If you have ever taught a group of children, then you know getting them to walk in an orderly straight line is virtually impossible.

Today I was included in a strategy meeting with the administrative powers that be, who were round tableing what shape they can paint on the sidewalks outside our classrooms that would be enticing to preschool students! What shape and what colors would best encourage them to walk from point a to point b, in a straight line while also maintaining six feet apart! I just can’t make this up but they were discussing it with such a seriousness that it actually made me laugh out loud. There are just so many issues with the fantasy they were trying to spin!!

First, let’s pretend the preschool students walk in straight line, have you ever been 6 ft away from a preschool student? You might as well be wearing an invisibility cloak because they don’t know you’re there!! Unless you are unwrapping a brand new toy or eating a cookie they are not paying attention to anything 6 ft away. They certainly aren’t capable of walking in a line following a person 6 ft away in front of them.

Second, have you ever tried to get from point a to point b with a group of preschoolers? It’s similar to herdng butterflies. Administrators have pictured a group of 12 preschoolers 6 ft apart. Let’s do the math: 12 students times 6 ft is 72 ft! Add in two teachers and you have 84 ft! The line going from my classroom to anywhere else they’re imagining will be an 84-ft line and we are going to be able to keep track of all 12 students spaced that far apart??!!! I hope there isn’t a turn! “Yes”, they say, “because if we pick the right stencil and color combo it will keep them engaged and moving forward in the right direction!!” What the Hell!? My students aren’t watching their feet. They’re looking at the clouds, the trees, the birds, the squirrels, that blade of grass, that leaf over there, And they’re most likely running towards whatever they’re seeing!!

Oh, and let’s not forget, wherever we will be walking guided by these magical, colorful, perfectly painted shapes on the ground we will be passing a playground that they will not be allowed to play on. Because it’s safe for us to be inside the classroom again, allegedly, but not safe for the students to be playing outside together on a play structure!! That won’t cause an extra fun little wrinkle. I am sure the yellow caution tape that they’ve wrapped all around it will be a clear indication to my students that they can’t go play 😂

Hopefully a glass or two (or perhaps three) of wine tonight will help shed a more positive light on the lunacy that is administration!! The lack of classroom experience in school district leadership has never been more glaringly obvious than during this pandemic!!!

It’s New Year’s Eve, and every where I look people are counting down the hours, as if when we wake up tomorrow the Rona is going to be a distance memory. Also, everyone is listing their Top 10, Top 50, Top 100, Top Whatever Most Hated memories of 2020. There have been a ginormous amount of sucky things in 2020, that is without a doubt. But I feel like I have so much to be grateful for, and so many silver linings of 2020 that I want to give more attention to those memories then the ugly ones.

So my 2020 Silver Lining Recap:

• Everyone in my homestead is healthy!
• Even the people I personally know who were sick with the Rona have recovered.
• My husband and I are still working!
• The months where everyone in my homestead were sharing table space all working/learning from home.
• Seeing my own kids engaging with their teachers and classmates via zoom.
• I have gone 10 months without being sneezed on, puked on, peed on, or bled on!!
• In all my years teaching, I have not gone 10 months without being sick! I haven’t had a cold, the flu, a cough or even a runny nose. I haven’t been exposed to ring worm, lice, scabies, or some other mystery rash! A PR that will never be repeated I am sure!!!!
• I have definitely grown closer with my team! We have the time (and desire) to collaborate more, be social (via zoom) more and we have really learned each other strengths, what makes us tick, and learned about each other as individuals.
• I have gotten to know the families of my students WAY more then I ever have before. I have the time (and desire, most of the time) to meet with them weekly (via zoom) and have learned where their needs are. I have found ways to give them the supports they need, as well as built a much better working relationship then I ever have had with parents before.
• I have had the time to create parent supports so that they can better understand typical child development (3 year old’s, even those with autism, do NOT read chapter books, no matter what you’ve seen on social media!!)
• I feel like, even though the minutes may be less, I spend more quality time individually with my students, and that is definitely impacting my lesson planning and their learning in a very positive way.
• While my house always looks ‘lived in’, underneath all the daily learning/teaching stuff, it is cleaner then it has ever been.
• I have rediscovered a love of cooking and baking!
• I start every day enjoying a hot cup of coffee before the day’s crazy starts!!
• I am grateful everyday for all the extra family time I have had the last 290 (and counting!)

