The May Juggernaut

I often reflect on the fact that May is - hands down - the best month in New Jersey.  Days can often be warm - but not yet sweltering - and nighttime sleeping weather is cool enough that a quilt and blanket keep me cozy as I sleep with the windows open.  Birds sing me awake in the mornings and the days are steadily getting longer.  Plants and gardens are looking splendid, with hostas, peonies, irises, and rhododendrons at their best.  The scent of my neighbor’s lilac bush perfumes the day into the  golden twilight.  

May is all those things but it’s also the last full month of school and the days are crammed full, accompanied by a to-do list that gets longer and longer, seemingly resistant to completion of anything. My Middle School students are alternately energized by the blissful weather and then exhausted at the idea of doing a single damn thing.   The end-of-the year is in sight but not quite within reach and they can be overwhelmed.  I understand the feeling; I’ve been known to read an extra chapter when I should just turn out the light and go to sleep.  The front porch calls to me with a siren song of temptation and I don't bother to resist.  

For me, the countdown to the close of the school year officially starts today.  There are 13 days between me and the sweet freedom of June 8, punctuated by the long weekend of Memorial Day, which will be a welcome respite.  As the busy days fly by, I will count them down and look forward to the bliss of Summer’s freedom.

Real Life Texts with KO: Friday in May edition

The Backstory: In the world of schools, May is a juggernaut to be survived.  Getting to the end of the week feels glorious but not all Fridays are created equal.  Yesterday started on a rough note.  I texted my sister and my mom a report.

Me: This morning at 5:45 am, the downstairs toilet clogged.  I fixed it and thought ok…day gets better from here.

Me: At 6:45 am, I discover that Lucy has puked in my bed.  I don’t want a do-over for Friday, I just want it to be over.

KO:  Friday needs to pull its shit together.

Me:  Truth.

Update: The day did improve in that it eventually permitted me to come home from work, cut the grass, wash the sheets of my bed, and dream of sleeping in on Saturday.

A Starry Respite

We’ve had Spring Break for the last two weeks.  I worked the first week, plugging my way through a 40 item to-do list, each task something that will help the final part of the school year to unfold smoothly (or at least avoid a shit show). I spent the second week away from school and work, sleeping in, and looking for the evening stars, which I found Tuesday night in rural Pennsylvania, in the company of JT and some dear friends. 

It was a welcome respite.  This morning, I’m up early for the return of students and the resumption of classes.  Spring is always busy - often ridiculously so - and I expect this Spring will be no exception.  With any luck, the time off will fortify me until the warm days truly settle in and bring the ease of sunshine and lots of time outdoors, which I crave these days.    

Just in Time

I stood in the kitchen this morning, looking out the windows toward the East as the glow of a vibrant pink sunrise slowly filled the horizon, glowing behind the branches of the leafless trees at Winter’s close.  It was beautiful; an unearned glory for a day that needed it.

Spring Break starts this afternoon and it’s been a long week - far longer than the 5 days it apparently lasted - and the time off is badly needed by everyone: me, my students, my teachers.  The Winter quarter is often difficult and this one has been no exception.  As the hardships added up, our collective patience thinned, and we arrive at this day with a great need to refresh our reserves.  

When things get tense, I remind myself, my students, and my faculty that we can disagree and still move forward if we can all be people of good will.  It’s not as easy as it sounds.  It requires everyone to step outside of themselves to see that there is a bigger picture.  It has the value of being both a guide in the moment as well as a clear map for moving forward.  It’s worked before and I’m hoping that that charm endures and can guide us into the light this time around as well.

Back in the Swing of Things

We’ve a half day of professional development today and classes resume tomorrow.  I am ready to return to my routines and see my students.  In the coming weeks, we’ll be exploring the place of the U.S. in the world and American participation in WWI.  From there, we’ll move on to the 1920s and it’s a fun decade to teach, so the next few months will feature some very enjoyable history for students and me to explore as we weather the cold.  

