domingo, 3 de mayo de 2020

May 4, 2020

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Kudos
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  • Thank you to our support staff, Bobbi Smith, Vicky Leuck, Lisa Iniguez, Cynthia Orzula, Pam Bauer, Jean Fifer, Ramon Alvarez, Brittanie Gayhart, Stacey Steeples, Chrystal McVey, Andrea Pangburn, and Johnny Aguirre who came in this week to assist with packing up our student lockers!  Your help is truly appreciated and it was GREAT to see everyone!  Looking forward to seeing you again as we continue to work on packing up student lockers!  
  • Thank you to Pam Bauer for assisting with student material pick up this past Thursday!  Much appreciated!  
  • Thank you to Suzanne Dunbar and Briana Harris for thinking of and organizing the staff video!  It was posted this past Friday and has over 2,400 views!!!  So awesome to see the staff pull together to give a little cheer to our students, each other, and the community!  
  • Special thank you to all of our teachers and certified staff for all of your initiative, creativity, focus, and hard work throughout our virtual learning time frame!  This week is teacher appreciation week and boy oh boy do you deserve to be appreciated!!!  You turned school into virtual school within TWO days!  We have recieved nothing but positive prays for the amount of work and time for academics from Karcher - thank you all!!!  
    • Annie and I both felt it was TRULY awesome to see all of you this past weekend, for those that we showed up to your house and you happen to not be home we would have loved to see you as well!  We struggled with how to show our appreciation this year and hope the yard sign and little gift brought a smile to your faces and made you feel important and appreciated... because you are!!!  Pictures of everyone is below!  Thanks again for all you do... we have great students and staff!!!
Article this week:  

I Teach School Now. It Isn’t Going Well.

A crisis forces parents to become overnight educators in a ‘virtual’ classroom




Anyone? Jason Gay is finding out what many teachers already know—getting students to pay attention isn’t easy.

