Week 2, Day 1,

 Been close to having a frost the past two nights, covered the tomatoes. We have been getting tomatoes pretty much from the end of June, and the plants continue to grow. Hydroponics, its whats for dinner.

Back to school for week 2, the electric boogaloo. 

Today was a bit smoother, we are getting the idea of how this is going. Also sent out Emails to students and their parents with their first week grades....some did no work, most did work today. That was something. We have students who wanted to be 100% virtual, just to get a few more weeks off from school. That does not seem to be working for them. Most of the totally virtual students are keeping up and doing work. Had one of our ESOL students change from virtual to in school five days, it will be best for her to do, she has been keeping up to the best of her ability, but will be better off in class.

Next week we are to go back to 'normal', whatever that may be. Because of that, I am holding off on a couple of astronomy activities until then, where we measure the diameter of the Sun. That way we can all go outside to do it. Doing labs and other activities will be much easier to do with the full group of students, we will have some virtual, but no where near as many. 

More students are showing me their first attempts at photographing stars, some are nice. One student took a picture of Jupiter and Saturn this past weekend, not to bad. This week they are to take a picture of the big dipper. I am excited to see how that goes. We may need to hold off on the photography until after the full moon next week.

Feeling more optimistic as the week opens. Hope that feeling stays.

Well, that was a week

 We made it through the first week. 

Shall I go on?

I now understand why the school year starts on a Wednesday or Thursday, a five day week to start is a bit much. I was ready to nap every day, but usually am most days. But that was not the deal.

The week was going alright, it is difficult to get into the normal rhythm of teaching, with some of the students there, and others not there, and the class length not being the same. But the Thursday happened. up until Thursday, the Internet was working fine, then it fell apart, it blew up, it crashed, it was ugly. We would drop a few times in a class period. Not very happy with that. We are supposed to teach all classes synchronously. The union went to the Superintendent Thursday afternoon, and we got limited permission to teach asynchronously. Most of my summer planning was for asynchronous teaching, this was a good thing. Friday rolls around. and our connection continued to be flaky. Friday is the day all but students with 'special considerations' are at home. I quickly drafted Email to each class, pointing them to their assignments, and let them know they needed to try to connect, and if they could not, send an email. That worked.

We will see how the rest of the week goes

One Down......

 First day of classes done.

Students in class and others online. In someways it went better than I expected, and other it was harder than expected.

With only a few students spread out across the classroom, disruption and distraction was at a minimum. However getting feedback by looking at their mask covered faces is difficult if not impossible. Getting feedback from the virtual learners is not to bad, as you can see their faces..unless they have a low speed connection. 

It felt, at times, like I was talking to myself.

Chemistry had their first lab on the first day. Simple thing of finding the density of water using various volumes. Really it was introducing them to electronic balances, and seeing how well they can measure and do some simple math things. They will need reminders on how to label numbers and how to use data tables, but that is fine, they have not been in lab for at least six months. 

They were somewhat surprised we would have a lab, not sure why, but we did. Had it set up so that the students in class were paired with a virtual student, so they could work together. We did this using breakout rooms in Google Classroom. I found an app to do this with, called,  of all things, Google Meet Breakout Rooms. We need to work out the sound issues we were having in the classroom. I need to mute my stuff while the kids are working. I will see how it works tomorrow in physics lab. 

As always after the first day, I am tired and ready for a nap. So, that is all.

Day 843 of "getting ready"

 Can we have students yet?

Another day of preparation. Other schools in the area opened up Thursday, but Monday for us.

Made sure my setup worked by doing a Google meet with my wife. it worked. 

How much more prep can we do? Just fiddle about more and more. 

Have yet to finish my video about taking star photos. It has been cloudy every night for a couple if weeks, but that is what the weather is like around here. Tonight and tomorrow night are supposed to be clear, but looking out the window at 5:00 pm, it looks very cloudy. Really want to see if yet another free app works with my iPhone to take star photos, running out of time. 

A couple of days later........

It did clear up! The app worked, and I finished my video. Wheee!

By the way the app I use for navigation is Star Chart

To keep the shutter open is the StarryCamera app

Rochester Clear Sky Chart

You might notice I keep stating the students do not need to buy anything, and pleading that they not buy anything. This is to avoid the inevitable push back from parents saying that I am requiring them to buy a camera in order to pass my class. You know that is coming.

When staring my laundry today, I realized next week I will have 'real' clothes in there, shorts and T-shirts are done for now. More laundry. Then it heads toward fall and winter, and I don't wear shorts on the weekend. Real laundry. 

Tomorrow is the big day...

I will let you know

Almost Ready....Really I am ready, and How to Lab

 Two more work days until the students show up, about dang time.

I don't know about you, but I have a difficult time really fully planning until I meet the class. I know most of the students, and all of my physics students were in chemistry last year, but it is hard to get a feel for how things are going to go. Not to mention how things are set up this year- I don't want to get into that again, check my first post. 