I am recognizing that one side effect of the breakup with T is that I no longer feel guilty for loving my job.  She hated hers and I always felt sad about that, not only because it’s hard to help someone whose days are often miserable but because work is a pleasure for me and always has been.  It provides structure and meaning in my days and I value that.  Even when I am frustrated - and that invariably happens - I still feel grateful that I get to teach something that I love to students whom I value at a school that works effectively.  That’s not a bad way to spend my days and it's a nice thing to acknowledge as I move into 2023.

Week Five

Every school year, sometime around week five, I become convinced I have developed a terminal illness.  My body aches at the end of the day, supper seems like an enormous undertaking, and I crawl into bed at 9 pm, already half-asleep.  I debate how to tell my family that my time is up.  Then I call my sister, a fellow teacher whose year starts a bit earlier, and she reminds me that it’s week five, and my condition is chronic but not terminal.  Soon after that, I gain my school legs, and I’m fine. 

This morning, I got up at 5:30 am, crawled into the shower, and was pleased to discover that overnight my vision had magically improved so that I could see clearly.  Two seconds later, my glasses were dripping wet.  I had gotten into the shower with them on.  

It’s week five, y’all.

Old Man Tree October 1

September of any school year is typically exhausting but September in pandemic school was well beyond that.  In the first full week, we quarantined more than 20 kids;  the next week brought another dozen at home.  Students have been a bit off the rails on the adolescent behavior front.  It’s been a challenging month.   Each day, I’d come home and take some time to admire Old Man Tree, the sentinel of time in my back yard and a reminder of the many things that endure even as life seems upside down.       

For all the difficulties of September, the teaching and learning - with every kid in class and none on Zoom - has been absolutely splendid.  I love that part of school again and it’s a most-welcome development.    As we settle into October’s shortening day, learning feels almost normal.  Mother Nature has been kind to us when it comes to outside recess and the changing leaves are here.

Old Man Tree is getting ready for the next season.  Under his careful watch, I’ll be ready as well.

Flowers at Midweek!

This day is the halfway mark on the last week before Spring Break.  Flowers are in order and for a whole bunch of reasons.

It’s sunny today and temps may actually exceed 60 degrees.

I am wearing a Spring dress (with a warm cardigan - of course - but still……)

This school year has been so damn hard and the approaching Spring Break will get us over the hump to the last part of the year.  I don’t like to wish away time but teaching hybrid in a pandemic is ridiculously difficult for all of us - students, teachers, and parents.  The weeks we have been remote were also hard but remote is nothing compared to the challenge of teaching hybrid.  The other side of Spring Break is just nine weeks of April and May instruction, all more bearable because the end is in sight.

Last year’s Spring Break was no break for me as the school frantically set up for remote homebound remote instruction.  This year’s Break promises some actual time off.  Add to that the chance for some enjoyable meanderings in New Jersey, thanks to the fact that I am vaccinated, and I am giddy about the coming break.    

The Longest Month of the Year

February’s status as the shortest month of the year may be a thing for the calendar but this year February found a way to drag on and on.  I can’t quite explain it because most of the month featured at least one snow day each week.  That the snow fall often measured more than a foot is part of the challenge.  Neither our snow blower or our shovels were ready for that much snow and much of it lingers in piles in our front yard, as proof that Winter wasn’t messing around this year.  

I always long for Spring and this year is no exception.  At midday today I realized why.  For this year’s model of hybrid school, our 6th graders are in session every day but our 7th and 8th graders are on campus for one week and then learn remote the next.  Snow and the dictates of a pandemic have sometimes demanded that we all learn remotely.  There has been little regularity to the year.  To provide time for non-digital play, the principal and I decided we would have daily recess after lunch.  To give the teachers a break,  supervise every recess on our own.  Our plan was to have that recess outside and for most of the fall and into a cold January, we did that.  The end of January brought epic snow and that snow has lasted all of the month.  So recess is indoors in a large space.  Middle Schoolers - even just 50 of them - are the loudest creatures on the planet and the mid-day noise can sometimes be draining, even when it’s the noise of happy kids.  This week we were on campus for all five days and that meant five loud recess duties.  I am ready for the snow to melt and the ground to dry so that my banshees and I can have our recess outside.

