I don't get on a blog much, but I wanted to reflect on the past year. This past year has been a doozy for education. I am finishing up my spring break and just remembering what happened this time last year. My spring break was a week earlier than most last year, and I did what I normally try to do which is go to my best friend's house outside Austin. I had started to hear talk of some virus going around, but we still did our normal thing of going around shopping and such. By the time I made it home mid-week, things were starting to get scarier. Talk was already flying around that we were going to be shutting down the schools because the virus was spreading so quickly. Luckily, Facebook groups started building that had resources for online learning if it came down to that.
As a lot of districts were about to have a week to prep for online learning, my district was thrown directly into it without warning directly out of spring break. Initially we were going virtual for a week, but that kept extending until Governor Abbott declared schools were to go virtual for the rest of the year. The teachers at my school dove head first that first week scrambling at the school, that was so silent because the crazy teenagers weren't there, to find ways to teach our students. We were told only to review things we had already covered, but I eventually switched to moving on to what I could teach virtually with the resources we had. Some of my students did like they were supposed to, some didn't. We finally made it to the end of the school year and hoped to be free of virtual learning by fall.
Enter the 2020-2021 school year. My district started out face-to-face but if you didn't want to send your student, you could keep them home to do asynchronous virtual learning. This creates lots of issues when you're the only one teaching a subject. I had to find a way to record my lessons to be posted in Google Classroom. Starting a graduate program that takes up a lot of time meant that I don't have the ability to record my lessons the evening or weekend before, so I had to choose a class period to record in. My 2nd and 3rd period classes have finally figured out how to deal with me recording in their classes. The recording catches mainly my voice along with what is on my document camera. It makes things challenging, but I've made it work.
The biggest issue with this school year is that the already declining work ethic of my students has gotten worse way faster. They got so used to not having to do much during the final nine weeks of last school year to pass that they think it should be the same now. It simply doesn't work that way, and it has been a constant struggle to get students to care about learning. I always get asked "when can we have a free day?", and I just tell them that my days aren't free. I'm stressed about giving a STAAR test in just a few weeks. My students were behind in math before ever coming to me, and the pandemic virtual learning has not helped anything at all. I have pushed through the curriculum, but I'm still going to have to skip some non-important topics. The things that I'm learning in my graduate program are making me see that what we do in education isn't right. It shouldn't all be about this big standardized test. Our students aren't all the same, but why do we judge them all based off the same test? It's going to take a major education revolution in order to make it so our students can actually start truly learning something in school.
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