Spent a fair amount of time on figuring out how to do labs in chemistry and physics. Going to give this a whirl. Each class is meeting on Google meet, including the in class students. From this each in class student will be paired with an online student to do the lab. The in class person will do the work and report observations, while the online person will do the data and observation recording.  There is a way to manually set up break out groups in Google meet, but today I found an extension to help automate the process, called of all things, Google Meet Breakout Extension. Messed around with it a little, seems good. Will see how it works next week.

Had a workshop on how to use an extension to take attendance during Google Meet. Gave me a headache. Do we really need to have one, I can just take attendance manually as I would normally. But what do I know? There are just so many things people are pushing on us to use, that we are losing sight of the actual teaching.

Anyway.....

Still getting ready, and ranting about google forms.

Another day, more time to get ready. Students show up in just a few more days. Still figuring things out. Built some ramps to send home for the virtual only physics students:

Some 8' corner molding, with some beveled pieces at each end to hold it upright. 

For the ones sent home, I marked every 10 cm, so they can do some measurements. Working on a couple of labs for these

Still fighting with myself with the take home chemistry labs. Really do not know the best way to do these, and have them meaningful. So much of the stuff on line is elementary school level or just garbage. 

Thinking of having each student have a virtual lab partner for the in class activities, see what comes of that. 

Just a little overwhelmed with the number of useful and useless resources for online learning. I am using Google Classroom, and trying to make things work with it, in a way that makes sense, and does not do the same things that other tools do. 

There are many things I wish Google did better, such as actually being able to integrate forms with anything. In order to put a video into Google forms, the video cannot be in Google Drive, it has to be a YouTube video. Why? Google Forms are generally a P.I.A., in order to put in subscripts and superscripts, you need to put in the ASCII code. COME ON!! I do like the forms, and use them most every day for the class warm up or as I call it "Do Now", it grades easily and you can set up feedback easily. It is possible to make branching forms, but, you need to sketch out on a piece of paper what you are doing. 

And another thing..why are there no native shapes tools for Google Documents. I use google drive pretty much exclusively for my documents. I just want some boxes, circles and arrows. Is that too much to ask?

All these tools, still getting stuff together, just makes for one giant ball of confusion

The things we do

 I am nervous and scared about the school year. 

I always am nervous and scared about the school year. 

Every year is different. There have been few times when I am not teaching something new, or in a new district, or with a new administration. Things change, students change, yearly, by period. 

Do I meet the needs of all students. I try, but don't. am I a good teacher, I try but always need improvement. We all do.

One of the things that confuse me about some teachers are the ones referred to as Retired In Place (RIP). That is they teach the same class, the same way for years, rarely changing anything. I could start with multiple stories of people I have worked with whom this applies to, but perhaps another post. You would think they would get bored doing the same thing over and over. I have enough trouble planning week to week, as sometimes the students get a concept that in previous years they did not. Perhaps I learned how to teach it? But the same group does not understand what last year grasped in a few minutes. Every class, every lesson is a change. 

So, what happens this year? Who knows. We will soon find out. 

Trying something different. Making short videos about some concepts. When looking for other resources to go over the same concepts, the videos are too long, or readings and worksheets don't get to the point. 

Don't know if it is that good, but what the heck. Displacement is a vector, distance is scalar. Who cares? I do. 

I have a few like this which will be shared as the year goes on.

Welcome to Me!

 This is perhaps the fifth blog I have started. hopefully this one will last longer than a month or so.

Being a teacher "in these troubled times" I thought it would be interesting to look at what happens during the year with my students and myself, and see how things change during the year. year

I am in the 33rd as a teacher. I started in North Carolina, moved to Illinois, and now in New York. I took a short break from education a few years ago to work as a programmer for an instructional design company. I am in my 4th year in my current district, where I teach chemistry, physics, meteorology, astronomy, and Introduction to Renewable Energy through one of the SUNY schools. I decided not to directly identify my district, but finding out would not be that hard, as I thing I am the only one in the world with my name (prove me wrong Internet land).

As we head into the school year, things are strange, and really do not know what is going to happen. The district has set up a schedule so only about half of the student are in the building at one time. We will have last names A-L on Monday and Wednesday, and M-Z Tuesdays and Thursdays, the days they are not in the building, they will follow their same schedule, but online.  but that is not all, some special needs students will be with us all five days, some students will not be in the building, but online all the time. The way we do vocational education in this state, the students go to a central location with students from other districts (we call this BOCES- Board of Cooperative Education Services) Normally some go in the morning, others in the afternoon, but this year, all BOCES students will go all day Thursday and Friday. Chemistry and physics have a lab period every other day, so this rotation is somewhat screwed up with students coming every other day.  We will survive.

So, I have been working this summer to make my classes workable in this format. At least I hope I have done so. We will see. The students start on the 14th of September.