There is so many negative things in the world that have happened over the last 10 months. And I am certain that I have forgotten many things I am grateful for, but I definitely wanted this blog post to highlight the positive. Not everything in 2020 has been a GIANT SUCK! We cancelled vacations, time spent with extended family, and couldn’t always get what we wanted at the store, but when the sun set at the end of every day, we had much more to be thankful for.

So now I am off to enjoy a large glass of wine (or 3) because there is no ‘too early’ to drink during the RONA!!

Stay safe, stay healthy, and wear a mask!!!!

So this is not a popular opinion, but it is mine. I’m currently enjoying distance teaching.

Not all the admin led PD. Nor the endless admin led zoom meetings, countless emails that shouldn’t exist and the reply-alls that follow. Nor the struggles with zoom, connectivity, unpredictable wifi connections, and the added complications of green screens…But the hidden treasures.

In the old world, if I wanted to start the day with a hot cup of coffee, enjoyed in the quiet calm of the morning, I’d have to get up before 6 o’clock and rush (so almost never). Now I rise at 7, casually brew a pot (because I can now drink more than 1 cup) and snuggle in on the couch joined for quiet reading time by my youngest, almost daily.

In the old world, I’d have to wait until dinner time to see the smiling faces of my children. I’d rush home at lunch time (when I got a lunch break) to walk my dog so she wasn’t stuck in her crate for 10 hours straight. And at the end of my day, I felt dead on on my feet trying to throw together dinner. Now, I see my children several times a day (we are in our individual zooms all day after all); I can serve us hot lunch (and actually eat it) and my dog has rarely been stuck in her crate in 8 months! I can walk her unhurried between zooms (and lesson planning and report writing and all the other ‘virtual’ paperwork that is part of teaching)!

Another silver lining, my colleagues and I have never been closer. We are a rock solid team! We do our own things but we collaborate way more then we use to. In the old world, we would chat, exchange small talk, offer advice and resources when asked, but we un-noticingly spent our days holed up between our own classroom walls. Now that our classroom walls are relocated in our homes, we chat via zoom, texts, and emails (we actually want to read) multiple times daily. We’ve traveled down rabbit holes exploring new technology, new apps, just plain newness and learned from each other. It’s refreshing and is keeping us all sane.

There is a lot of negative out there right now. And not everything about remote learning/remote teaching is rainbows and unicorns, but there is some good. I only highlighted a few of the silver linings I’m grateful for and I will continue to be grateful for while we navigate this new, temporary world. 10 years from now this will only be a memory, and I hope to remember more good then bad.

So as the sun sets on another Rona caused wacky day, I pour a big glass of red wine and reflect on silver linings ❤️

So this blog was born from my desire to share the WTF moments I have as a special Ed teacher, and only 2 weeks into this school year I already have a few to share!

My first story is about the family that moved into the district over the summer (during a pandemic) and thought it most appropriate to just slip the IEPs for their children (yes, more than one) through the mail slot of the district office door, in unmarked envelopes. Then on the eve of the first day, starts emailing everyone up the ladder that they have been ignored and their children are being discriminated against. Not once did they reach out to the special Ed office, except to email the director the day before school started. Somehow emailing their home school, or the school registrar didn’t make sense, but emailing the superintendent and members of the school board does?!?!

Then there is the family that thinks since preschool is 3 hours, I should be hosting 3 hour daily zoom meetings. This is the family that also hasn’t done any of the at home learning lessons I send home (complete with the supplies to do them) because”that’s my job” but I suspect will be the family that files suit in a year because their child hasn’t made any progress on their their IEP goals.

Speaking of weekly work packets, my team and I methodically plan and prep what is appropriate for our students in order to work on IEP goals, keeping in mind what is also age and developmentally appropriate. Then arrange to have contactless pickup so no one is exposed during this pandemic.  So of course, in keeping with the neediness of this year’s families, I have parents that are unable to come, during the 6 hour window we give them, and want us change our times or to deliver?!?!

