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April 2020: Five Things I've Learned About Myself During Emergency Distance Learning

I think we can agree we've all learned a lot about ourselves right now.

I'm fortunate. My family is healthy. We are able to work from home. We have fairly little responsibilities right now. My dog is ecstatic that he gets multiple walks a day. We get to cook and bake much more often. We have time to work on our house that we bought last year.

As often happens during times of change, I've learned some things about myself.

  1. It is possible for me to stay awake past 11:30. (I actually hate it though. I'd rather get up earlier and go to sleep earlier. I'm working on that, if anyone has suggestions...)
  2. I need my students and colleagues. I crave social interaction all day and my husband has zoom calls and work to do. I'm sure even my dog is getting annoyed with me. I miss hearing about my students' weekends and chatting with my department in the hallway during passing periods. (I still don't miss lunch duty. I will never miss lunch duty).
  3. I have started to see my students as people more than I ever have. I pride myself on getting to know my students. However, I've been shocked by some moments of honesty that have come up during this quarantine from students. I have students who babysit all day then work at night. They're doing their best to stay caught up. They want to be successful, but they have so many things going on. It's been humbling.
  4. I can be a runner! I made a mileage goal this year, and I am already 40.51% done with my goal! (I'll let you figure out what my goal is.) It's the only time I can get out of my house, and I have actually started looking forward to it. WEIRD.
  5. I love teaching other teachers as much as I love teaching my students. I have loved being the go-to person for my co-workers when they have questions. I made a whole video for a co-worker where I showed him how to copy slides from Desmos, how to use the computation layer, and how to build a card sort. I have loved learning from everyone on Twitter and being able to share the different self-checking Desmos activities that have been created with them. 
I won't lie, working from home is nice. I love getting to eat when I want (and actually having time to prepare something!). I love being able to go to the bathroom when I want. I love sleeping in a bit. I love getting to spend more time with my husband and my dog. It's fun to post math problems on my driveway for the neighborhood kids to try out as they walk by.




But it's hard to work from home. It's hard to be motivated to work here when I've trained myself SO HARD to not work at home. It's hard to create lessons that I love to only have half of my students even try them.

But I truly hope good things come from this. I hope that we can learn from this time of "different grading" and make more time to focus on feedback for our students. I hope we can remember this when we give cumulative final exams. I have loved being able to give extensive feedback and not having my students worry about grades and percentages. I have loved getting to create lessons that explore topics and use technology. I hope we can take the best things from this and bring them back to our classrooms (whenever we eventually get there again). 


Theo hopes you are all staying safe and healthy! (Go Cubs!)


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