Snow Day Grievances

With a Winter storm featuring 24 hours of snow on the horizon, last night my school made the call for a snow day today.  I was not mad about that because I love myself a leisurely morning and with classes cancelled I can freely indulge in such luxury.  The rest of the day will be given over to catching up with work —— new lessons for the 8th grade, comments home about quizzes and such, a calendar for the post Spring Break months, planning for a (fingers-crossed) in-person but socially distant closing ceremony for the 8th grade.  In short, there is plenty to keep me busy today.

Around 8:30 am I opened up my side of our school digital platform to find no less than 8 messages from students.  Several wanted to know if school was cancelled….all acknowledged that they had received the school message which read “…Thursday, Feb. 18 will be a snow day for all students.  All instruction and campus activities are cancelled.”  

Yikes.

A few more students sought to find out if the digital open note quiz, assigned three weeks ago and slated to close tonight at 8 pm, would have an extension because there was no class today.  

Ahem, hard NO.

A few more offered explanations for why they had submitted incomplete quizzes and were now sending additional answers to the quiz questions.   Would I please give them full credit?

I cannot even.  

At this juncture, I took a pause from school work and stuck my nose into a Miss Read book.  Her February in Fair Acre features early daffodils and the smell of Spring.  That’s a balm to my tired soul and spirit.  When I return to the business of quiz grading and such, it will be with a patient heart.  Pandemic school is hard for us all.  Winter makes it harder.  We are all worried and afraid.  But kindness is free and I will find some hope; I always do.

The quiet fall of snow is lovely.  We have heat, running water, and electricity in my corner of the nation.  Winter can’t last forever and March is on the horizon.  Sassafras Spring will surely arrive even sooner.  We can do hard things.  And we will.

Quarantine’s End

T and I have been in quarantine since January 20.  Two weeks and three negative tests later, we’ve shoveled ourselves out from the snow and today I return to school in person.  I’ll be teaching in the hybrid model we’ve used all year and so I don’t really expect to see that many students in person in my classes — usually no more than 4 students are in the room; most Zoom in to school — but I am glad of the chance to leave the house and teach from my classroom.  

I taught from home while I was in quarantine but it was hard and a huge burden on the co-workers who were called upon to hook up the classroom into my Zoom.  The longer I teach hybrid, the more frustrating I find it.   But that is a post for another day.  Today is a day to be glad and grateful for my blessings, so I won’t grumble and I will hope, as I do every day, that my turn for a vaccine comes soon.

Doing Hard Things

My second week of hybrid learning school starts today.  When we decided to invite half of the students on campus for each week (the other half learn remotely), I knew that we had selected the hardest of all teaching options.  Last week, as classes got underway, the difficulty of the choice was confirmed.

This week, the students in class last week will be remote and the second crop of students will be present in class.  Some families have opted to be all remote and with those kids mixed in, more than half of each class I teach is off campus each day.  Teaching school with masks and social distancing, with more than half of each class learning remote, is more than exhausting.  It’s also really, really hard.  

Though my classroom is familiar (albeit with plexiglass and desks spaced 6 feet apart), so much of class is different, starting with the tiresome but necessary mask worn while teaching to masked face students in person while the rest of the class chimes in via Zoom.  For years, I’ve taught lessons using an iPad to broadcast notes on the screen.  In hybrid learning, I must choose being seeing the faces of my remote students or broadcasting my notes.  I’ve chosen student faces but that makes the task of teaching students how to take notes much harder.  Lessons take longer and while I don’t feel the pressure to cover material at the same pace as the pre-pandemic world, I’m increasingly aware of what we lose in this method of schooling.

For now, I persevere, aware that there is no other option available.  I relish the laughter and chatter of students doing what middle schoolers do.  I’m also aware of the relative privilege of my students, all of whom have Internet access and a brand-new iPad; most have two devices while they learn remotely.  If it’s hard for us, I can only imagine how much harder it is for teachers whose students have so much less to work with.

