Yesterday our neighbors told us that something was wrong with our pool pump. It was making a banging noise in the night and keeping them awake. It could have been anything wrong. Luckily when we went to look, we saw that it was just that the lid for the filter pump had come loose. Phew that was an easy fix! They thanked us for fixing it and gave us a ginormous bag of lemons from their lemon tree:
Today I got more lemons. This morning I woke up to find that our Learning Management System, Canvas, had been hacked and all my lesson plans and assignments were not going to be available to me or my students. My students even had a really hard time logging into my first period class and I heard that students were later being kicked out of their last period classes (during my prep.)
This year has been such a learning experience daily! But then I think back to the other 3 years I have been teaching and wonder if there will ever be a year I feel like I have got everything down. My first year I was so lost! The next year I moved rooms and taught study skills classes and no Spanish 1. The year after that I moved schools and learned a whole different gear for classroom management. This year it turns out I didn't need classroom management skills so much as mad technical skills in Canvas, Google Meet (which I hadn't used until this year) and about a half a dozen other applications I use daily (Canva, Gimkit, Vokaroo, Google Slides, Flippity, Flipgrid....)
I'm not complaining. I have actually had a really fun time learning a bunch of new things I would have never been exposed to before and I'm pretty good about cutting myself some slack when I'm on a crazy train. (Sometimes too good!)
Today my students were frustrated and irritable. They were getting spam emails from teacher's email accounts that had been hacked. They couldn't log into their Google Meets without trying unsuccessfully 30 times first. Many of my students hadn't even slept last night (that last one is on them though!)
Today we played a Kahoot several times to get ready for a quiz next time. I think the lemonade I will make from these lemons is letting my students play the Kahoot one last time on Friday and letting their Kahoot score be their quiz score. Life is hard enough!
Now I have about 50 lemons to go squeeze. Do you think we're all going to get sick of lemonade here??
3 comments:
Your lemons are beautiful! And I think you are so good at learning new things and being good to people. You have lucky students. And everyone else who knows you, especially me.
Sometimes all life has to give you is lemons and you had better have a lot of extra sugar when that happens. Lucky for all of us you're one of the sweet ones of this world.
Are those new programs make me very impressed. I also admire your flexibility and your compassion for your students.
You think and do good things! I like what you have turned you lemons in to in your teaching. You work hard at teaching and helping your students have lemonade. I hope you have really good lemonade and other lemon inspired dishes. I hope you have fun with all that yellow goodness.
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