Apace of Change

by Damian Bariexca, Ed.D.

One Week In [BTP]

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.

Blogging the Pandemic: Intro

This series of posts is less for you than for me, but thanks for stopping by anyway. We’re living through historic times, and I would like to have a record of my lived experience as our country, but more specifically my profession and my family, faces the novel coronavirus pandemic of 2019-2020. This has already been an experience unlike any I have faced in my entire 20-year career, and it’s nowhere close to being over.

As I write this, it’s the evening of Monday, March 23, 2020. Students and teachers in many districts in the NJ/PA area have been out of school and on “remote instruction” for a week now. Sometime in late February or early March, we started having discussions in my school district about how we might provide remote instruction in the event that we had to close as a result of the pandemic. We’ve had this discussion before, mostly around reimagining snow days as “virtual learning” days, but seem to have always gotten hung up on logistics: with heavy snow often comes loss of power – what then? What about students with no Internet access at home? For a 1- or 2-day event like snow, I’m honestly of the mindset to let the kids be kids and just have a snow day, at least as far as the instructional piece is concerned.

This is different.

As more information came in and initial estimates said we could be out of school for two weeks or more to stem the exponential spread of the virus, we polled our student community to identify the levels of Internet access students had outside our buildings. Our district has a 1:1 Chromebook program for students in grades 6-12, so in our building, at least, device accessibility was less of a concern than infrastructure accessibility. As it turned out, only a small percentage of our student body reported not having a reliable Internet connection at home, and subsequent conversations with parents/guardians indicated that not even all those reports were accurate. For the eventual handful of students who needed them, the district procured T-Mobile hotspots and put together how-to guides before cataloging, disinfecting, and distributing them.

During the week of March 9, it was decided that the school schedule would be amended on Friday the 13th and Monday the 16th. Students would be sent home at the half-day mark and teachers would be given the afternoons of each day to plan for remote instruction. As it happened, we never got to the second half-day. On Friday, March 13, after another week’s worth of information, data, and most importantly, recommendations from federal and local public health agencies, the announcement was made that students would be dismissed at the half-day mark as planned, but the district would be closed to students and teachers from Monday, March 16, through the end of our Spring Break, April 14, in order to allow for social distancing and stem the spread of the coronavirus. Building administrators (me) would report to work for 4-hour workdays starting Monday, March 16.

Back home, my wife (a high school special ed/English teacher) and my kids (9th grade and 6th grade this year) were getting their own messages from their respective school districts. My wife’s school was also shutting down to students effective March 16, but staff would be expected to report for a half-day that day in order to continue planning for remote instruction (they had already done so the previous Friday as well). My children also received word that school was closed starting March 16.

The stories all start to diverge a bit here, and in a household in which we manage information from 3 different school districts in 2 different states (we live in PA but my wife and I work in NJ), it can get a little messy. What’s been interesting to me is having a first-hand opportunity to see how different districts have handled this crisis both as an employee and as a parent.

As I mentioned, it’s now March 23, and we’ve all been home exactly a week. Next time, I’ll be reflecting on what the first week out has looked like in our household.

My Blogless Year

…or, ‘And Nothing of Value was Lost’.

Several months ago, I decided to do something I hadn’t done in over ten years prior: take a conscious, long-term break from regular (i.e., monthly) blogging.

It didn’t start that way, of course (nothing ever does, does it?). I’ve been blogging in this space regularly since August 2007. The span from August 2007 to December 2018 is a little over 11 years. Thinking of it in other terms, that’s over half my career and nearly a quarter of my life. Clearly I must have found value in the practice to have stuck with it for so long, but at this time last year, I guess I was just, for lack of a better term… done. January 2019 came and went without feeling the urge to put pen to paper, then February… I think by March I was pretty sure I needed to give myself permission to just shut it all down for a while, rather than beat myself up over yet another month gone by without me writing anything public.

It’s interesting how these habits we develop can turn into feeling like obligations. That’s not always a bad thing: it’s how my exercise habit has stayed as consistent as it has over the course of my entire adult life. It’s how I managed to complete two graduate programs on time (and on budget!). And, until recently, it’s what’s kept me reflecting in this semi-public place about my practice.