But that doesn’t mean my exhaustion isn’t real.  That doesn’t mean my lift isn’t heavy.  Each day I remind myself and then my students that we can do hard things.  And each day we do the hard thing moves us one day closer to a brighter horizon.  

And with that, a new week of hard things begins.

Bulletin Board Season Opener

My annual bulletin board (which is really more of an inspiration board) is one of my favorite back-to-school traditions.  In all the insanity of planning for our hybrid teaching school year, I considered letting last year’s board hang around.  But I love this tradition and spend all year collecting things for my bulletin board and so last week I set to work on the 2020-2021 bulletin board.

I am glad that I found the time because it makes me happy every day.

The Little School That Could

School starts today.  To say that I am nervous, excited, worried, hopeful…….all of that is an epic understatement.  But children belong in school, a place separate from home in the company of their friends and led by adults who care deeply.  My school is this place and today, nearly 6 months after we shut the doors and went to remote learning, we are able to have students in school again.

We have masks and open windows, social distancing, and carefully marked hallways.  Daily we are at half capacity with 50% of our students learning remote and the other half on campus for alternating weeks.  The amount of preparation put into this day is staggering.  

But with all of my heart and soul, I am ready for this.

Everything is the Same

I am a planner.  I have lists on paper, lists that live in my head, symbols of the passage of time are present in so much of my daily life.  

I keep a stack of bookmarks and I choose a new one with each book I start, carefully placing the one just used at the bottom of the stack, ready to use in the future, aware as I do it that the 10 books down the line may be read over two or three months  When I open a bag of coffee beans, I think of the future, aware that when the bag has emptied, six weeks will have passed.

I organize so much of the minutiae of my daily life in this way.  I watch a houseplant as new growth sparks and know that when the new leaf is full, the next season will be closer at hand.  I organize the cloth napkins on which I set out my morning coffee service each week and know that when the floral ones have been used, the bandana prints will follow, and then the green floral prints, and then…..my mind quietly recites the events to which I can look forward: JT will be home from college, T’s birthday will be celebrated, my tomatoes will bloom….

I do this so often, so much of the time, that it feels as if the planning and anticipation are just another part of my daily life.

I thought of this habit this morning when, for the first time in weeks, I put on some mascara, sandals instead of my now customary work-from-home flip flops, a skirt fancier than what I’ve worn for the last few months, and got ready for the last day of school.  But I didn’t walk out the front door and drive 8 miles to school in the early morning.  Instead, I went downstairs to sit at my desk for a Zoom teleconference with the 7th grade.  Together, if from our separate homes, we watched a recorded version of our closing ceremony and said goodbye to the school year.

Today is the last day of school and, in a normal world, I would have been anticipating this day for weeks; weeks marked by bookmarks shifting and different morning coffee set ups, by an app on my phone that marks each day that ticks by until a much-anticipated event will occur.

Instead, the weeks have all jumbled together as we lived in the world of the pandemic.  Daily existence seemed both more important and smaller as we navigated the condensed world of everything happening at home.  The amount of work required to teach remotely meant that weekends were also given over to work, hours and hours spent writing clear instructions for students to read and carefully follow so that they would know where to be: in Zoom, at our class webpage, on a shared Google doc, in a discussion forum…..but all of it from the same place, looking at the same screen.

So it seemed fitting that today would be the same as so many of the school days have been since we began to learn remotely.  That time has passed is clear.  The curve of disease has flattened,  my pandemic anxiety has become a familiar companion, the days have more sunshine and warmth, everyone has longer hair, we’ve learned new things.  But there is a sameness to it all that is the unsettling reminder of all that we’ve been through together even as we’ve been in our separate homes.

The Month of May, Kicking My Butt, Per the Usual

When it comes to school and work, the month of May is - invariably - completely insane.  Busy beyond measure, May usually finds me heading to work at 7 am and coming home later than I would like.  There is a long to-do list to start every day.  Typically, the month has two enormous saving graces:

1. May is beautiful - blooms are fresh, trees and lawns are verdant.  The month is filled with splendid color and smells and, often, lovely warmth.  

