Letting Go of COVID Control

I have been struggling during this time. I love spending this time with my wife and kids, but I am concerned about people I care about who don’t live with me. While I am completely content to chip away at my list, clean the house, find interesting ways to connect, create, and be involved in my community, I am keenly aware that this is a time of great uncertainty and danger. And I have been living with that sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach: fear.

So my goal continues to be to not lose this moment because I am afraid about what may or may not happen later. I am working to be present here and now. I want to be able to appreciate the moments I have with my family at home, on the phone, through video chats, texts, and emails instead of fretting about the dangers from which I cannot protect them.

 

I guess I need to let go of the protector father/husband concept, too.

 

It is easier written than done. I read an article talking about how one’s mindset affects one’s immune system, and anxiety hinders the immunity system. Did I really need to be told that fear is the mind-killer? Do I diminish my ability to stay well by making doomsday plans?

 

I am a planner. I like control. One doesn’t become a theatre director and English teacher unless one is constitutionally predisposed to being in charge. I am happier when things work according to my plans because I spend significant energy structuring all the pieces. I have checklists, to-do sheets, procedure documents, and contingency plans for my contingency plans. My father calls me a “belt and suspenders man.” It is an accurate description.

 

While there is nothing wrong with being thoughtful, prepared, and planned, it can be problematic when my need to direct the show is thwarted. I am in the wings for this crisis. My role is to stay out the way and do whatever I can to help those fighting this pandemic.

 

I am slowly learning how to do that. I am not a lead in this play. I am a bit player, an extra, and I must do my small part and let the show’s leads save me. That does not come easily to me, especially when some of those key actors don’t seem to know their lines or blocking and are terrible stage hogs.

 

I need to take my own grandmother’s advice and look at things positively. This does not mean ignoring, denying, or minimizing the things that make me anxious but putting them in their place. It does not mean throwing up my hands and saying I cannot participate in the struggle to improve our world, but finding healthy ways to contribute to the fight. And of course, letting go of my expectation of control.

 

A dear friend told me her version of the serenity prayer; she said the only good thing about hitting your head against the wall is that it feels really good when you stop. I must accept that much about this situation is out of my control. I cannot let that frustration destroy the good things that are right in front of me. I must not let my imagined horrors outshine my here and now blessings. There are things I can control. There are ways I can both help keep everyone safe and help make this a more just and peaceful world for everyone. I must understand the difference.

 

Writing this is one step. Doing it is another. I’ll get back to you.  

How’s Distance Learning Working For You? Ideas for the Fall

It is not hard to hear the cries of teachers, parents, and students right now. Distance learning, e-learning, or whatever you want to call it is not a big success. It is difficult and cumbersome. It is a very poor substitute for what happens in classrooms across the country. At best, it is a stopgap, and at worst it is a sham. 

And now we are learning that we may not be able to return to school as usual in the fall! Does that mean that teachers get all summer to get better at the bad solution? One could rationalize that we are only now learning how to do learning online and, by next fall, we’ll all be experts and do it beautifully! I don’t know who might say that, but whoever would has never been in education – or they are experiencing quarantine delusions.

Kids are disengaged, teachers are frustrated, and parents feel like they don’t have the tools to help their children. The technology is buggy, the content feels overwhelming, and so many other factors are at play. Providing an online analog for school is not working.  

So what do we do? More of the same? Amp up what isn’t working anyway? Become stricter and create more punishments if students don’t comply? Threaten kids with grades, demotions, or failure? What a great formula for success!

We must create better options and reinvent the way online school functions. Rather than a failing attempt to replicate regular school online, let’s use what we know about what makes learning successful to create new options.

The relationship between student and teacher sits at the heart of education. Anything that disrupts this relationship will have a devastating effect on learning. Whatever we do in the fall, it must allow teachers and students to build powerful interpersonal bonds. This is especially important since teachers and students may not have met each other prior to this crisis.

Students must be actively engaged in learning and that engagement must be maintained over time. Teachers are talking about digital fatigue. Students are complaining about school being turned into a series of worksheets, readings, online quizzes, videos, and Zoom meetings.

More is not better, no matter what the highly materialistic parts of our culture may argue. Students are not empty vessels waiting to be filled with formulas, dates, and texts. Education is not a constant barrage of information. Without active involvement, interactive experiences, and engaging ideas, students either disengage or robotically play the game.

