full functionality of open channels. Open channels are fine. But not for 10-11 year olds. They need to be corralled into private channels so they don’t mess things up for themselves and others.

Teams has an endlessly flat non-hierarchical structure

Yes ideally and eventually we’re going to kill grade levels and age-based learning and all of that. But it hasn’t happened yet. And it’s not going to happen in the next few months of online learning. And yes fortunately and for the better of all we’re moving from thinking about students and classes as “my” student/class/subject.

The very basic question we all grapple with in creating teams is how to structure it. Because there isn’t really a structure in teams.

Here is something I posted to the Tech Community educator group early on in December 2019 about the sheer math of the matter and some responses:

Screen Shot 2020-03-24 at 6.53.50 PMScreen Shot 2020-03-24 at 6.54.25 PMScreen Shot 2020-03-24 at 6.55.41 PM

I still don’t really have the optimal answer to that, particularly given the restrictions of private channels (maximum of 30 per team, no meeting scheduling and no meeting recording).

The thing is it’s better to think this all out in advance and to have a plan rather than to start and then have to reconfigure things afterwards because

  • you can’t change a private channel into a public channel after creating it as private
  • you can’t change a team into a channel – private or public or vice-versa
  • you can’t move a channel into another team
  • you can’t rename a team or change a teams name (well you may “think” you can and do it,  but you have potential real problems in the back-end in Sharepoint)
  • you can’t sort teams or put them into folders or pin them – you can drag them around – easy enough if you have a couple of teams not so if you have 300 of them, you can filter them – but that only works if you’ve named them all properly and consistently.

There is no dashboard / entry point

When you enter teams it is a full on experience. There is no dashboard with your calendar / assignments / meetings about to happen. You can scroll and scroll and still miss things – sometimes I have a meeting to attend and I even know in which team and it’s started but I still can’t find it quickly!

The analytics are very rudimentary

I’m the first to admit I’m a little bit of a data nerd – ok a lot. I have seen a lot of responses in the twitter-sphere along the lines of “no one is going to tell my child what to do during school closure” or “I don’t care if they learn or not as long as they’re happy” – but that’s not my demographic. Our families are paying a lot of money for their children’s education and learning and they have high expectations of us and their children.

[Personally I’d also say an engaged, purposefully busy and cared for child (not just by the parents but by the educator too) is a happier child than one left to endless repeats of anxiety creating bad-news on social media or TV. ].

So we spend a lot of time and energy making sure we’re mentoring students, monitoring their engagement and that they’re not falling too far behind their peers. Moodle, our usual LMS (but the clunky old stead) has great analytics. I can see exactly who’s been online and when, for how long and what they’ve been engaged in – but for many reasons our students and teachers like the intuitive feel of Teams more.

Teams has basic analytics for the week and month BUT I can’t click on anything! I can see the number of active / inactive users but I can’t click further and see WHO is inactive – so here’s one class for example – 9 kids’ haven’t re-engaged in the first 3 days after spring break. Who are they? Without looking through comments and assignments in detail I don’t know. I look at 28 days and see it’s just 1 person – who is that?

But that’s just one teacher for one subject – say I’m a mentor for 11 students and I need to report weekly on all my students and see who’s falling behind and whether it’s just one subject or all of them. No can do.

Lack of portfolios

Using portfolios as evidence of learning is really important as we progress in our understanding of education as a process of learning rather than students needing to jump through some curriculum and examination hoops at certain points in time in their lives (really relevant now as IB, GCSE and A level exams were cancelled this year). The structure of teams is that the Team in Sharepoint “owns” the work students have done as assignments. There is no easy and quick way to gather all the evidence of learning from the assignments and “give” it back to students to add to their portfolios as they move through the system or from one school / teacher / grade to another.

This may seem minor but it’s a major philosophical shift that need to happen in education. Learning is not something that happens to students from teachers, but something that students own and are accountable for. Especially now. Especially in concept-based education like the MYP.

There are many ways of showing mastery and the current set-up still puts the teacher in the control panel.

I’m way over my time and word limit now, so to end my sandwich:

What else works really well

Add on apps and integration with things like Zoom. A fabulous user-base in China with the inimitable James Rong – check out his blog – we have a joke here that if we ask a question to Microsoft, they ask James and then come back to us with his answer. Our other “joke” is that he posts an answer on his blog to a question we didn’t even know we had until we see the answer!

