Welcome to the 2020/2021 School Year!

 Welcome back! By this time in 2020 I hope everyone has embraced a new philosophy for living: flexibility! Every aspect of our lives now requires this. That and patience. As I've lived through the past 6 months of this pandemic I've looked for the silver linings, and for me they include slowing down, learning to schedule less and remain flexible, and learning to be patient with myself, my children and family, and with my society.

This is an unprecedented time, so as I enter my 27th year of teaching I feel like I'm entering my first. As I enter my 20th year of parenting, I feel like I'm back at the beginning. It's an anxious time, a time when I feel uncertain and aggravated, a time when I feel like I have no clue what's going on. To be sure, I have no idea how this year is going to go, how it should go, or how we'll all come together to get through it, but I AM sure that it will all happen and we will be fine. We just need to be prepared for anything, so in that vein I have spent my time since June trying to find a way to prepare for anything and everything. Here is my plan for this year:

• We will be using Google Classroom - whether Face to Face or online, my entire class is now on Google Classroom. I will post my daily lesson in the form of slideshows; all assignments are online, all documents will be turned in on Classroom or Turnitin.com. We will be as paperless as it is possible to be. There are a couple of reasons for this including: if we are sent home, they will already be acclimated to the platform, and we're in the technological age at this point so we need to use this change in how we do things to fully embrace this era.
• I fully believe in teamwork and collaborative learning, so my goal is to utilize technology to have all of my students participating in group discussions and projects. I have researched ideas, platforms, and protocols to make this happen. It will not be seamless, but we will be continuously working on this all year.
• This year is an opportunity for positive change. For me, that means that I become more adept at teaching my students to learn how to learn rather than just memorizing facts. In other words, we'll be working on skills for learning and working. For my students this means learning that failures are a part of life and will happen! But we learn from them and we move forward and utilize this as part of the learning process. For all of us, this means that we learn to be patient and forgiving of ourselves and of others. I truly believe that if we embrace these changes we will be better people and a better society - less anxious, less focused on false truths, more focused on what is important.

I use this space as a place to let you know my thinking and philosophies about education and life. I also use it as a way to communicate what we are doing in the classroom, so I'm going to list my plan for the first full week of school. Both my English 9 and English 10 are working on the same thing this week, so here is the plan:

• Tuesday, 9/8 - learn how to use the Journal; acclimate to my online platforms and look at the parent letter, rules, procedures, and blog; pretest for determining where we are with skills - parts of speech; Who Am I? Part 1 - assignment - submit; exit ticket.
• Wednesday, 9/9 - journal; pretest - reading comprehension; Who Am I? Part 2 - submit; exit ticket.
• Thursday, 9/10 - journal; pretest - reading for main idea; Who Am I? Part 3 - submit; exit ticket.
• Friday, 9/11 - journal - submit for week; pretest - reading for author's purpose; Who Am I? Part 4 - due by Sunday at midnight; exit ticket.

The goals of the week:

1. Establish where we are for skills
2. Establish where we are emotionally
3. Introduce ourselves to the class
4. Introduce ourselves to the technology that will be used this year

By the end of the week students should be able to say:

I can locate the tools I need to function in this class or ask for help if I need it.

I Can Utilize the Habits of: curiosity, openness, engagement, creativity, persistence, responsibility, and flexibility.

As Used In: all jobs and careers.

I hope this blog is helpful to parents and students. I update it by Sunday evening every week and send out reminders; that way it is available to you as needed.

My wish for this week: may we all transition back to school successfully, happily, and with kindness toward ourselves and each other. Have a great week!

Welcome to the 2020/2021 School Year! by Laura Stubbs is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Based on a work at https://www.laurastubbs.blogspot.com.