Quarantine: Day 34

Kira and I have played an amazing amount of Mario Kart on the Wii for the last month. We have unlocked characters and cars nobody knew were even there. We have discovered cheats and short cuts. And we both have experienced the excruciating pain of keeping your eyes open too long with dirty contacts because we don't want to blink and miss a turn or a jump. We were watching the movie Aladdin the other night and there was a scene where Jasmine was teary-eyed at the thought of her kingdom being run by (whoever the bad guy is, geez, am I supposed to remember everything!) and Kira said, "I wish my eyes were that wet when we play Mario Kart," and I laughed and laughed. She played so hard one night that a contact lens fell out and she couldn't find it. I found it today on the kitchen floor.

Distance learning for my students is really starting to suck for me. Today, nay, I should say, last night at about 10:30 a parent emailed me asking where her student could find the information (Read chapter four of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde) she needed to answer the question I had as an assignment today. I gave the books out to students before we started distance learning but this student didn't pick one up. No problem! It's in the public domain and online! I graciously took a screenshot of the slide in my slideshow where her daughter, and all the students can find that information and more! As you can see, I linked the chapter, AS WELL as an audio link to the chapter, AS WELL as TWO links to summary and analysis. AS WELL as a link to Sparknotes. But they couldn't find the information.

I replied to her email and told her to have her student look in the slideshow that I took hours painstakingly making and she would find the links. She said they couldn't find it. You know why they couldn't find it? Because they didn't look. Every other kid seemed to have no trouble finding the chapter. Even if I was a total coaster and didn't post links and just said, "Find the book Jekyll and Hyde and read chapter four" that would not be an unreasonable thing to ask them to do because it is, as I've already said, in the public domain and a simple Google search of "Jekyll Hyde Chapter 4" brings dozens of results. I have amended my Jekyll and Hyde unit so the kids have to answer ONE question per chapter instead of several among other activities, and still I get complaints. Well, "complaint, (singular)" but it still riles  me up. The nerve. I know exactly what happened too. This kid told her parent, "I don't know what I'm supposed to do," which is a total lie because I haven't changed the basic format of the course from when we were at school, and the parent believed her and got busy on email before she could do her own research. I get it. People are tense. I am tense. I understand. But still. 

For the most part though, school has been okay. I miss my students desperately and I miss being in the classroom with them, but they have been doing alright. Another colleague asked her tenth grade advisory if they were getting too much, not enough, or just the right amount of work in their courses and 100% of her students said that they were getting the right amount in English. No other department had 100%. It's tremendous. All the people are saying it's the best department ever. The results are unprecedented.... oh, sorry. I just forced myself to watch a national press conference and also, on an unrelated note, I'm just a tiny bit drunk.