One of the major side effects of last week's winter storm was water main breaks in my city. As a result, many of the homes in the area that I teach, are without water. Many of the local schools were without water, themselves, or were being used as distribution centers for bottled water. This caused the district to decide that it was best to go virtual for the week. 
Now, I've only taught remotely on one occasion; I used to tutor a third grader in math, and most of our tutoring took place via Zoom. It was hard enough to maintain one student's attention for one hour at a time, when all of her physiological needs were being met, and she had her mother sitting next to her keeping her on track. Now, consider the absolute cluster fuck I would have experienced had we decided to teach all of our classes via Zoom, all week long, while a good 40-60% of our students are without water or power or both. Needless to say, it basically wasn't an option - ESPECIALLY in a Title 1 district, where many of my students already didn't have access to technology. 

With that in mind, my mentor teacher and I decided that this week would be a week full of bonus opportunities and easy discussion boards. We wanted to give our students every chance to succeed. However, without the structure of the classroom, without being able to sit with my mentor teacher and discuss plans for the following day, and without the guidelines of the curriculum, coming up with assignments for the week was difficult. 

Tonight I hit an actual road block. I sat at my computer for fifteen minutes trying to decide what I was going to assign my students for tomorrow. I wanted to give them a quick bell ringer assignment that was relevant to the book we're reading. Problem is, we've only read one chapter, and they did a review of that chapter today. I can't ask them to read the second chapter of the book this week, because the school barely had enough copies for the freshman English teachers to have a full class set each. I taught them how to look up the PDF online, but I'm sure many of them won't do it (my students are NOTORIOUS for refusing to read outside of class). That left me with no clue what I should assign them. 

Of course, that meant that I had to lean on my absolute favorite tool for bonus assignments: FlipGrid. Y'all, I fucking love FlipGrid. I tell my kids all the time that if they have time to make a tiktok, they have time to make a FlipGrid video. It's hella simple. So far, I've used it for a discussion on what makes them unique, and a virtual poetry slam. 

The problem tonight was that I had no idea what to ask them to do on FlipGrid. I didn't know what to have them discuss. We've been out of school for two weeks. They need a refresher of where we left off when we left, and an overview of what comes next before we can really do anything else. That didn't leave me with much. So do you know what I did? I gave them a scavenger hunt. 

I gave them 10, totally random items that they could choose from. They only have to show one of them, and then tell me why they picked it. The items are things like their favorite book or a picture of them with their best friend. It has absolutely nothing to do with what we're learning, but it sounded like fun. This... this is what virtual teaching looks like in the middle of a pandemic, when the majority of your students aren't having their basic physiological needs met, and a good portion of them don't have access to technology. This is it. 

I don't know if what I'm doing is the right thing to do. Maybe it isn't. Maybe I should have given them actual work for tomorrow, or maybe this is just the thing they need. Maybe I can justify this by saying that it appeals to the state standards on speaking skills. Maybe I can justify it as a "get to know you" activity, since I didn't get to do that at the beginning of the year. 

Some days I think I'm going to be a kick ass teacher, and others I wonder if I'm really teaching them anything at all. Oh well, at least my students won't be stressed out when they see tomorrow's assignment...