And finally my favorite is the family that “can’t handle having 2 kids at home” so since no kids are being educated live, in the classroom, can’t they bring their child for 4 hours everyday to my classroom?!?! Mind you, in a world where I got to teach live and in person, my students were only there for a 3 hour school day, but for them I should offer 4?!?!??

Luckily, I am teaching remote, so wine time can happen much earlier in the day! Coffee til cocktails is legit!! Along with pj pants all day every day 🤣

You want to talk about opening up schools again, sure. You go first.

School principals and administrators, school boards, stop meeting remotely to talk about opening schools.

Local, state, and national authorities, stop meeting remotely to talk about opening schools.

Elected officials, stop meeting remotely to talk about opening schools.

The CDC and other official health agencies at all levels, stop meeting remotely to talk about opening schools.

News broadcasters, judging teachers for wanting health and safety measures in place, stop talking about how teachers don’t want to go back to school, remotely.

All these people are doing this from the safety of their own homes. If you think it is safe to open schools, there is no risk to students, teachers or school staff, then you go first. You go back to your offices, meeting rooms, broadcast desks. You expose yourself daily. You risk your health and the health of your families, first.

Then tell teachers it is safe to be enclosed in a classroom with 10, 20, 30+ students all day. With no recess. No breaks. Inside lunch because we can’t open the cafeterias. It’s not yet safe to open the school playgrounds. Or to mingle with other classes on campus.

The answer is easy. You want us back in the classroom, You go first. Until then, we’re going to keep fighting for basic human decency. Basic human safety. We’re going to keep fighting for safe, clean schools, with enforceable sick student policies.

You go first!! Until then, we’ll keep answering the call that was thrust upon us last spring, and connect with each of our students, remotely; providing high quality education, meeting the individual needs of our students, remotely; being the awesome teachers we always we’re, remotely.

Until you go first.

Well that didn’t seem to take long! I think our 15 minutes of fame are over, already. Gone are the kudos for how hard teachers work and how dedicated they are to their students. And now bring on the criticism, the budget cuts, the layoffs…. And the community blaming us for schools not reopening!

I had a hard time adjusting to the fully remote instruction model. I truly missed being face to face and interacting with my students daily. I teach preschoolers who have special needs and it was not a natural progression for them or me to start interacting over a computer screen. Most of my students never adjusted to seeing me on a computer screen and as the weeks went on during the shelter in place, I became less a teacher and more a parent coach.

Don’t get me wrong, I still wrote individualized weekly lesson plans chopped full of activities that parents could do with simple household items, catered to each one of my students and their IEP goals every week. There was no one-size-fits-all lesson plan for my students! I did whole group live lessons via Zoom; I recorded myself reading extra stories and posted them for my students to watch; I even brought in (virtual) guest readers, and posted How-To videos for my families on how to implement the lessons that I was giving them each week. All the while, demands got higher from the district and my students were attending the zoom meetings less and less, and more of their parents were logging in needing help. It’s exhausting work trying to teach parents to do for their children what comes naturally for you to do with them in the natural setting of a classroom. But the parents were grateful, at least the ones that actually tried to implement the strategies we discussed. They realized how hard that I worked with their students in the classroom, how much I cared, the benefit it was to have them in the classroom working with me. Parents could finally see what progress their child actually made, where before they may have complained that their child wasn’t making progress fast enough.

Now that school is finally out for summer, they all want their children back in school on the first day of fall just like it was before the Rona. They don’t want them to have to wear masks; they don’t want to have to do temperature checks in the morning; they want to just say that every runny nose is allergies even though we all know they had a fever and were tylenolled up just before they came to school in the morning! In my area the cases are skyrocketing! It isn’t getting better and there is a real risk that we won’t open up in the fall. But all parents hear is that teachers don’t want to open up in the fall because they are concerned for their own health! Well, first of all, isn’t that a realistic concern? We all get the flu, strep throat, rashes, lice, and colds every year because parents send their kids to school sick. Why would we expect parents to be different sending their kids to school even if the family’s been exposed to COVID?!?! But also, why do parents think we have that much control?! We had no control over closing the schools in the first place. And we have no control over when they open again! Every week the state superintendent, the CDC, and our local health authorities are all putting out new recommendations/requirements for how we need to open up schools all the while they’re cutting our budgets, talking about laying us off, and we have to do all of this new with a whole lot less. How can we have class sizes of 12 or fewer with less teachers? How can we space our students 6 ft apart and have multiple separate groups of kids come to school each day and meet their minimum educational minutes live in person and still have time to clean all our classrooms, prep curriculum, assess and progress monitor?!?!