If you’re rockin’ teams and have some suggestions on best practice, please don’t give them on twitter or facebook where they’ll disappear, but add them as a comment here so that as a community we can all learn together. 

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I don’t know who created the image on my blog header but it’s amazing – it was passed onto me in a chat as a meme, if it’s yours please let me know so I can credit you.

 

First the earthquake and then the tsunami

Six weeks done and we enter our virtual online Spring Break. And my social media both professional and personal is awash with questions from people about school closure and online learning from a teacher/librarian/tech/personal point of view. It’s the long tail, the tsunami hitting land after the earthquake at sea. And I know that’s just a pretty picture of a wave on my blog and nothing at all like a tsunami. We in China had the Earthquake and now as folk in the rest of the world start running from the Tsunami we’re inundated with questions.

I’m not sure we’re equipped to answer them.

As private international schools in Asia we are a bunch of extremely privileged people. Both educators and pupils. My “go to” people in the China EdTech /Education world are a relatively homogenous group in that we are all well resourced and can go back to our leadership and ask for the money we need for the things we need to support and sustain online learning.  We have strong and capable leadership in our school who have modeled best practice in their empathetic and compassionate attitude and behaviour to all constituents of our community. We haven’t had to deal with salary cuts, union rules, students in situations of extreme poverty, or unreasonable demands. My colleagues and peers are a sharing, giving bunch and the things we create or come up with are shared freely without cost to others as we build on what works. The companies we work with have been super helpful and responsive and generous.

But the Tsunami has hit shore, and the coastal dwellers include the most vulnerable and least equipped or prepared for this. Our solutions won’t and cannot be their solutions. We have to remain humble in our responses. Even as I realise this and write of my experience I realise this comes from a place of privilege. I have these resources I can rely on.

The personal and political

This blog is a little more personal as I sit in the early hours of the morning after a fitful sleep. The virus has come close to home. A child in my daughter’s boarding school in the UK was diagnosed with the virus yesterday. After he left the school to go back to Europe on Wednesday. We heard last night European time. My husband is still in Nanjing. My son is with me in Switzerland. She’s in the UK. Three jurisdictions. Three different social, ideological cultural and emotional responses to this event.  But what does that matter when you have to make decisions? Decisions that could put other people at risk – like her guardians in the UK. A country that won’t let her be tested privately or publicly before going to them. A place where a lot of air-traffic is still occurring due to bizarre travel decisions by the leader of yet another nation. Where schools won’t/can’t make autonomous decisions and need to look to their government, but where the government, unlike the Chinese government, has a more cavalier response to the situation. And it seems is putting economic and political expediency above people’s lives. I keep second guessing myself.

This much I know is true. She should not be in a boarding house/school with so many other people. She can self-isolate with our friends / her guardians. She should not be travelling internationally at this time – airports / planes = high risk. Virus statistics and reporting is a numbers game. Literally a game. You test, your infection stats go up your fatality rate goes down. You don’t test, you can pretend all is ok. But then people die.

These are my concerns. Is she infected? If so, she infects the people who are generous enough to take her in. They infect other people. She gets ill – she’s young and healthy – but what if she gets very ill? I’m relying on friends to take care of my child, my young adult?

Parenting online

Ok, so a bit more about parenting (or the lack thereof) during the virus.

I wrote this for parents on a libguide right at the start of school closure. It was recently included in an article by ISTE so I thought I’d better revisit it. Funnily enough I don’t think I’d change anything. I’ll just expand a little on what it looks like practically and in reality for people going into this.

I’ve been working crazy hours, so parenting has suffered. This is a good thing in some respects.  Above all I think it’s important to keep good relationships going in the home. A big part of that is me refraining from nagging my son. When I do try and take what he considers to be an unreasonable interest in what he’s doing / how / when / how much, it nearly always ends in a row. Unless he’s doing the asking for help – in which case I need to drop everything and attend to him. I just love this (old) NY Times article about being a potplant parent – that’s needed more than ever during online learning.

