A recap: I started 2020 flush with writing plans and goals, primarily to finish a draft of Haven and then circle back to Aco and fix my pace and character arc problems in both drafts. I made some progress, but my writing was (predictably) derailed when the spring musical started up... and then both the musical and my writing met their premature end due to COVID.
Across America, schools were closed and teachers and students alike were sent home. And so it was in my small district. For about a week. And then, because we are fortunate to have a supportive community that funded a technology referendum to supply laptops in a 1:1 initiative, we began full time distance learning.
For me, DL meant sleeping in until 7:30 (no alarm clock needed), shlepping to the shower and making coffee in time to check that my Google Classroom lessons had posted (automatically set for 8:00), and then sitting down in front of a screen for the next 14 hours. Seriously. My routine typically included a short break for lunch from 2:30-3:00 and supper with a TV show from 7:00-8:00. And then back at it until all emails had been answered, online work had been graded, and new lessons were ready for the next day. On an "early" day I was finished by 10:00 pm. Sometimes I worked past midnight.
It was physically grueling, and sitting so long in front of the mac messed up my back.
But the emotional impact was far worse. As a teacher, you strive to meet each student where they are and inspire them to achieve as much as they can. I was able to continue being that sort of teacher for a few amazing students. But too many of my seniors decided their MO for the rest of the year would be doing the minimal needed in order to pass and graduate. And that meant disengagement and rampant cheating. Let me give an example.
Let's say, during the study of Macbeth, I create a lesson on Lady Macbeth in act 1, scene 5. I am thrilled when I find a wonderful (short) video of Niamh Cusack rehearsing the scene for the RSC and create a lesson with a recorded introduction by me (with a funny personal story from a time I saw Niamh on stage), a link to myshakespeare.com so they can read the scene with vocab and explanatory help, and an interactive Google Doc where they can watch the actress dissect and perform the scene and react to her performance choices in writing. It takes me a little over two hours to put together (typical). I guess that it will take the students maybe 20 minutes to work through. That's only half of a class period, but I don't have another two hours to make more content and frankly, within days I realized that students were unwilling to do any assignment that lasted longer than 20 minutes anyway. I have two other preps to address before crawling into bed... It'll have to do.
I post the assignment. When I start grading assignments a day later, I realize most of the students have skipped the reading entirely and watched maybe 3 minutes of the 11 minute video before composing their reactions. Some of the reactions make no sense as they are copied straight from the internet, probably after they took my prompt question and pasted it into the search bar at Google. And 5-6 students have the exact same personal response, down to the type-o's and grammar errors.
From a distance, I could not have made the scene more simple and engaging. I was overly proud, in fact, of how clever I had been. They didn't care. And now I faced another 4 acts worth of lessons to create knowing that no matter how I addressed the lack of effort and outright cheating, no matter how clever I was in creating technology-forward, learner-friendly lessons, I would face similar choices by the students. What more could I do? It was emotionally crushing.
This led to my realization and DL mantra: You can stay up until midnight creating beautiful, detailed maps leading straight to the freshest water, but you can't stop a horse from using Google Maps to find a short cut that leads to a brackish swamp.
By the end of each week, I was so physically and emotionally drained that I collapsed for the weekend. Teaching, which is usually fun, became drudgery. I was ready to quit education entirely. I spent more than one moment dreaming of early retirement and looking at the help wanted ads in the local paper . And through it all, there was literally NO time to write.
Until summer.
That's when the pandemic's restrictions became convenient excuses to indulge myself in days of gardening, quiet time recovering from the soul-devouring atrocity of DL, and finishing my Haven draft.
So that's what I did.
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