It’s the Monday after February vacation. This was me:
I was actually looking extremely presentable and put together because my GOV students had a videoconference with Congressman Pappas this morning, and that was was really cool. They were a bit quiet, initially (it’s a difficult medium, there was press listening in, it is a Monday, etc....), and I admit to being nervous enough that I broke the silence and asked questions twice, but then the students got more comfortable and their shyness wore off. They had awesome, specific questions about Covid relief, the minimum wage, gun control, voting rights, and other issues. So, ultimately, I was happy with how it went.
Now, because I have two sections of the class this semester, we scheduled the videoconference during one of the periods of independent work time in our school day so everyone would be free (the congressman and his staff were flexible with his schedule to make this happen, which is appreciated). And, since that meant students didn’t have that time to work independently on assignments from their various classes, I gave them an equal amount of time during my scheduled class time for that.
I used the remainder of my class time to connect some real world stuff to the concepts they’ve been studying, so we had these bouncy discussions about the failure of the power grid in Texas Texas, bureaucratic regulation and deregulation, FEMA, education, unfunded mandates, ADA compliance, pandemic safety guidelines, our governor’s recent executive order that all schools have to reopen, the drinking age... The connective threads are the debate over the role of government, and the balance between state and national authority.... Lots of cool questions and comments out of that. I do want my block 2 class to engage a bit more- there are a handful of students doing all the participation- so that’s something I’ll be working on in the future.
At the end of class, The Principal made an announcement that all after school activities would be canceled because a storm was coming in. It’s snowing pretty hard now, so I’d say that was a good call. Since it meant that I didn’t have practice, I went to chat with Mrs. W about World and then went to talk to Mr. W about life. Actually, I went to ask him about doing a karate demo in my World classes (the pandemic makes this logistically challenging), but we ended up mostly talking about life... and online disinformation... and radicalization... and all the challenges of trying to teach young people in this day and age.
We obviously didn’t finish that conversation, heh.