My son has ADHD. He was totally overwhelmed at first. So were his teachers, even though I don’t think any of them are similarly afflicted. The first inclination for everyone is to try and carry on as normal, just online. It took at least two weeks or more for everyone to “calm the f down” and settle into workable solutions and routines. A couple of strategies that helped for us at home:

  • Putting a desk in the guest room upstairs to stop him working in bed / on the sofa / at the dining table. I know if he’s on his laptop in any of the latter spaces he’s either doing “light” work or goofing off. So does he. When he’s got a serious assignment or a meeting with a teacher he’ll go upstairs to his desk to work. There’s a glass door to the space and my new standing desk (much needed based on the hours I’m spending online and the back and arm ache) on the landing is a few metres away so I’m there but not there.
  • At the end of the first week when he finally admitted that he was losing it and couldn’t cope, I bought a paper agenda and we agreed he’d just think about and focus on two subjects a day. Once he’d caught up he could go back to the regular schedule, we agreed on which subjects they’d be for a few days together and then he took charge again. The fact that our school has moved to an asynchronous learning model is very helpful here.
  • Letting teachers be the teachers. We’re extremely, extremely fortunate to be at WAB. I can’t emphasise this enough. I know that his teachers are supporting him and looking out for him. That means I don’t (and shouldn’t) micromanage his learning. He has regular face-to-face check-ins with his teachers and his class mentor. They have physical and emotional distance from him while still being on his side. I don’t have that. It helps. When he messes up or misses a deadline, or doesn’t respond I will hear about it, but not before. We needed to intervene once with a busy-work / communication style situation, but that’s hopefully been resolved.
  • Sharing the household burden. It’s taken nearly 17 years, but after a week of closure he spontaneously came to me and laid out what part of the household chores he’d take upon himself “without any prompting”. This includes cleaning the bathrooms and toilets, taking out the garbage, helping walk our elderly neighbour’s dog and helping with the cooking and cleaning the kitchen. He’s stuck to that for over a month now and I’m more proud of that (and walking into his room yesterday and seeing it tidy, with the bed made) than anything else during this period.
  • Giving each other space – we’ll each go off for walks on our own. Take time out to cool down if we have words or after a shout. Yes I shout. And swear. And so does he. We’re human and emotions can run high. But we’ve found a new type of equilibrium in our relationship, an understanding that that should be more important than all the other details. It’s been a long time coming.
  • And I think he’ll want me to add this, he’s not a gamer. That’s huge. I know families with big concerns about the vast amount of time online at the moment that’s spent gaming not learning. I am grateful to him that this is not the case, and he reminds me of it when he sees the impact on some of his friends and peers.

This gif shows how I felt by 7am yesterday morning after nearly 7 weeks non-stop working. We’re now in our Spring Break and I’m promising myself to get off the computer and do some reading. Of real physical books!

via GIPHY

 

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Photo by Joshua Dewey on Unsplash

Online learning is not new shiny things

I’ll be the first to admit I’m an old boring Cassandra. It possibly / probably has to do with my age. Just to put things into context. Once upon a quarter century plus ago I was an auditor finishing up my articles. It was in the days when “calling” existed. Not the kind of cold-calling or call-centre type of calling, but when every single document that left the accounting firm’s doors would be read by one accountant to another (not secretarial staff, the actual articled clerks with three or four years university behind them) and checked to ensure there were no typos or spelling or number mistakes. This was the 1980’s just at the cusp of personal computers. It was tedious but important work, because the reputation of the firm and profession was at stake – or so we were told.

messengersA podcast episode that made a particularly profound impact on me was Freakanomics’ “In Praise of Maintenance” . Another favourite is Hidden Brain’s The Cassandra Curse which is particularly pertinent at the moment – with the fudging of Corona Virus numbers by a person who shall not be named in a country that should know better. A great book to read on Messengers and Messages is “Messengers” by Stephen Martin – valuable lessons on who gets listened to and why – spoiler – middle aged women are generally not listened to.

What does this have to do with online learning due to school closure in the time of Corona? That doesn’t quite trip off the tongue like “Love in the Time of cholera“… Well basically people are spending a lot of time exchanging tips on what tools to acquire and how to use them. All the tech giants and wanna-be’s are out there touting their wares and offering freebies (but what happens when everyone invests time and effort into content in them and we go back to having to pay???). Twitter and Facebook are awash with what tools to use for communication, teaching, feedback and learning. Padlets and Wakelets abound – that will all be redundant or fall into disuse or no longer be updated before you can blink your eye – because maintenance is well, boring. About one in 100 things I read are about sensible boring matters like setting up procedures, making sure systems are secure, robust and accurate.

