Starting Over

It is time to start blogging again!

It has been WAY TOO LONG since I wrote on my blog!

I miss this creative writing outlet, to reflect and find joy in each day.

So here we start again!

2020......what a year this has been.  Let's look back.  

The 2019-2020 school year started off AMAZING.  The second week of school, September 3, 2019, 798 students, grades K-8, gathered in our gym as ten previously selected students spoke with an astronaut on the International Space Station.  I was finding my groove in the engineering classroom, our Botball and Jr. Botball robotics students were doing amazing, we added an amateur radio after school club, life was great!  I foolishly thought this was going to be the best year ever!  

Then Friday, March 13, 2020 arrived.  This was the last school day of the 2019-2020 school year on campus.  The students never returned to their classrooms.  This is still so sad to write. Teachers were immersed into an online world.  It was difficult, but the end of the year came and everyone let out a deep breath that summer break finally arrived.  We would all return in August and things would get back to normal...........

With the slight possibility that things could still be sketchy when school returned, the majority of teachers I know spent the entire summer taking classes online, signing up for every webinar they could find about online teaching, joined teaching online forums, read blogs, articles, books, and spoke with anyone they could that had knowledge about remote teaching.  TRUST ME, teachers worked their behinds off this summer prepping for what might happen in the 2020 school year!  

As summer progressed, the Covid-19 virus numbers continued to rise.  Truth, I was really surprised when we were told that school would start back remotely.   

Our school has been remote, hybrid, all students on campus daily grades K-4th, and now back to hybrid.  Teaching STEM in a hybrid model and remotely is a new challenge.  Finding engaging activities while not sharing materials and working independently is difficult.  But nothing worthwhile ever come easy!  The teachers I work with, respect, and admire are all digging deep and thinking way out of the box to keep kids learning and growing! If you are a teacher, are married to a teacher, have a sibling that's a teacher, an adult child that's a teacher, or a friend that's a teacher, you know that they are working harder right now than they ever have before.  

PLEASE have grace with us teachers.  We miss our students, we miss daily student hugs, we miss our school family connections, we miss our routines, we miss our normal.  

Finding the joy today..... this afternoon a 1st grade boy was so excited about what we were doing in engineering that he gave me a quick side hug as I walked by him.  It caught me off guard, but it was such a nice surprise.  I didn't even care that he was closer than 6 feet!