We’ve gone from being heroes to being the villains! And we really have no power driving this train!!! We’ve gone from getting accolades claiming that we are way underpaid and need to be more appreciated, to we’re overpaid and we need to lay teachers off.

I’d love to have the feeling of empowerment that I have any say over how I can open my classroom safely next to school year, but the truth is I don’t have that power! I do feel safe in knowing that I will reopen my classroom next year, when someone of higher rank and grade tells me to, and that I will not have the protective equipment that I need and deserve, unless I buy it myself, and I will not have the cleaning supplies necessary to keep my classroom sanitized and germ-free, unless I buy it myself!!

That’s enough crying for now, it’s wine time! 🍷

So I have been sitting on the one for a while, hoping my negative feelings would subside, but that just hasn’t happened.

Teachers are not only charged with educating their students, but frequently we we offer comfort, nourishment, advice, and maybe most importantly, we are offer life saving first aid. The latter is what this blog post is about.

I have a student with a seizure disorder. Not terribly uncommon. I need to be trained annually on how to administer seizure medication in the event of a seizure. It is not easy or pleasant, and I will spare the details.

One morning during recess, I was playing with my students when I noticed the early onset signs that my student was having a seizure and implemented his seizure action plan, scooped him up and took him in my classroom for privacy. Since the seizure did not stop on its own, I administered his medication (rectally) and called 911. The rest of the details are unimportant to my story.

This was on a Friday. That afternoon we debriefed with staff and admin; what went well and what we could be done differently next time. Admin was full of praise and kudos. I left feeling pretty good about myself and my team as well as very shaken up by the experience. I am a teacher, not a first responder, paramedic, or doctor; and, if I never have to see another one of my students terrified like that while having a seizure, it will be too soon. Don’t get me wrong, I will do whatever is necessary again without hesitation, I just don’t want to need to.

Then comes MONDAY morning and after admin has had the weekend to process the events. I am called into a meeting in the principals office (your never too old to be scared of this) followed by another full staff meeting to review what I, and my team, did wrong (they came prepared with a long list!). AND we’re talking about nit-picky stuff!!! Sure, maybe we could have alerted admin to the medical emergency sooner, but what would that have changed? Sure, we could have tried to get the other students off the playground before we called 911, so no one was left at recess when the paramedics arrived. But why? They were hurried inside when the fire truck arrived all safe and sound.

I could go on and on, and clearly I have been festering about this, but the bottom line is I would not have done anything different. My student got the medical attention he needed when he needed it, and his family is still grateful for how my team and I handled his crisis. Maybe that’s all I should focus on. But what I wish is that admin would have just left it as it was on Friday, when they expressed their appreciation, because now I am just full of negative feelings towards them, and I have definitely lost a little more respect.

Maybe instead of criticizing me Monday morning, they could have just brought us all bottles of wine!!

Today was not a particularly hard day, but I also don’t remember the last time I had an “easy day”. Is there such thing when you’re a teacher?

Wednesdays we start school 90 minutes later so we have “collab time” or time to be “professionally developed”. I am completely guilty of being the person sitting in the back making snarky comments under my breath, rolling my eyes, questioning the relevance and wondering why I can’t just be in my classroom prepping?!

Today was my freakin turn to be the one up front leading our “collab”. Collab is in quotes because it’s a complete BS term.  Sure, opinions are gathered, even notes are collected, but when all the crap boils to the top, we’re stuck doing whatever admin deems important no matter what our input is. Today I got stuck leading because I am so “knowledgeable” and so “helpful”!! I can’t think of a better way to encourage me to mind my own business and not help my colleagues then make me lead our collaborative meetings. So instead of spending my last few nights prepping for my students and dealing with my own classroom needs, I was stuck prepping for this meeting. AND I HATED BEING THE ONE IN FRONT!! I don’t want to be the one everyone is rolling their eyes at or making snarky comments about. Fellow teachers being held captive are WAY WORSE then any student (okay maybe not any student, but a lot of them).

