Ms. Fey's School Daze

Thank you, WBEZ, for compiling this list of advice for surviving remote learning ! My contributions are under Keeping Students Engaged, Using Technology to Its Fullest Potential, Improving Poor Attendance and Helping Students Process the News.

    Oh, we stepped into it yesterday with the turning of the page of Of Mice and Men and the word in the first sentence at the top of page 20. And that "stepping," as I so delicately call it, was no accident. We've taught this book many times. We think we know this book. We did that. No accident. Full stop. Learning stopped. Talking went on, class went on, the audio tape kept playing, but the white women and the black kids (so Braveanna told us) stopped thinking about anything else but the word on the page and the sound of it still hanging in the air. "I understand," I said to B. when she waited after class to tell us The Truth We White Women Teachers Are Late To Learn.  "No, you don't," she replied. And I was schooled. Ashamed. Stricken. Enlightened. Energized. Curious. Ready to go at it again.   Hey Teachers, Hey, Ms. Fey! You all believe that there are a million ways to teach and a million ways to learn, right? That we are all sponges, some of ...

it makes me think about how we can claim identities in order to be a part of something, or we can claim identities in order to separate ourselves from somethings/someones. i wonder when i do which and why... #miseducAsian — grace a chen (@graceachen) September 3, 2020

 Hoo doggie! Last time I taught, we were in a classroom for 3 hours a day, 5 days a week, for 3 weeks, live. Now we're remote from each other, for 50 minutes a day, 2 days a week, possibly for 12 weeks. We don't have time to watch movies together and share the joy. We don't have time for...like, anything. Except checking in and seeing each other. I just want to appreciate their attendance and their chiming in and their bravery in this weirdness. It's really a college model - I deliver the schedule of work and explain it, they run off and either choose to tackle it or flounder. In office hours, we work intensely one on one and they talk to me like Cambridge or Oxford orals. And those dear young ones who are not on the college trajectory fall further and further behind.

 My beloved colleague had assigned a NYTimes article for the students to read and discuss before she left for her maternity leave. I finally got to grading the student work this weekend and my first impression was "Oy vey, I would never have used this piece." The Lexile is through the roof, the cultural references were 5 years out of date, the light tone did not seem to suit our current storms. Oy.   "Gender roles are merging. Races are being shed. In the last six years or so, but especially in 2015, we’ve been made to see how trans and bi and poly-ambi-omni- we are." Then I started to read the student responses. They were honest with their struggles with the author's complicated points about identity and race and shifting gender norms. They grappled with the text, pulled out great quotes to work with, talked to each other (at this point in the relationship they are mostly agreeing with each other, but that's okay.) And I reconsidered. I realized my dear ...

 There's a college feel to this kind of teaching. The kids can come to class or not. They can pay attention or not. In an actual classroom, I would work to keep all kids on task because attitude is contagious. In remote learning, if you're asleep, your blank screen looks the same as the kids who is working but doesn't want to show his bedhead. Let's think and talk about Comfort and Discomfort and their relationship to Learning. Let's talk about Reality and how it is Socially Constructed.  Let's talk about Ageism and how the students needed the assignment to be called "Adult Show and Tell" because they hate to be treated like children. Let's talk about ageism and how young people are leading the way in the new Civil Rights movement but there is resistance to them. Let's talk about ageism and how internalized the divisions between the ages are -- especially with the Boomer, Millenial, Gen X, etc. labels. Let's talk about Ageism and the contem...

 One of the first times we encounter Frankenstein's monster in Mary Shelley's novel, he's rock-climbing. (The last time we see him he's dog-sledding.) The monster is scaling a nearly vertical rock face and the image is an apt metaphor for the teacher efforts right now to adapt to remote learning, a world-wide pandemic, civil rights action and resistance across the nation and a period of destruction and renewal writ large.   It's terribly moving to see how many students used quarantine as a time of reflection and introspection.  They shared items that had meaning to them today and everyone spoke, one by one, without my calling on them. Even a question that I may have meant to draw out more information or to satisfy my curiosity seemed an imposition.