@PS great news about the new job, I know giving notice is hard, especially as I know you will be an employee that they will hate to lose, but this a great new direction for you.
Your comments about teachers are interesting. Here in NZ we have ten week terms followed by 2 weeks holidays, except at Summer when we have six weeks off. We went into lockdown at week 8 so the government announced they were bringing the school holidays forward by 2 weeks, which was the best decision. No teachers I know are having a holiday, we are meeting everyday via zoom and conference calls to try to plan what our digital platform will look like and then going away to plan the lessons and units that will be delivered, while all settling our own families into lockdown. There are lots of comments floating around about teachers here too, but not a lot of understanding around what is happening behind the scenes.
It’s going to be really interesting when the holidays are over and class teaching resumes. At my son’s high school they are keeping the same timetable. He will log on, watch a video from the teacher explaining the work for that session, then the teacher sits in the virtual classroom to answer any questions and students share their work via google docs which the teacher marks and advises on. They also have individual face to face zoom chats with their teachers once a week.
In my school it is different, the range of ages and abilities in a primary school is huge, from kids who cannot yet write or spell to ten year olds. That is where planning is trickier because parents are needed to be involved in the learning far more and there is a real awareness of the need to keep kids engaged and learning while not adding to parental stress in lockdown.
The other big side of teachers roles here is the pastoral care part. I am ringing every family with a learner with diverse needs to see how they are doing and what support they need. We are all very conscious too that when we video chat with the children themselves there is always a possibility of them making a disclosure that something is happening at home that feels unsafe, so a lot of training is going on about how to handle that in a lockdown situation.
I feel for families who are not technically savvy, but also for those fighting the screen time battle when school inevitably will need screens and keeping kids on task will be a source of tension for families.
In other news my son and I had an awesome movie night at home with popcorn, and a failed attempt on my part to make a frozen coke lol. He has wanted to watch ‘Airplane’ for ages, boy was that like taking a step back in time. I was his age when it came out, a spoof obviously, but still a reminder of what air travel was like (back when air travel was possible!)
My dog is loving lockdown, they are the real winners in this situation - loved the news story about the sausage dog who was so happy to have his family home all the time he sprained his tail from wagging it too much (he’s fine now).