One week into “remote instruction” mode, in which all 4 of us in the house are home due to our schools closing to staff and students, and I’ll share a few of my observations from a couple different perspectives.

As I mentioned last time, it’s been interesting to see how different school districts (and different states) are handling the response to the pandemic, and I want to say right up front that any comparison or contrast is simply to document what I’ve observed, and not to judge. I’ve been involved in enough conversations in my own district to know that these are weighty, nuanced calls to make.

Look, my wife and I are both career educators – not only do we talk, but we talk from a common base of experience and knowledge that comes from having shared a profession for two decades (and having worked together in the same building for about a third of that time). While I definitely have my own gut-level reactions to what I hear and see, I have been reminding myself that I don’t know every detail and every factor that goes into every decision that gets made, and the further away I get from my own lived experience, the less I know about that (this mindset also helps me to maintain perspective when my own district is held up to criticism). Furthermore, while this isn’t the first pandemic to cause school closures in the US (it’s neither the first in my lifetime nor in my career), it’s the first one I – and I would wager, most, if not all, of my local colleagues and contemporaries – have experienced personally. We’re all finding our way and making the best decisions we can given what we know at any given time… or so I want to believe.

Dad Observations:

• The kids are bored as hell. PA Governor Tom Wolf issued an order on Friday, March 13 not only closing all schools in the state for two weeks, but also essentially waiving the minimum 180-day requirement for schools for this school year. The communication I received from my kids’ district essentially said that they were treating the week of 3/16 as snow days, for all intents and purposes, that could be made up in June, and therefore would not be providing any instructional materials. The initial euphoria of finding out they just got two weeks off school waned fast. Even my son, an excellent student but, much like me, Mr. Social Distancer under normal circumstances, has been pining to return to school, if for no other reason than the social connections he’s missing.
• The Internet is vital to keeping them connected. Academics aside, my son is playing video games and chatting online with his friends. My daughter is active on whatever the videochat app du jour is among the middle school set, and she and her friends are learning dances together. The other night, she even dragged some of her American Girl doll stuff out of the basement that she hasn’t touched in ages. She brought it all up to her bedroom; I’m not sure what that’s all about and I’m not sure I’m going to ask, either. Most of my professional conversations over the last few weeks have focused on the Internet as a vehicle for providing learning opportunities, but what those conversations didn’t really focus on is how the kids would use the Internet to maintain a sense of society and community. Viral videos that have come out since much of the nation went into voluntary social distancing (and in some cases, government-ordered shelter-in-place) have demonstrated the need and the want for that. A few are already making the rounds, and I’m sure more will emerge in the coming weeks and months.
• They’re actually taking this fairly well. We’ve had a lot of opportunity to talk as a family about the social, political, economic, educational, and other ramifications of this situation, and in a weird way, I’m glad my kids are old enough to have had this experience at a time when they could consider these things and at least maybe learn something from it. Also, I think they’re spending so much time on devices during the day (not thrilled about it but also have bigger fish to fry during the day than tracking their screen time, tbh) that they are actually craving face-to-face conversation with my wife and me when we’re done our own work. Some of the dinner and after-dinner conversations we’ve had recently have been among the most pleasant in recent memory.

Work Observations:

• This past week has felt like a month, which is even weirder when you consider I’ve only actually been home full-time since last Wednesday. My days largely consist of organizational strategy meetings, discussing with my colleagues what ‘remote instruction’ looks like now, looks like in two weeks, and looks like with the potential that we could be out of school significantly longer than originally planned (as of this writing, both Virginia and Kansas have announced school closures through the end of the 19-20 school year). Once we figure that all out, how do we communicate the message consistently to staff, students, and families?
• I’ve taken on the mantle of not only teaching myself how to use apps like Zoom and Google Meet with some proficiency, but also helping my wife – whose instructional mandates are somewhat more stringent than those in my district, at least at the moment – navigate them as well. On top of that, I’m also the unofficial official tech support for the Bariexca household, which means I’m sometimes ducking away from my own meeting to figure out why something’s not working on my wife’s computer. I’ll be interested to see if/how my services become more in demand now that my kids have started with skill maintenance online activities as of yesterday. These admittedly minor intrusions serve to remind me that all families are juggling a lot these days and that schools must be flexible with deadlines and expectations in the coming weeks. There are a lot of variables being introduced that we ordinarily can more or less control for when students are in the building. Not so much now.

Random Observations:

• I miss seeing my friends and colleagues at work, and I miss seeing the students, but I DO NOT MISS THAT COMMUTE!
• I’ve been trying to get dressed every day despite not really having a reason to, if for no other reason than to maintain some semblance of normalcy in the face of what feels like a de facto quarantine. I could go the whole day in sweats if I wanted, but I’m trying to at least put on jeans and something semi-presentable. It helps me stay somewhat focused. My wife has taken the opposite approach, going full-on #TeamComfy.
• The university at which I teach has also gone to remote instruction for the remainder of the semester, so that’s been weighing on my mind as well. I have been reading a TON on navigating online teaching – to inform both my jobs – and I gave my first assignment in lieu of an in-person class tonight. We’ll see how it goes, but like I am asking of my own staff, flexibility’s going to be the name of the game for the next few weeks. My plan to have students run demo lessons is completely shot out of the water, so I am really going to be reinventing the next 7 or 8 weeks, likely a week at a time.
• I’m tidying up a lot more than normal. Not like cleaning or disinfecting – which might actually make sense – but just keeping things neater and more organized than I ordinarily would. I wonder what psychological need that satisfies… probably feeling like I have some control over something during very uncertain times. My dorm room was never cleaner than the semester I student taught, and up until now, my house was never more organized than when I was writing my dissertation!
• I’m being more social on social media than I usually am. Over the last few years I have really scaled back my active participation on social media, but I’m finding myself commenting and posting more frequently than I have in quite a while.