And yet probably 99% of my time is spent documenting, testing, and fixing things that go wrong as people rush from the one new shiny thing to the other. It’s the boring maintenance stuff I’d recommend you spend some time on –

  • is all student data up to date in your student information system – we’ve had some poor souls join school during closure!
  • Are all students in the right classes / groups for every tool you’re using?
  • Is there a central entry point that students/parents can find information and get the daily/weekly learning and ask questions / get answers and where attendance can be taken?
  • Is there a place where information and knowledge management / FAQs can be accumulated for Teachers and Students (ours are in libguides)?
  • Are expectations for Teachers and Students clear, unambiguous and enforced (if necessary)?
  • Are there central calendars, preferably by grade where students and parents can check for online classes and meetings and assignment/assessment dates?
  • Are the lines of communication for Edtech / IT support / curriculum support etc. clear and easily found and used.
  • Are we working hard or are we working smart? Witness the overwhelming inboxes of some teachers who don’t make use of central forums for Q&A but still answer individual “same same” questions time after time.

A very valuable (but time consuming) exercise is to pick one student per grade and follow their “expected” path online checking from morning check-in, class to class, tool by tool and including the calendar to see that everything works as expected.

To parody the old saying of “an heir and a spare” – for each teaching and learning outcome you probably only need a pair of tools. One that is your trusty old steed that you preferably already were using before closure and everyone is familiar with (I nearly said “happy” there, but I deleted it, because hardly anyone is ever happy with the familiar old steed, they want the “next thing”) and you can use for 95% of things and the other is the one you have as a back up for when things collapse for one reason or another .

OREO online learning I still like Alison Yang’s graphic that came out waaaay at the start of the closures – about a million years ago (actually only five weeks but it feels much longer). Since not all the tools she recommended were “China Friendly) I used it (with permission) as the basis for the summary of the tools we’re using – each link in the guide leads to a page of explanations and usage tips and recommendations.

There comes a time in online-learning when as a community you have to agree to say “no” more often than “yes” because there is only so much a community can absorb, process and use effectively. You also need to be able to focus on just one thing each week on the back-end and do it properly.

This week was my “week of the calendar”. One could possibly not think of anything more boring and less “sexy”. But I was floundering under the 100s of zoom and team meetings that were popping up everywhere, some clashing with each other, many invisible or rendered invisible by poor naming strategies. I think I’ll change this into a separate post to minimise a TW/DR problem in blogs.

Have a great week – and don’t forget the plumbing.

Addition: 18 March 2020 – this is getting a lot of attention so I thought I’d add the infographic I made yesterday – happy to improve it based on suggestions (please add as a comment in the comments)

EdTech this and this

Photo by Sharon McCutcheon on Unsplash

Panda Madness

As we move into Week 5 of online learning I had a yearning to return to my librarian roots. I was prompted by our librarian network sending out a notice for the voting for the annual Panda Book Awards. Despite the closures the voting will continue. In my previous incarnation as a PYP librarian in Singapore I found it a lot easier to promote the Red Dot Book awards – you have a weekly captured audience in primary, plus we had our after school reading club geared towards preparing for the annual Readers’ Cup.

Things change in Middle School – puberty seems to affect the reading muscle as much as it does every other aspect of being. Also in China we have the “Kids Read” competition for middle schoolers, which is considerably more daunting – 100 books in teams of four.

Another aspect of online learning is that it is really hard for everyone to stay motivated. Our daily entry point each day is the Mentor discussion forum on Moodle. As much as Moodle is extremely robust, it’s also very old fashioned and clunky, so driving traffic there is a chore.

I’d been seeing a lot on my twitter feed on US librarians setting up for “March Madness” and that inspired me to get a “Panda Madness” going for March. Besides the voting I also wanted to put in some challenges for points with a couple of aims:

  • getting students onto our online reading platform Sora
  • getting students reading online generally
  • getting students reading the Panda Books
  • getting students to promote books through FlipGrid and book reviews on Oliver
  • making the daily sign-in to their mentor groups a bit more motivating and of course
  • having some fun

First off was selecting the books – in MS we’re literally in the middle of the reading spectrum so I could select from both the “middle” and “older” reader lists. I selected 16 of the books, leaving out a couple of picture books and trying to use books that were available on Sora so they could still be read.