2.  It’s the last full month before June and summer break.  Time off - splendid, happy, relaxing time off - is on the horizon in May.  The prospect helps to  make the long, busy days worthwhile.

I thought that this May might be different, working from home as I am.

Ha.

It’s still beautiful, as per the usual.  And, as per the usual, it’s been crazy busy.  Neither morning nor afternoon commute happens, as all I need to do is come downstairs to go to work.  But, damn, there is a lot of work to be done.  Plus, I’m teaching lessons remotely and those lessons don’t seem to write themselves.  Usually, this point in May finds me turning the students loose to use the last weeks of class time to work on their big final project.  This year, lessons will see us through to the closing, and class time is used for direct instruction.

Breaks and time too think seem to be a fairly short supply.  So I start blog posts but never seem to finish.  I miss the time spent on this project and as I get farther and farther behind, I am annoyed that I can’t find the time for myself.  This weekend has provided some time and I will fill in from behind and plan forward so that postings continue.

Remote Learning is Live

Spring Break  - the oddest Spring Break of my life - is over.  Classes resumed today and so this morning I got up, had a shower, and came downstairs to work.  Armed with a cup of coffee, I set to teaching remotely from my study.  My classroom is now in a basket.

I’d spent a part of every day for the last two weeks making plans for this kind of teaching and learning and while I started the day with some nervousness, class went well.  At our next class meeting we will practice a teleconference.  Normally, in class my hands and mind are busy with kids.  That’s also my focus in remote class, though it feels substantially different.  I’ve been teaching so long that trying these new learning muscles is an interesting phenomenon.    For a while, there will be no teaching on auto pilot.  These days, that's a good thing ----- days with a purpose beyond worrying about things that I cannot control is rather a good feeling.

Back to School

The second half of the school year begins later this month, when we officially hit the mid-point of the year, though it might as well be today, when I return to school.  

No matter how much the cold weather tries my patience, come January the school year always starts to fly past.  By now, we’ve hit our pace and the students understand expectations.  February’s shortness speeds by and before I know it, March and two weeks of Spring Break will have arrived.  Then it’s April and the prospect of balmy weather, flip flops, and relaxed Summer days are squarely on the horizon.

The last two weeks gave me the chance to rest up, read, and otherwise celebrate and relax.  It was a well-earned and much-needed respite.  Now that school is back in session I am ready to go.

Fall Foliage

My school’s campus is located amongst the woods that line the western edge of the Delaware & Raritan Canal and the Raritan River.  Though we are very much in the suburbs, this patch of nature along the waterway is thick and wherever possible, it’s preserved all over the campus.  I’ve seen herons along the pond, deer on the lawns, and there is often a campus hawk patrolling the perimeter.

This beauty is part of my every day and I appreciate it so much.  Earlier this week, I was on campus before sunrise to send off some field trips.  As the sun rose and I waited for the last of the students to arrive on campus for the day’s adventures, I walked alongside the sidewalk outside the Middle School, intent on the quiet and fresh air.  This view is the daily scene outside of my office.  I never tire of it.

From the looks of things, the leaves have just begun to change.  But on the grass, it looks like things are well underway.

I never tire of this view and that’s very happy!

Back to School 2019

For the last three nights, I’ve dreamt either that I was late to the first day of school or that I got to school only to that it was the first day but I had no plans for the classes I teach.  Last night, I had both dreams.  That can only mean one thing.

My school bag was packed up last night.  This morning, I’m wearing shoes and made an extra effort by putting on mascara and eyeliner.

That can only mean one thing: school is back in session.

I’ll welcome familiar and new middle schoolers this morning.  This year’s 7th grade will get their assigned seat and their first homework assignment.  There are familiar lessons and newly designed lessons on the horizon for them; I’m excited to think and talk about history with them. Even after all these years of teaching, the first day still feels like an exciting fresh start.  That's happy!

Here we go…….