In lieu of Supporting Friends Friday, I’ve decided to dedicate this Friday’s post to the memories of three great men that left us in the past week. One was a beloved funnyman; the second an influential public intellectual; the third a former colleague’s husband.
That order is not indicative of a ranking by significance or importance, to be clear. As I noted, I consider all three of these gentleman to be great men. Each contributed something to the world in their own way.
After a glorious Labor Day weekend and a scenic drive, my school opted to hold a virtual learning rehearsal day, intoning the usual incantation of “out of an abundance of caution” due to the possibility of holiday-related viral spread. The decision to do a day of virtual learning also came with the insistent emphasis that we are not planning on going to virtual or distance learning on a long-term basis, but merely wanted to practice in order to prepare for the worst.
Thank goodness! While I very much appreciated the more relaxed pace of the day—and by extension the cancellation of Back-to-School Night—I was also reminded of the shortcomings of distance learning.
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Apologies to readers for the delayed post. After a long but productive week and a drive to Athens—not to mention a late-night dose of NyQuil—I’m getting a late start on this post.
Education is a field that tends towards authoritarianism and centralization, especially when faced with a major problem outside of its usual scope. The field’s emphasis on safety—understandable given that teachers and administrators work with children—can become, in certain circumstances, pathological.
Schools, especially public schools, sit at the uncomfortable nexus of politics, liability, and conformity. Various political schemes to improve education often backfire, instead creating onerous additional tasks that rank-and-file faculty shoulder. Centralization of control at the State and federal levels, rather than aid classroom teaching, often merely force conformity on the profession, while creating unrealistic “benchmarks” that don’t align with local conditions or needs.
The ever-present fear of lawsuits reduces administrators to whimpering toadies, themselves often filled with silly pedagogical theories from bogus education programs. Educational dogma is fully onboard with social justice foolishness, and education programs are excellent at producing dedicated Cultural Marxists and “activists,” all eager to indoctrinate students into the prevailing cult of groupthink.
Within this milieu is the tendency for professional educators to possess a bit of an authoritarian streak. There are plenty of good teachers with an authoritative approach to both their subject matter and classroom management (the buzzword for “discipline” or control of the classroom), but some teachers and administrators relish control over their tiny little domains. Small people ruling small fiefdoms tend to possess rather inflated senses of their own rightness and righteousness.
The Age of The Virus, then, provided the perfect conditions for justifying all manner of policies and procedures that do little to help children learn, but do a great deal to empower administrators, district offices, and the like with the pretexts for depriving students, employees, and parents of any modicum of personal and academic freedom. The very same forces that would hawk abortions with the rallying cry of “my body, my choice” also gleefully mandate experimental mRNA vaccination regimens and literal muzzles—even for vaccinated employees!
Locally, the Darlington County School District has tied vaccination to COVID leave, an invention of the federal government that allows teachers quarantined or sick due to The Virus to receive paid COVID leave in lieu of their regular sick leave. Per the article at the News & Press (emphasis added), “‘Some people may think this is controversial,’ Education Superintendent Tim Newman said. ‘Sometimes, you just have to take a stand for what you think is right.'”
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The new year school year is back into full swing, with this week being the first full week of classes. Needless to say, yours portly is tired, but very much enjoying the academic year so far.
I’m teaching Pre-AP Music Appreciation again this year, so I’m excited to dive back into some of the works we discussed last year—and some new ones! Of course, we’ve kicked the year off with a listening to “The Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra,” a favorite for introducing orchestral instruments.
My Pre-AP Music class this year is quite small—just five students—which makes for a more relaxed classroom environment. We’re able to explore tangents as they arise (and, based on my frequent use of em dashes and parentheses, you can imagine I go off on them frequently), and generally take the time to enjoy the music, which the students seem to be doing.
I don’t have much more to add that I didn’t write a year ago. Britten ingeniously weaves a whopping thirteen variations on a Henry Purcell theme, featuring nearly every instrument in the orchestra—including the percussion section!—in solo or soli. Even the neglected double basses get some love with a melody of their own.
With that, here is 31 August 2020’s “Benjamin Britten’s ‘The Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra’“:
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Last Saturday my younger brother and I woke up very early to attend an all-day concealed weapons permit (CWP) course. We’d both been meaning to get our CWP for some time, and he stumbled upon an instructor in his area on Next Door. Wanting to knock it out before college football season begins, we decided it was the perfect time to learn to be certified killing machines.
In all seriousness, the course was extremely informative—and sobering. Owning any firearm is a huge responsibility, as misuse of the weapon can result in injury and death—including to yourself!
I’d always understood that in the abstract, but taking the course and handling a firearm really drove that home. Our instructor really pounded into us two things: situational awareness and practice.