Panda Knockout covers The complication in China is that not only do books have to be available with rights in China, they also have to be approved by an agency for use.  So the hurdles we climb (besides expensive platform fees and expensive digital rights that disappear after 12/24/26 months or 26 checkouts are:

  • lack of a digital version,
  • georights, or
  • publisher preferences. For example, the publisher Hachette Livre (one of the “Big Five”), don’t sell their ebooks to schools or libraries outside of the US.

Then there’s weird stuff, like “Front Desk” is available as an audiobook but not an eBook … usually it’s the other way around, books are available as an eBook but not audiobook (which kind of makes sense as there are extra costs and efforts involved recording an audiobook). I’ve reached out to Kelly Yang and she’s looking into it (love authors who are invested in helping one out!)

In the Older list we’re missing “How to Bee” and “The Assassination of Brangwain Spurge” I’ve reached out on Twitter to both sets of authors but not heard anything back yet. In the Middle list we’re covered, although it would be nice to have “Front Desk” as an eBook – there’s a hierarchy of how students like to read

  1. Not at all (lol)
  2. Physical Copy
  3. eBook
  4. Audiobook

Next step was making the knockout lists. That was a tough one. Which books to pair against each other to make it a little bit exciting – I must admit to have spent way too much time on overthinking this one.

 

Then I didn’t want to start the voting straight away, so for Friday (we have virtual WEIRD every Friday where I lead the Mentor discussion) I started with the motivation and getting ready bit. In order to do that I needed to set up a point system*, Libguide, Flipgrid and Microsoft Team, plus all the graphics. Needless to say that consumed all of Thursday in-between the usual Tech troubleshooting.

Moodle Message

And then it was a case of waiting with baited breath as to the response – luckily it was extremely positive – by the time I woke up at 6am European time, my “copilot” on the MSTeam had approved 83 students and by the end of the day we had 121 students and teachers signed up (over 1/3 of our student population).

IMG_6210

Yesterday I wanted to sort out the leaderboard and the scoring … that was another full day task – mainly because there is so much to set up – a current and reliable student/mentor group spreadsheet (yes, we’ve had a few poor souls who joined the school just prior to, or during the closure period), getting all the data of who had signed up to Sora – with proof, and then the most time consuming – going through the library records of each of the 16 books to award points to the consistent readers who’ve been reading the books since the start of the school year in August! A very manual procedure.

Another thing one would expect would be easy but wasn’t is extracting a list of “members” from a MS team! There’s no way to export that – so I had to copy and past from the list into excel and then sort it out and match to my master sheet.

Another thing that I spent way too much time on of course was creating the graphic of the leaderboard.  I must admit to having found one I quite liked and then adapting it. On the first day students had gained 872 points and we had a history of the books being read 129 times. A lot of students / groups tied as it was the first day.

Panda Madness Leaderboard 280220

Then rubrics / criteria for the Book Trailers and alternative book covers were created. Luckily I only had to adapt these from the ISLN Readers’ Cup that I was heavily involved in during my time there, and Barb Reid kindly sent me the latest versions.

The last thing was to create a Form for students to predict the winner and to post the updated status to the Moodle announcement for Monday.

Hopefully the rest will just be maintaining the scoresheet each week and monitoring the Flipgrid; student book reviews on Oliver; and entries for the book cover competition and book trailers… The first knockout vote will be on Friday.

Let’s see how this goes and if we can achieve our aims!  Already the teams who have teachers involved (they can take part with their group) are the leading teams… says something!  Happy to share everything created with other schools affected by the closure – just flip me an email or PM on twitter with your email. Everything is on Pages and can easily be adapted / changed for different books.

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*Points for now – I’ll add to this as we go on

  • 5 points for taking part
  • 5 points per Flipgrid promotion of a book (multiple promotions possible – but you must have read the book)
  • 5 points for a one paragraph review of a Panda book on Oliver
  • 2 points for every Panda book you borrowed before school closed
  • 2 points for signing into Sora (upload a screenshot to Moodle to gain the point)
  • 5 points for borrowing and reading a Panda eBook on Sora (screenshot and summary to gain the points)
  • 5 points for borrowing and listening to a Panda AudioBook on Sora (screenshot and summary to gain the points)
  • 10 points for predicting the winner
  • 5 points for predicting one of the 1/2 finalists
  • 2 points for predicting one of the 1/4 finalists
  • 1 point for predicting one of the 1/8 finalists
  • 5 points per good quality book trailer following criteria
  • 5 points per good quality alternative book cover following criteria
  • Each week new random bonus points will be awarded based on new challenges

Objects in the mirror

As we enter week 4 of online learning (and week 5 for me of the supporting and setup) a few musings on the process.