So this afternoon I played hooky from responsibility and took a loooooong bath, read a book and drank a glass of wine (before 5 o’clock). Yes, I have lesson plans that need planning; I have assessment reports to write, parent emails to answer, IEP goals to review, and data to analyze. BUT self care cannot necessarily wait until we have time or wait until the weekend. It’s only Wednesday. Saturday seems soooooooo far away.  I rinsed the guilt I should feel down the drain with my cold bath water.

Remember, fill your virtual wine glass. Your students need you to be full, refreshed, happy and ready to support them. You cannot care for them they way the need, if you don’t care for yourself they way you deserve. Now I am off for a second glass of wine tonight!!!!

So, it’s been more than a year since I posted a blog. The longer I went, the harder it became for me to get to it.

Kind of like exercising!!

But unlike exercising, I like blogging and sharing my adventures (and frustrations). It is a new school year, and with it comes a New Year’s resolution…get back to blogging.

So this is one is going to be a little house keeping, a little catching up, and not a lot of stress about making it great!

Last year was full of major changes…I changed the grade I teach, the school site I teach at and the team I teach with. To put it shortly, as the 17-18 school year came to a close, I could not fathom teaching any more!! I was surfing job web sites for ANYTHING else I could do. My daydreaming led me to wishing I worked at an Amazon warehouse packing boxes of happiness (after all, isn’t that what Amazon boxes bring everyone, happiness?!). But they weren’t hiring!

I did continue teaching and I am glad I did! I am at a much better place!! With that said, I am still a teacher, working for the same district, so putting up with much of the same bullshit. I am just surrounded by happier, more like minded people now. So I went from living alone on Castaway island, to living with company on Gilligan’s Island!! (more on that later)

So Getty-up…I already have a coconut tree full of stories from last year and only a few weeks into this school,  I can already tell this is shaping up to be a very entertaining year!!!!

Lift your wine glass with me in a toast to being back!

So I am jumping on this bandwagon! I am not usually a fad follower, but I am seeing all over places like Instagram and fellow teacher blogs, posts about the importance of taking care of yourself, and I am all in. This is going to be my Self Care Summer.

This past school year was the toughest one yet. It is the first time I had legitimate first-hand struggle with burn out! I feel like teaching is my calling and my passion, but this year really tested me and I was ready to walk away from it all and do ANYTHING ELSE! I had SPED admin who were non-existent; I had specialists who were out of compliance and just plain stopped giving my students their services; I had some paras that were coming to school more for the social interaction with each other and had incredibly bad attitudes about actually working with the students; I had the most aggressive group of students ever collected in one classroom; and, I had more than my share of crazy, unreasonable parents (and their lawyers)! I walked out of one meeting feeling like I just plain hated people!!!

SO back to the self care. With the bruises finally fading and my headache subsiding, I have already made some positive moves in the direction of preserving my sanity! I left my last school. Facing another year with the same team of specialists, paras, admin and students, with an ever increasing work load and decreasing preps during the week (I had none this past year, and this next year my students’ staggered school day was changing so I was losing my ‘lunch break’) seemed like the very definition of crazy!!!

Today is MOVING DAY!! I have already packed up my old classroom, said good-bye to the few people I cared enough or respected enough to, and with the endless support from my family I am moving on to a new SPED classroom!

But moving on is only one of the steps I am taking to re-fill my “giving-a-shit” account! My summers are usually spent on classroom prep: cutting, laminating, and cutting again; reading and learning new techniques to better support my students; or surfing TPT and Pinterest for new classroom resources. I am sure some of this summer will be spent on that too, I do have an entirely new curriculum to learn, but this year I am also spending part of everyday doing something I love! Something just for me, that makes me feel better, and something I love doing with my family.  It is only July 3rd, and I am already feeling more human!!!!!

So fellow teachers, I encourage you to drink your coffee while it’s hot, your wine while it’s cold, and pamper yourself! The school year is looooooooooong, and the summer is short. Enjoy it while it lasts!! Summer is when we collect our overtime, but that does not mean we need to spend it working!