PHOTO: CBS/GETTY IMAGES

If one penguin lays two eggs, and four penguins lay four eggs, then six penguins will lay…oh, what do I know about penguins? Can’t someone ask me about the NFL draft? Bill Belichick did the draft with his dog!
Hi. My name is Jason. Welcome to my schoolhouse. I used to write about sports, but now that job is relegated to the funny hours, in the early light, among the chirping birdies, or in the dark, after my family has snoozed off for the evening. 
Like many parents, my 9-to-5 workday is now consumed by teaching “virtual” school—in my case, for a 5-year-old and a 7-year-old, a pair of innocent children suddenly at the mercy of a father who misspelled “San Francisco” halfway through his Super Bowl column. 
This isn’t one of those know-it-all columns in which the author gives smart advice about how to teach children in quarantine. There is no smart advice here. I’m lousy at this. My children are plunging in aptitude with each passing minute. Thanks to their dad, they’re on the verge of delinquency and mayhem. I think I saw one of them try to carve “Black Sabbath” into the kitchen table with a pocket knife. I swear they’ve started smoking in the bathroom. 
But these kids are stuck with me as long as this goes on. That’s because their mom is a teacher herself—a real teacher, not a moron, like me. When she steps in and runs virtual school, it actually resembles a school. But a lot of the day, she’s tucked away in another room, teaching her own students, while daddy is out on the living room couch, tormented by phonics for the first time in decades.
I know what you’re thinking: Your kids are 5 and 7 years old. How hard can it be? I got news for you, friends. School has changed. You can’t simply pick your nose and roll right into high school anymore. You or I would be road kill in first grade in 2020. Today’s students have real work, every day. If my kids don’t do it, they’re going to wind up in some dead-end job, like newspaper sports columnist.
I want to be clear: my family and I, we’re lucky. There are too many children out there with unstable living situations, or limited access to technology to make virtual schooling work. Quarantined at-home education isn’t an “equalizer”; it’s quite the contrary, penalizing the same students habitually penalized by an imbalanced system. Schools are worried about students falling behind or slipping entirely through the cracks.
We’re fortunate. I’m grateful.
Let me tell you how virtual school works in my home. My wife and I wake up in the morning, make the kids’ breakfast, and then start yelling at them to get dressed for virtual school. I call this “opening yell.” Then the kids run around for 20 minutes ignoring everything we say.
After that, it’s time for “morning meetings,” aka group Zoom calls with their respective classes. I don’t know if you’ve ever been on a Zoom call with 20 pre-K students, but it’s the most adorable thing I’ve ever seen, and I’ve seen baby pandas on YouTube. You’ve got a screen full of kids, half of them still eating breakfast in their unicorn pajamas, cross-talking and howling at each other (“I had pancakes!”) until the teacher can’t take it anymore, and mutes them all. Then they begin their school day, talking about quantum physics or magical llamas or whatever 5-year-olds talk about. 
You need to keep an eye on your children during school Zoom calls. A couple of weeks ago, I left the 7-year-old alone in his morning meeting, and when I returned, he grandly announced that he had taken out his pet gecko and fed it a live cricket while his entire first-grade class watched. I do not know if he was telling the truth, because he is seven, and 7-year-olds have been known to be fabulists. If he was telling the truth, however, he probably has sewn up the election for second grade class president.
Once morning meetings are done, I give my children some “free range” time. They are given the option of A) running around and making a mess or B) running around and making a mess, while daddy looks at his phone and checks to see if the Cowboys have traded anyone. 
I know there are some virtual school parents who have color-coded schedules with rigorous structure. I am not one of these parents. Imagine a dog park, where none of the dogs have leashes or seem to belong to anyone. My school is like that. 
You’d never believe it, but both my mother and father were school teachers. Mom taught elementary school. Dad taught high school. I have inherited none of the family genes. There may have been a mix-up at the baby hospital.
Eventually, things settle down, and we focus on the lessons of the day. I don’t want to sell my kids short—they’re both lovely, intelligent children, probably the most lovely, intelligent children in the history of the planet, and in no way am I biased, it’s simply a fact. They’re just stuck with a crummy teacher. When I can get them to lock in, they ace the work. The first-grader has iPad-based assignments, which means he gets to use the iPad. He can’t believe his luck. He acts like he found $10,000 in a shoebox.
I admit: there have been moments when he has darted off before finishing the final problem, and I’m sitting there, with the iPad, fairly certain of the answer to 10 minus 3, and I think Oh, who would be the wiser, if I just finished this up? But it’s a slippery slope: answer a first-grader’s math question one day, and then you’re hiring a landscape architect to build them a volcano for science class, and from there, it isn’t that long a road to photoshopping their head atop a rower’s body for a college application, and getting raided by the FBI and winding up in the slammer. 
I leave it unfinished. But I know the answer. 
Six. 
Seven.
San F-r-a-n-c-i-s-c-o. Not San F-r-a-n-s-i-s-c-o. 
Teachers are miracles. I know there are some cranks out there who think teachers are just slapping together e-homework and calling it a day, but that’s pure nonsense. The effort required to move an entire curriculum from a live classroom online—in a matter of days—is astonishing. I know, because it’s happening in the other room. And at night. And in the a.m. And on the weekends. It never stops.
I hope when this is over, we step up our respect and commitment to teachers. You can always find a politician lazily playing to the cheap seats by attacking teacher unions and school budgets, and all I want is for those politicians to step inside a classroom and do the job for a week. Actually, just do it for 45 minutes. I think that will be enough. 
And my kids really miss it, school. They miss their teachers and friends and the hectic rush of the classroom. They miss talking about pets and Pokémon and who got dog poop on their shoe in the park. We send our kids to school for an education, but there’s a whole community and energy which can only be duplicated in person, with other children, together. 
I hope we get it back, soon.
So here’s the upside of virtual school. I know so much more about my children. You can go to all the parent-teacher meetings in the world, but there’s nothing like riding shotgun to see what they’re all about, what they’re challenged by, what enthralls them. I know that the 5-year-old loves to draw and write, and I know the 7-year-old has a knack for math and science. They both love animals and nature. The other day, they found a bird’s nest, and they acted like they’d won the World Series. 
And yes. I showed them Belichick’s dog, sitting at the dining room table on draft night. They thought that was hilarious. 
We’re doing the best we can. Early on, I tried so hard to avoid descending into chaos, that helpless feeling of: the wheels have come off. But the longer this goes on, the more I realize: the wheels are always off. That’s the status quo of quarantine—along with the endless, dull anxiety of a spring gone sideways. I’ve learned to appreciate those moments that happen once in a while, when the children are engaged and learning, figuring it out independently, and there’s a brief period of feeling OK about the world. The wheels have briefly come on. A minute later, it’s back to the chaos, and that’s fine. I’m no teacher, but after the past month we’ve all had, I figure chaos is a learning experience, too.

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Information/Reminders
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New Construction Information 
  • Click HERE to access the new building blog!
This week:

  • This is an additional reminder to all staff that it is required that you have a mask and gloves on to enter the building. Please make sure you bring a mask (as we have a very limited supply after donating to our local health care workers) and we have some gloves. Please make sure you follow this expectation.
  • Pass/No Pass
    • Thank you for changing your gradebooks to pass/no pass last week. If you forgot... the directions are in last week's blog... please take care of this ASAP so we are consistent across the building.
  • Reminder... if you are wanting a second staff member for a Google Meet you can ask any of our support staff, they would be happy to help! Here is the link to know their hours and availability! This is on the Karcher Calendar!
  • Student locker clean out & staff room pack up.
    • This document is where staff sign-up is! Make note that only 6 staff per day can come to Karcher.  
      • Just an FYI... you cannot bring any of your kids, spouse, friends, etc into the building. We have to be careful on the number of people entering the building and need to keep it to employees only.  
      • Please come up to the main office when you arrive at Karcher and come back to the main office prior to leaving. We need to document everyone who is in the building and the duration. Thank you!
      • The "End of the year check-out form" is in your classrooms... close to the door. This needs to be filled out and completed for check-out, just like in years past.
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Pictures from the week
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Happy teacher appreciation week!!!  Missing a few people who were not home when we arrived... will add them once we get one!  Again... so great to see you all!!!








































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