I chose today’s title because a lot of what we do is like trying to drive a car in reverse over a long distance for a long time with only a side-mirror as any view on reality. The other reason is that things are both distorted and exaggerated.

My mantra has always been that it’s not about tech, it’s about people. And that seems even truer if possible now. Students (and teachers) who were struggling in real life classrooms are struggling now. In some ways it’s just more obvious and exaggerated now. Those with a great rapport with students are re-creating that rapport albeit online. And the people who thought the usual rules and ways of doing things didn’t apply to them still think that – only it’s really messing up students ability to find what they need to do and to do it on time, so maybe, just maybe they’ll be sanctioned.

This week I wrote a blog for our parent EdTech blog forum about maintaining social relationships during online learning. What I didn’t say, because it wasn’t appropriate in that forum, was what my son said to me when I asked him what his advice would be. Besides saying he was just doing what he always did usually and that he had mates whose sleep/wake patterns were so messed up that he knew he could have contact with them no matter what the time was. He’s quite a perceptive kind of kid, and comes out with great one-liners, like this one: “the sad thing is that suddenly some kids are realising that they don’t have friends. They hang around in some amorphous group at school where they have the illusion they belong, but this just highlights they don’t have one real friend”.

It’s a time of learning so much about oneself. Like I’m usually a highly structured person with great habit-stacking and very regular when I wake up, exercise, work, read, learn Chinese, etc etc. This usually even includes holiday time when I always have great learning goals which I usually achieve (more or less, say 60-80%). But trying to be available for everyone all the time has truly messed me up big time. This weekend is the first one in five that I’m refusing to look at my emails or teams or WeChat (except for posts from friends). I’ve started refusing meetings starting at 3am-6am. And trying to force myself to bed on time (since last night). Because no proper rest means that I’ve become a bit of a brain-dead idiot myself. Even my reading has been suffering – I remarked on twitter to someone the other day that I was incapable of reading my school book club book (Down Girl) because I didn’t have the mental capacity for anything besides series of mediocre historical crime fiction and popular nonfiction (thanks Bill Bryson for “The Body” – yup that virus you predicted has come to reality, and I’m working my way to an early death right now).

So what works?

Having systems and structures and routines in place: When I originally read “When Adults Change” I thought it was a “nice idea” and something that would be “nice to have”. I’m beginning to think it really is a “need to have” at this point. Off line there is considerable room for ambiguity. Lots of opportunity to improvise and make things up on the spot or change direction 180 degrees. Online is less forgiving. Especially for people under stress. If you say that students can find their daily check-in and work for the day in place A, if it is not there about 80% of the students will assume there is no work for the day. About 10% will go hunting around using intuition and some kind of savvy and about 10% will bother to ask the teacher and/or EdTech person or their parents will do so. That means at any one time in any subject a lot of kids are missing the boat.  Having one daily entry point solves a lot of that. 

Simplifying instructions to the point of no-ambiguity: When things aren’t clear you can see on people’s faces that you need another way to explain things. That you need to rewind. That you need to do things one step at a time. Online, even in conference calls the nuances of facial and body expression are reduced to caricatures of themselves. Ideally you should only be delivering one message at a time. In clear simple language. With illustrations / marked up screenshots and screencasts. You need to say what you mean and mean what you say.

Eliminate and refine channels of communication: I tend to be quite private and don’t generally have colleagues on my personal social media, even if they’re my friends. In China WeChat has resulted in significant blurring of those personal/professional boundaries. Luckily in MS we’ve said the WeChat is not an acceptable channel for teacher/student communication. Unfortunately it is still so in HS, something I don’t support as a parent of a HS student – even if he thinks it’s ok. But I still regularly have people trying to contact me on school Tech matters on WeChat, while my order of assistance is email, teams and then finally about 4 or 5 hours later I may get to WeChat – because I still see that as my “personal space”. I’ve had to communicate that clearly to people at the risk of them feeling it’s unkind of me.

