The third quarter of the school year ended on Friday and today is the one-year anniversary when we went home from work not knowing that we would begin teaching remotely three days later. I’m tired. My eyes literally ache and would love for me to step away from my screens for the weekend. But the next term begins on Monday and the push to teach the last ten-weeks of the school-year with even more unknowns (“hybrid”!) requires that I continue prepping my content, adding the things I’ve learned over the past 27-weeks.
Speaking of Hybrid, when it came down a couple weeks ago that we were going to transition from fully remote to hybrid, I was lucky enough to get the vaccine, but thought that given my history of auto-immune issues that I needed to do something about the challenge of teaching face-to-face when the number of COVID cases are now down to where they were during the past summer surge… (aka, “we’re not done with the dying yet, folks!”).
I’ve been doing this teaching thing long enough to know that one of the enemies against successful teaching is audio, muffled or unintelligible. Not being heard affords students the excuse to not engage. Sorry, but a piece of fabric over the mouth can really cut down on whether one is being understood or not. So, I decided to lean into this strange new world and invested in one of these space helmets (air.micro.climate) that should enable me to not have my mouth or face covered with a piece of fabric and hopefully be understood when speaking. Hell, at 61 I submitted an application to become an actual NASA astronaut last Spring, so I might as well see if I can tolerate having a plastic dome on my head for hours on end. Here we go! I may be exhausted, but not too exhausted to go to Space!
joe bustillos com 