Thursday, March 11, 2021

One More Pivot

Just as the students were arriving for their first day in the building this morning, some sort of HVAC catastrophe had the halls outside my classroom roaring like an airport runway. With my door closed, the thunder was manageable, and when the noise quit, I assumed it was fixed. 

Not so fast, though! The principal knocked on my door a little while later. "We're going to have to move your class down the hall while they work in the ceiling to replace the part," she told me. "It's for safety reasons. Have the students pack up." 

In another time, the request might not have seemed so complicated, especially since there were only 4 kids in the room with me. But concurrent teaching and all its attendant technology had me dismantling my carefully calibrated set-up: unplugging several cables, turning off the SMART board, and leaving my extra monitor and the webcam and mic behind. 

"We'll be back on the call in a minute!" I told my virtual students and led these brand new students to an unfamiliar classroom with only laptop and iPad in hand. With no other choice, I propped up my laptop on a student desk, almost as if it was the fifth student in the class, and taught from the front of the room.

Oh, the lesson went fine, and it was actually quite liberating to get up from behind my fortress of a teaching station and move around a little. By the end of the class period, the repairs were complete, and I was able to return to my classroom and reconnect the whole apparatus before the next class began... 

...and dream of a time when the room is filled with kids agin, and all that technology is no longer necessary to do the job.

5 comments:

  1. Nothing is easy this year! I maintain that 24 students huddled on a rug in front of me are far easier to manage than the 14 I have spread out around the room 6 feet apart This slice also speaks to the many levels of flexible we have had to become in our profession!

    ReplyDelete
  2. Yes. So many combinations of examples of us having to do what we do differently. We have to believe when we go back to "normal" we'll be all the better for it. And today you got an impromptu field trip. Yay! Haha - great post.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Well, that sounds like quite a morning! No doubt you got through all your classes like a pro!

    ReplyDelete
  4. Of course, the A/C has no regard for what we're going through. How rude.

    ReplyDelete
  5. Oh, this makes me ache for a vastly more untethered time.

    ReplyDelete