For students I’ve recommended that teachers eliminate one-on-one communication by email as much as possible for “communal” issues. If students post a problem in a communal forum, the chances are (a) more students have that issue / misunderstanding (b) some student has already resolved the issue and can help the others (c) everyone sees the issue and the solution. So anything from two to 60 one-on-one emails are eliminated. On the other hand it’s good to have one-on-one (with another adult in the room) mentoring sessions to make sure that students are no isolated and are feeling supported.

Knowledge management – Curate and publish FAQs & Issues: Thank heavens for Libguides * at this stage of the game. I’ve always been a fan, but now I can not only “can” responses but also point people to a central place where they can (hopefully); help themselves. I have a central one that points teachers, parents and students into more detailed pages. A couple of things I see happening are well documented in EdTech lore – the “waves” of adoption and understanding. We have the early adopters (along with the EdTech team) who already were tech savvy and quickly work out the tools and issues. So their questions become valuable in setting up the FAQs about your basic LMS, they then move onto experimenting with other tools, and gaining and sharing expertise and issues in these (like Teams). Besides this there are some amazing groups on WeChat China Tech who’ve been experimenting and documenting and helping each other (Thanks James Rong – the Teams Guru) Then the bulk of teachers start having the same experiences, and if you’ve had time to document things you can point them to this.

Then you have the very long tail of people who have not been keeping up with developments and out of the blue want to use tools that are either obscure or have already been tested and failed.  That’s what we are experiencing right now.

Keep things minimal and simple: managing EdTech has always been a balance of having a few “old” tried and tested tools and giving teachers and the Tech team the freedom to experiment and try things out with the hope that something amazing is around that corner that will be a game changer. Very few new tools are truly game-changing. Even Microsoft Teams for Education, which is pretty good but still has a LOT of work to do before it’s ready to take over the learning space (I’ll write more on that some other time).

Now is NOT the time to throw new tools and edtech at teachers and students/families. See my point above about one daily entry point. It’s also not the time to expect students to use seven different tech tools to complete one piece of work, with the risk of failure to connect at each point. It’s also not realistic to expect your IT support staff to have to up-skill to be able to support all the many and various issues that may arise. That’s why it’s important to be able to either say “no” or “only if it’s proven to work in China and you’re on your own if things go wrong”.

Don’t create busy-work – remember your educational goals. This is really important. In the first week of closure I noticed at home with my own son (first year IB), the difference between the teachers who were in tune with the idea of online learning as an asynchronous experience that would be used to continue teaching and learning and those who saw it as a delivery mechanism for work-sheets and busy-work. Online learning is hard – particularly if no-one (teachers or students) signed up for it in the first place. It requires extraordinary levels of self-motivation. It’s far more “active” and “harder work” in the sense that generally in a normal school situation students can gain a lot of their education by passively going to classes and absorbing what’s going on.

Some of our students are discovering previously un-tapped resources of self-discipline and self-motivation. Many of our teachers are being amazingly innovative. A lot of very positive things are coming out of this experience. Both the positive and negative are just very magnified right now.

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* As regular readers of this blog know, I’m a huge fan of Libguides during this period they’ve become even more valuable than every before in information and knowledge curation. For their quite modest price they definitely punch above their weight in reliability and accessibility. And they’re not hard to learn – some of our teachers have jumped right on board and with a bit of training and help have created amazing guides – see this one for our G5 PYPx on Sustainable Development Goals made by @MrsBidder

Photo by Elly Filho on Unsplash

Ha, ha, ha bonk

That’s me laughing my head off at my thoughts two weeks ago on this same blog. It’s also me laughing at this article about setting priorities and using the “Urgent / Important” matrix. 

urgent important matrix

So we’ve just finished our first week of online learning and I’ve learnt a heck of a lot. One of the main things being that the only way to get out of box 1 is by working roughly 20 hours a day non-stop so that you can set up systems and structures to move things into normal operational mode.

The problem is that while I’m answering urgent matters with students and teachers I’m not setting up the structures.

What I’ve managed to set up so far:

It’s basically a triage system, but unfortunately it’s hard for people in panic mode to absorb so much information, so a lot of the time we do need to do emergency surgery. I must say that Microsoft Teams has come out the hero here – besides a brief all systems down last week, it’s been pretty robust and reliable.

Now I’m going for a walk, the sun is shining and the moon is full. Everything else is shot. No blogging, no Chinese, little reading of anything substantial, basic diet and way too little sleep, no schedule.

How is everyone else doing?