So what do we do? How do we make the best use of this time with our students even though we can’t be in the same classroom with them? Here are alternative ways we might structure school in the fall:

Less is More: Some high schools have as many as nine periods a day. Some schools use a block schedule and have two, three, or four longer classes for any given time period. Beloit College in Wisconsin is considering  breaking its first semester into two parts. Students would only take two classes during each part. Teachers would teach fewer classes, too. These classes would be more immersive and in-depth.

What if, instead of taking five, six, or more classes, each student only took two? This would allow for more in-depth contact with the teachers, more time to explore in more depth, and prevent some overload. Instead of a long semester with many classes, what about two classes at a time for four weeks each? 

Teachers and schools must be flexible with their curriculums and standards. This is an unprecedented situation and insisting that we cover all thirty-seven chapters, quiz on each, and take the unit test is not the path to success now. Fewer classes give teachers and students a better chance to develop a relationship. It gives them more time to find engaging activities that might go beyond the computer screen. It could also provide a natural limit on the content.

Beloit is also using their two at a time as a way to be able to pivot when the actual building can be opened again. After the first set of two classes, maybe we can then get back together. If not, we do it again.

Interdisciplinary Teams: Another approach would be to bundle several classes together. Instead of a single teacher and twenty-some student several times a day, what if we had a group of teachers and a group of students working together? Instead of Science, Math, English, Art, and Social Studies, what if we had a team of teachers working with a group of students? They would not divide into individual subject areas but create an integrated curriculum. The group of teachers might also include a counselor or social worker. Perhaps these classes would focus on social issues like climate change, racial identity, or a particular art form, period in history, or scientific concept. Perhaps they would employ a variety of experiences both on and off the computer. Perhaps they could engage parents and community members who had specific talents or backgrounds.

This approach must not be “today is social studies day, look at the document.” To function well, each activity and assignment should challenge students to explore. The connections would be the focus of the course! We could feed one bird from several feeders!

Again, teachers and schools will have to say that they are not covering the entire AP curriculum and be willing to go deeper with a more narrow focus.

If they build it, you will come: We can take both of these ideas one step further. What if we let students drive the curricular choices? What if we put them in charge and make teachers their guides and coaches instead of their directors?

What if we ask kids what they would like to learn and organize courses around student generated interests? Students and teachers would be paired based on suggestions, maybe some from the adult staff and some from the students. These teams would then design their own courses as a team, students and teachers working side by side. Could everyone “do the work?” Could assignments, activities, and assessments apply to everyone, adults and kids alike?

This would also mean that some courses might need outside experts as consultants. Teachers might have to move beyond their areas of expertise and learn with the kids.

After school activities could be approached in the same way. Could we have e-sports teams? Could we move from theatre productions to short films? What about puppetry? Electronic music? The school newspaper online could be a critical piece of keeping the community informed and connected!

We must be able to relax rigid structures that stand in the way of student success during this time of learning apart. We must be willing to make relationships, engagement, and depth the educational priorities. Why can’t we have multi-age classes? Why can’t art, physical education, and world languages be integrated with traditional academic subjects? Now is the time to go as far as is necessary to help students learn and thrive. They deserve no less.

What If Your Computer Crashed And You Could Not Recover What Was On It?

Last Sunday, my computer froze and showed me nothing but a beach ball. I waited. I restarted the computer. I looked online and tried several techniques to boot in safe mode, recovery, and off an external disk. Nothing worked. I called Apple and we spent several hours trying to reinstall the operating system, repair disks, and get the machine to start. It refused.

I eventually took the very large computer to the Apple Store, and I await a repair. Yet, as you can see I am still writing this blog. In fact, using my work computer, an old computer at home, and my iPad, I can do almost everything. My solution is imperfect; for some important functions, I am waiting for my computer to come back from the shop.

One thing I am not worried about is the recovery of my data. My photos, music, documents, home records, and other valuable files are backed up to both an external hard drive and through a backup cloud service.  I am confident that, when I get my computer back, I will be able to restore it such that I will be able to function as I did before it broke.

That wasn’t always the case. This is not the first time a computer has crashed on me. Since that first painful lesson, I have instituted a system by which I back up files in multiple ways to different sources.

What if your computer were to crash, be stolen, or destroyed? What would you lose? What might make life more difficult for you? What would be irreplaceable?

