What I Did In School Last Week

 For the past nine months, I haven't done a lot of teaching. My job has been primarily support. I have been making teaching possible for others, but my own classroom has become storage for bits and pieces of all the devices that make distance learning possible.

Except for one corner, where I have a pair of Chromebooks set up in front of what used to be my desk. Now it's a repository for the things that I haven't gotten around to putting in the piles that will eventually be consolidated into larger piles. At the corner of the table where I have those two Chromebooks plugged into a power strip, just a step away from what used to be the nerve center of our computer lab, this is where I have been doing my teaching for the past ten weeks.

After school. I have been working with a group of fourth and fifth graders much in the same way that I have for the past five years, once a week. Except now it's all done online. On Zoom. In little boxes that I hope will be filled with expectant faces and youthful enthusiasm. Pre-COVID, I would meet kids out in front of the school and round them up, usher them inside, and run through our week's exercise in community building. I'm running the Upward Roots program at our school, working to help build tomorrow's leaders out of ten and eleven year olds. Not the easiest feat, but this year the level of difficulty was raised yet again. Think: herding cats via Zoom.

I was blessed with a smaller group than the ten to twelve students that I had become accustomed to in years past, swelling at times to six or seven but most meetings sat squarely on the two or three die-hards who came up with their own vision of community service: COVID-19 - How We Can Help? Over the course of three months, they did the research and came up with a slideshow that they decided to present at our school's weekly Star Student Assembly. Virtually. And to make it just a little less Frightening, they chose to record it rather than narrate it live. 

Clever kids. The bottom line for them was hope. They featured the safety protocols of wearing a mask, social distancing and washing hands. But they also highlighted the importance of working on this as a team. To quote one of their slides, "Yes it is hard right now and we all are not used to this but we have to try our best to stay safe we all are going to get through this."

So, that's what I have decided to do. I will keep fighting the good fight, and making the world a safer place for those who will inherit it. I think we'll be in pretty good hands.