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Matrix by The Startup on Medium
Photo by Tim Mossholder on Unsplash

Making your bed and other stuff

There literally is a book about the importance of making your bed each day. Personally I don’t put much store by that type of advice – particularly as it’s written by a male military type. But I do think it helps to have a reason to get out of bed in the first place. That’s way more important.

Luckily today the pollution had settled down to the red zone so I could go out for a walk along the river with my high duty pollution mask – the blue sky is deceptive – the AQI was still over 150 – but I was not the only one lured outside – the river bank was full of fishermen probably suffering from the same cabin fever as I was.

Our local grocery had luckily stocked up again and some delicious strawberries were available which I could take to my lunch date with some fellow librarians where we had a great book chat. That way I could tick off two things that I think are incredibly important for sanity in this period – time exercising and time with other people.

Now just like the war that would be over by Christmas, I’m wondering if this closure may last longer? I did a little SARS research last night and found out that Hong Kong schools were closed for 7 weeks. Depending when you start the clock ticking (from the start or end of the CNY break) that could take us to the end of March. That means an extended period of not only online teaching but also home-schooling. It also means different things depending on the age of your child(ren) / students.

Possibly the worst hit are our final year IB students – things are really tight between now and 23 May when they graduate. So while 2 weeks isn’t much in the grand scheme of things for most people, it results in a bit of a train smash for their mock exams, finalising projects, doing things that would have helped them create a portfolio if they’re applying to creative tertiary study etc. etc. For all the talk of online and blended learning there’s still a heck of a lot that requires physicality of self and material. And many related activities (sports fixtures, APEC drama etc. have also been cancelled).

Further down the food-chain I can assure you there are good reasons why most of us don’t homeschool – infanticide being one thing that comes to my mind. Beijing Kids had an article on this last year – but that was in a situation where you could do the socialising and gyms and sports facilities were open. Many families are hunkering down and some won’t let their children out of the house or receive guests (not moi).

My husband is still working in Nanjing, I cut my holiday there short on Sunday, so I’m getting the updates from there as well. It seems it has the facilities to take care of patients, and hotels have also been requested to be available for R&R of medical staff. According to him it’s pretty much a ghost town still and more and more areas are shut down. You can follow the live construction of the hospital in Wuhan as well.

Here our compounds multiple entries are shut down and everyone is flowing through one central gate where non-resident ID’s and temperatures can be checked.

And now for some book suggestions. I’ll start with G7 as it is in the middle of middle school and we had a rather cool unit just before the break looking at young adult literature over time – “Changing Times Changing Voices“.  Students read either “Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime” or “The Outsiders” (or both for some) and were encouraged to explore some of the Time 100 best Young Adult Books which we had on permanent display/borrowing plus the current and last year’s Kids’ Read 100 titles.  So – there you have a list of 300 books suitable for teens if you’re short of inspiration!

A side note on the Kid’s Read titles …. last night on twitter there was a post on reading challenges including “reading hard” with Book Riot’s “Read Harder Challenge” * I had a look through the challenge (well worth considering in this time) and realised that our chosen titles covered all the ground amply!

 

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Kids Read 2020 books

* The Challenge – I have some ideas for these – what are yours?

  • Read a YA nonfiction book
  • Read a retelling of a classic of the canon, fairytale, or myth by an author of color
  • Read a mystery where the victim(s) is not a woman
  • Read a graphic memoir
  • Read a book about a natural disaster
  • Read a play by an author of color and/or queer author
  • Read a historical fiction novel not set in WWII
  • Read an audiobook of poetry
  • Read the LAST book in a series
  • Read a book that takes place in a rural setting
  • Read a debut novel by a queer author
  • Read a memoir by someone from a religious tradition (or lack of religious tradition) that is not your own
  • Read a food book about a cuisine you’ve never tried before
  • Read a romance starring a single parent
  • Read a book about climate change
  • Read a doorstopper (over 500 pages) published after 1950, written by a woman
  • Read a sci-fi/fantasy novella (under 120 pages)
  • Read a picture book with a human main character from a marginalized community
  • Read a book by or about a refugee
  • Read a middle grade book that doesn’t take place in the U.S. or the UK
  • Read a book with a main character or protagonist with a disability (fiction or non)
  • Read a horror book published by an indie press
  • Read an edition of a literary magazine (digital or physical)
  • Read a book in any genre by a Native, First Nations, or Indigenous author