So what happened?

Aside from the usual “life gets in the way” stuff, I think, for me, as I’ve moved up the administrative hierarchy, I’ve felt more and more vulnerable about putting my reflections out there. Please believe, reflection is still a major part of my practice – I do it often, by myself and with colleagues (and I work with the greatest team of folks who not only push my own reflection, but encourage me to push theirs as well). But I guess that as a classroom teacher and school psychologist, I just felt less put out there writing about what went well and what didn’t go as planned in my classroom or my practice. Over the last few years as a K-12 department supervisor and now as an assistant principal, I have struggled with the public reflection piece more than I did in other positions.

As I draft this and push myself to think about why that might be, I am thinking that when I was a teacher, it was about what I was doing in my classroom. Regardless of how objectively true it was or wasn’t, my perception was that I was writing about me, myself, and I. The further away I have gotten from my own classroom, the more stakeholders – students, teachers, administrators, parents, board members – are involved in my practice. Perhaps I fear my personal reflections, considerations, and questions being twisted, taken out of context, or otherwise impacting my colleagues in ways I didn’t consider likely (or just didn’t consider at all) years ago.

Perhaps these concerns are not well-founded; I’m certainly open to that possibility. Perhaps I just need to find a better way to write about what I might want to write about in ways that won’t have implications for confidentiality or propriety. Perhaps my perspective has shifted with age (I started blogging at 30; I’m 42 as I write this). Perhaps I just need to get over myself.

Miscellaneous Observations from 2019

  • People still read this blog. I get hits daily for a variety of posts but the most visited post of 2019 (and overall) is this one from 2012 in which I describe my transition from high school English teacher to school psychologist. The really cool part is that people still leave comments asking me for advice as they face similar decisions and transitions – the most recent one came in August of this year!
  • Control is an illusion. As a general principle, I’ve come to accept in my adult life and often advise others of it, but this truism punched me square in the nose this year in a way it hasn’t in a very long time. I generally believe it’s better to be proactive than reactive, but in some cases, reactive is all you can be.
  • Relationships still matter. Content knowledge matters. Theory matters. It all matters, and if someone tells you otherwise, make sure they’re not trying to sell you something. Still, the relationships we develop with students, colleagues, and families facilitate all the other stuff to a large degree; at least, that has been my experience over the last two decades in this profession, and I have experienced how both the existence and absence of strong (or at least burgeoning) relationships can impact our work.
  • ‘Lifelong learning’ doesn’t have to be just a buzzphrase. I continue to read voraciously (most, but not all, books about my profession and/or books I think will help me improve my practice), and I put many miles on my library card this year, as well as got the most out of my Audible account. I set a goal of reading 30 books in 2019, and while I managed to double that, I think a more modest goal is appropriate for 2020, as both professional and personal obligations after work hours have increased significantly over previous years. Check out the 60 books I read in 2019 here!

Goals, Met & Unmet

For the last few years I’ve been participating in the Goodreads Reading Challenge. Not that I need to be challenged to read, as I usually enjoy it, but after a multi-year spell of not doing much reading other than for graduate school & dissertation work, it was fun to do in order to get back on the bike and I guess I’ve just kept doing it out of habit.

Back in January I set a goal of reading 30 books in 2018. Seemed a bit of a lofty number, but after handily blowing past my 2016 and 2017 goals of 12 and 15 books (respectively), I thought it appropriate to set the bar a bit higher. Additionally, I decided to set a modest goal of running 300 miles in 2018. I’d done it before, but in the ensuing years my running had really fallen off as I focused my fitness regimen more on weightlifting. I figured this would be the impetus I needed to get back into it and better balance my approach to physical fitness.

So How’d I Do?

So let’s start with the good news: the reading challenge went well, aided undoubtedly by the hours I spend commuting and my Audible subscription and multiple library memberships. As of now, I have completed 53 books in 2018, and I am on track to finish at least one more in the next day or so. I always say I’m going to do a post about my favorite books of the year and I never do; I plan to change that this year and hopefully get a New Year’s Day post up about that.

