There Are Too Many Days Left, And Too Little to Do

courtesy of Pixabay CC0 Public Domain

Day Two of the Balloon Racer Project started off well enough and the students worked hard for nearly two hours. Four more cars were finished. Unfortunately, it seems that will be all the cars we will have to enter the race. The other students have exhausted their ideas, and a small group of girls decided not to try at all. Instead, they wanted to spend the whole time talking, loudly, and had to be shushed often.

Two hours is already longer than the students usually stay with me. Because of testing there are no electives this morning, so the kids are stuck with me, probably until lunch. Hopefully, they will not be stuck with me all day the way they were yesterday.

As might be expected at this point in the school year attendance is down. I had six students absent this morning. One student showed up late. Two students who were absent yesterday came today. I don’t know if my teammates are experiencing the same level of absenteeism as I am. I heard at lunch yesterday that the 7^th grade teams at the other end of the hall had a high absentee rate. I wonder if the same is true today.

In order to keep the students occupied, and to give them a head start on next year’s Social Studies course on state and US history, I am presenting them with a lesson on the American Revolution. Hoping to make it a bit more palatable for the students, I am showing episodes of the PBS Series “Liberty’s Kids.” While some of the history in these episodes is slightly abridged, perhaps the ideas presented will stick with the students and be familiar when they come up next year.

And then came the email from the school IT representative telling us we had to stop using streaming video because of on-line testing at the high school and the county, because of budget restrictions, doesn’t have enough band width for the testing, much less for the testing and for us to stream video. This leaves teachers with a conundrum.

If our students, who we are supposed to have for 75 minutes a day, but who wind up staying with us 3 time that long, have finished the activity we planned for them, which we planned to last twice as long as normal, and we are not allowed to present the video lesson we planned, even if it is educational and part of the overall curriculum, what exactly are we supposed to do with our students? Contrary to what the people isolated in their offices at district and state headquarters might think, the students are not going to sit and accept instruction as usual at this point in the year.

Due to the necessity of this decision, made necessary because the legislature and county commission are not willing to invest in technical infrastructure for the school systems, my students wound up playing a game called Silent Ball, a game they promise to be silent during. Naturally, being 7^th graders of their time, staying silent is a near impossibility.

When they tire of Silent Ball, I may see if they want me to read to them from one of my books. Classes in past years have enjoyed this. The students really enjoy it if I read to them from one of my works-in-progress because they know they are the first to hear it.

This day has already been long and it’s not even 10:30am. A little over four hours to go.

As always, I remain,

The Exhausted Educator