As I write this, a gathering of young adults two floors below me are having a drinking contest. It is a puente, a 3-day weekend, and the sound of reggaeton echoes up out of their courtyard. They are likely university students. They are ignoring the social distancing mandate put in place by the Mexican authorities.
I will also ignore it, tomorrow, as I go out and about to get food and prepare to spend most of my days inside my apartment here in Guadalajara, Jalisco. We are closing our campus temporarily and moving our classes to eLearning on Wednesday.
To make that happen smoothly, our high school staff at ASFG will gather, sin los alumnos, on Tuesday and figure out how to meet our learning goals as we protect our community from the COVID-19 pandemic.
Everything about this year has been unexpected, from my personal health issues, to my lifestyle challenges in Mexico, to this: teaching in a foreign country during a major global health crisis. Some of my colleagues and their families are stressed about this new paradigm shift. I am surprised that I am not, though maybe this is evidence that I have learned to accept the unexpected with a smile and a shrug. “Hello,” and then I take its hand.
Tomorrow, I’ll spend much of my day adapting my Shakespeare unit from a highly-collaborative group production of a podcast about Macbeth to a highly-collaborative digitally-produced podcast about Macbeth. What I’ll have my students do will be largely unchanged. But it would be irresponsible of me as an educator not to guide them toward online practices that will help them self-organize via email, video chat, and whatsapp.
I would also not be as effective an educator if I didn’t now set up some way for them to take notice of their metacognition, since that’s usually something I do spontaneously in our classroom environment. I want them to feel confident with both the subject matter they are learning and with their everyday technologies as necessary education tools. I need them to realize that my expectations of their awareness regarding their learning goals remains unchanged.
As their teacher, this means I get to think more about how to help them manage their time, and give them some best practices when communicating via digital means. I must provide them examples of how to document their communication and creation processes so that they can show me what I would have passively observed in our classroom.
Fortunately, podcasts that are created over distance are nearly undistinguishable from podcasts created in the same room: they often sound the same. So in this way it’s not the product that will change, but the process. Where we all would have had the ease of adjusting the creation process in person intuitively, as issues arise, now they will need me to support these processes before they undertake them, so they don’t feel overburdened by trouble-shooting on top of feeling isolated. Teens both struggle with and thrive off of working in groups.
I can’t say now, at midnight on a Saturday, how I’m going to create these “guidelines and expected evidence of process” that I’ll need to use starting Wednesday. That’s tomorrow’s work, after yoga and coffee. I do have some ideas, like small check lists, like meeting new daily deadlines, and like who will need to facetime me when; just to make sure we all look each other in the eye, feel free to ask about the unexpected, and see that we are all of us still doing this together, even over social distance.