The easiest way to back up your computer is to automate it. I use the Apple Time Machine system, but almost every hard drive has a program to create backups on a schedule. Every platform has a variety of options to backup once a day, hour, week, or whatever makes sense for your needs. You can purchase an external drive and use the program that comes on it or one that is connected to your computer’s operating system.

My children have laptops. They do not leave their computers on desks connected to external drives. For that reason, I subscribe to a cloud backup service that backs up automatically from the cloud. There are several companies offering this service. If you are interested in which one I use and why, reach out to me and I’m happy to tell you about it. I don’t want this to be a commercial.

Unfortunately, the service I used for many years just ended their consumer backup plan and I have recently moved to a new service. Thus my children are not protected by this way right now. That is an issue.

Another solution to the laptop problem is to purchase a micro SD card. These cards are small memory cards that can hold as many files as some phones, tablets, or computers. Most computers have a slot to read them. You can purchase cards in many sizes. My plan is to purchase 200-gigabyte cards and let my kids either automate or manually copy their important files as they see fit. I use a similar method with my school computer. Once a week, I copy all my important files to a flash drive.

Of course, for many of us, much of our digital life is online anyway. Between Google Drive, DropBox, iCloud, and other services, we can keep a great deal of our important data online. I don’t do that with the scans of my tax returns or old photos. My financial files are on an old version of Quicken that I have intentionally prevented from connecting to the internet. And I have a ton of music and videos that would take up far too much space to store online. Thus, I back them up on a drive that sits next to my computer. 

I am hopeful that when I get my computer back (which I am assured will be any day now) that I will be able to reload my digital life and be back to normal quickly and painlessly. Thinking about backing up is not fun, but it is far better than the problem of losing everything that was on your computer.

So again, I ask: what have you done to protect yourself if your computer were no longer functional? What will you do now?

Plan B

My favorite game is chess. I am not fond of games where the players’ success is dependent on chance: the roll of a dice, the deal of the cards, or random selection of tiles. While those games are certainly interesting and have their challenges, the player’s success is integrally connected to random chance. Not in chess. In chess, both players have the same “hand” and the only difference between them is who goes first. In chess, success or failure is the result of the skill of the player.

In my experience, the key to a successful chess game is the ability to think beyond the immediate move. Good chess players have many contingency plans. They think beyond the next move, the move after that and the move after that. They anticipate the moves of their opponents and create multiple versions of those plans.

This skill is critically important, not only in chess, but in life. Of course we want to, “live in the moment.” But how many of our own and our society’s problems are the result of short-term thinking? While all consequences cannot be predicted, many can. I would argue that a person with a plan B (and a plan C and D) is better equipped to deal with surprises than a person without.

Recently, the Chicago Tribune published an article providing drivers with winter safety tips. One of the those tips was to look head and see what was coming up, “Drivers should anticipate difficult situations by looking down the road far enough to identify potential problems. They also should be aware of drivers coming from other lanes and cross streets. ‘Across the board, that's the No. 1 mistake people make in driving, period: Not looking far enough ahead,’ said Mark Cox, director of the Bridgestone Winter Driving School in Steamboat Springs, Colo.”

A good driver is always looking ahead and asking, “what if.” What if that truck pulls out? What if the door to that car should suddenly open? What if that child runs into the street? What if the light changes now? Like a chess player, a good driver must have multiple plans to fit many possibilities.

It goes beyond chess and driving; it could be a philosophy of life. Whether it is with financial or personal choices, at home, school, or work, how much more successful would we be if we thought a few moves ahead?

This doesn’t mean that we save all our money because the pleasure we buy today would prevent us from purchasing food tomorrow. Not at all. Rather, it means that we consider the possibilities. It is prudent to anticipate needs. Americans are notorious for spending money they do not have. They are terrible savers. Buying a fun toy today is even more satisfying knowing that it will not jeopardize tomorrow’s necessities.

But it goes even further than these simplistic examples. Considering the options while making choices could help us with our relationships, the environment, and bring us more success. When I purchase a product, who is getting the money and what will they do with it? If I support this candidate, what is she likely to do in office? How will my words and actions affect my family, friends, and co-workers?

Thinking a few moves ahead will slow us down. It will help us have fewer of those impulsive mistakes. It will make us safer drivers and more successful chess players and human beings.