The running challenge was not quite as successful, but at the risk of soft-peddling it, I will say that I gained some valuable insight from my failure to reach that goal. As of today I have 195 miles under my belt in 2018 and with a week left, I will definitely top 200 – still well short of my original goal. I realized something, though, sometime in the early fall: from the start of the year, I had aimed to run 3.1 miles (5K) twice per week, but for some reason, I just wasn’t able to fit that into my week along with after work commitments and my lifting schedule. As a result, I only ran once per week for most of the first eight months of the year.

Once school started in September, I reassessed my goals for running – why do I run at all? For me, it’s not about training to go longer distances, but really just as cardio for healthier living and to support my weightlifting. I used 3.1 miles as a convenient way to think about how much I wanted to run, but since mileage wasn’t really a specific training goal, did it really matter if I ran 3.1 miles every time I ran?

I got the bright idea that instead of focusing on mileage, I was going to focus on time – after all, I was not trying to increase mileage for marathon training, I just wanted to burn some more calories. I started limiting my runs to 30 minutes, and however far I ran, that’s how far I ran. To my great surprise, I found myself much more committed to maintaining that twice weekly running schedule alongside my lifting, and my monthly mileage jumped as a result! January-June I was doing 12-15 miles/month. July I totally fell off (the less said about that, the better), I had a slight increase in August (taking advantage of treadmills in the air-conditioned gym on our cruise ship), and from September on I have been closer to 24-25 miles per month.

Call it purely psychological, call it wimping out from running the full 5K twice per week, I don’t care. I may have fallen short of the goal this year, but I learned something valuable about myself and how I best work toward this particular goal. If I keep this pace up, I will have no problem hitting 300 miles in 2019, but more importantly, I’m seeing the health and aesthetic benefits I was really looking for all along (looking leaner, lower resting heart rate). It’s not necessarily the number of miles I ran in a single session that mattered, but the overall volume of work done, and if I had to ‘chunk’ it to smaller individual doses to do more overall, then so be it.

I hate sounding like a cliche or a bumper sticker, but my failure to hit this particular goal by doing things the way I used to do them really did result in me learning more about myself, my purpose, and what works for me, and subsequently, how to better achieve the results I wanted. In this instance, I really was able to ‘fail forward’.

Do Break the Chain

The summer I wrote my dissertation, I posted here about a productivity strategy called Don’t Break the Chain.  Click the link for the backstory, but the gist of it is that it’s easier to maintain a habit if you keep at it – even for a little bit – every day, and monitor your progress visually (e.g., Xing off days on a calendar).

The good news is that it worked for me to help me get the last two chapters of that dissertation drafted and finalized over the months of July and August.  The bad news is that is also works in reverse – I’ve now maintained a chain of 143 days uninterrupted by blogging.  This is not a trend I’m proud of; in fact, it’s the longest break between blog posts I’ve had since I started blogging in the summer of 2007.

It’s been bothering me that I haven’t found the capacity to sit with my thoughts and write, especially since I’ve spoken time and time again about how therapeutic and valuable I find writing, I guess just not enough to actually force me to sit down and do it.

Enter Christina Torres‘ blog post in my RSS reader earlier today.  Who knows how and why circumstances come together the way they do, but she wrote just what I needed to read at the time I needed to read it.  Rather than try to sit down, gather my thoughts, and put together a coherent, “like-and-fave-worthy” statement of profound educational import, I’m taking the advice I gave students for however many years (and the message I took from Christina’s post) – just write.  And I’m not doing it sat in my office, or in my living room, or some other “writer-friendly” space – I’m banging this out standing in my kitchen, dripping wet after a run, just to get the words on the page.

It’s my hope that by breaking the chain of bloglessness (?), I can kickstart whatever reflective and creative juices have powered my writing for as many years as they have.  It’s something I’ve done here before – a quickie post, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing, just to get myself back on the horse.  It’s worked in the past; let’s see if it takes this time.

Thanks, Christina.  Just goes to show you never know the impact your thoughts and ideas – whether they’re blogged, tweeted, podcasted, or simply shared face-to-face between colleagues and friends – can have on another person, and it’s yet another reason why I’m not ready to give up on Twitter for one aspect – albeit an important one – of my professional learning, despite the increasingly unmanageable signal to noise ratio.