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School is back, and while I’d like to think The Age of The Virus is in its twilight death throes, the powers-that-be seem intent on foisting fearmongering variants upon us, no doubt as a pretext to strip us of more of our civil liberties.
Regardless, we’re starting back normally this year—as normally as possible—with a whopping 408 (and counting) students. Considering we had fewer than 100 students a decade ago, that’s a pretty huge change.
Hopefully we won’t have any major outbreaks this year, as we largely avoided last school year. We managed to get through with only a few isolated cases among students and faculty, and finished up with life largely back to normal in the final two months of the year.
It’s interesting looking back to the beginning of last school year and seeing how the year progressed. The fiasco of using Loom lasted about two weeks for yours portly; I quickly reverted to using the desktop version of Google Meet to record my lectures.
I’m also relieved that I won’t be livestreaming classes anymore. I don’t have anything to hide; it’s just a huge hassle getting online kids logged in, much less engaged. There’d frequently be times when I was ten minutes into class and a student would log in after being marked absent; sometimes I wouldn’t catch that the student had entered class, and the student would then complain about the absence.
More frequently, students would log in the moment I’d sent the attendance e-mail to the registrar, so I’d have to resend the e-mail. Sometimes the registrar wouldn’t see that second e-mail, and I’d get a call in the middle of class asking if the “missing” student had logged into class.
Those were minor issues when compared to bigger problems with the online platform—students suddenly switching to distance learning on test days, for example—but still headaches. It probably cost a good five-to-ten minutes of class time just to take attendance.
Well, here’s to the normal amount of craziness and bureaucratic overreach of the typical school year. With that, here is 28 August 2020’s “First Week of School in The Age of The Virus“:
Well, after starting back to work Monday a week ago, we’re finally back at school today. We’re one of the latest schools to start back in our area—my county’s school district started back classes last Monday, and Florence County schools resumed on 2 August 2021—but it still seems too soon. The Florence start date seems insanely early as far as I am concerned, but they’re transitioning to a semi-year-round model, in which the students will get a week off in October and February, as well as some other juicy breaks.
Of course, any time off is never quite enough, is it? I often find myself thinking, “if I only had one more weekend to finish this up” or “I really need another week of break so I can work on writing.” That said, during the peak of The Age of The Virus in 2020, when I had virtually limitless free time, I didn’t complete any of the big projects I had set aside for myself. That puts to the lie the idea that more time necessarily means getting more done.
Indeed, I often find that I am more productive when working against a deadline. As I’ve gotten older and more experienced—albeit not much wiser—I’ve learned to plan ahead, and to churn out a great deal of work in long stretches of focus, in order to save me some time later. That’s a necessity with my crazy schedule, and helps keep me from getting caught flat-footed by some unanticipated deadline or task too often.
Regardless, school is starting back today, and things are (mostly) back to normal—no more remote learning, no students tuning in from their cars or bedrooms to class, no more mandatory masks (again, mostly) [update: we have received word that we are starting the year with masks—nooooo!]. I’m hoping it’s going to be a normal-ish academic year.
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With school starting back in just a few days, I’ve been hammering away at schedules of all sorts. The school schedule itself seems to be in flux, with an ebb of last-minute changes and adjustments to the all-powerful Master Schedule. Surprise personnel changes and a surge in enrollment have seen quite a bit of shuffling taking place, though it doesn’t seem quite as chaotic as it has been in past years.
The new academic year also means that I’m scheduling students for private music lessons. In a normal year, it can be a little difficult to put together a consistent weekly schedule. This year, I have so many students, it’s been a Sisyphean task, although I think I nearly have the boulder pushed to the top of the hill.
Or, like Sisyphus, I’m only fooling myself, and the boulder is about to roll backwards, flattening me in the process.
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This past Monday, teachers at my small private school resumed work, sitting through our annual OSHA blood-borne pathogens training and another sales pitch from the AFLAC representative (start offering long-term disability insurance, AFLAC, and I’ll buy a policy). Registration for new and returning students is now in full swing.
Last year was a unique school year, with its own challenges and opportunities. As I detailed in this post, we had a host of new sanitation procedures, as well as the odious masks. This year, the masks are optional, but we’re still sanitizing desks and checking temperatures at the door.
Unlike last year, we’ll have all the fun stuff again: pep rallies, chapel, etc. I know the students will be excited for some fun events to return to campus.
Of course, that means yours portly will be back to hustling to satisfy the bottomless appetite for audio-visual production values the students (and my administration) crave. One silver lining of last school year was the vast reduction in constant events and activities, which allowed me the time to focus on teaching and grading.
Oh, well—here’s to another year! And here’s 10 August 2020’s “Back to the Grind 2020“:
