FAQ's except that I made them up
Oct. 8th, 2020 10:55 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sorcyressSome answers to some (reasonably) frequently asked questions right now:
Wait, you're still in the hotel?
Hotel appears to be my life until the end of October, no but really this time (which is to say that we have agreement from the landorbs that if their new place isn't ready by then --the new place which was supposed to definitely be ready by Sep30-- it will be their turn to find an extra place to live for a few weeks). Hotel is currently a two room suite + a studio single-room a few doors down the hall. I work in the studio during the day, various of us sleep or yoga or do meetings over there at various times.
You must hate your landorbs so much!
Nope! My landlorbs are wonderful communicative people who have a lot of their plate and are currently VERY VERY FRAZZLED by the fact that their contractor, who swore he would have everything ready by Sep30, turned out to not be accurate. They let us know the situation as soon as they could, and we've been in communications, and they're helping compensate us for hotel, and everything's good.
Okay, but like, two months of hotel living with your roommates, you must hate *them*!
I don't love this line of not-actually-questioning you seem to have going here. Yes, Ezri and Rey and I are all a little stressed out about being in really close proximity all the time, but we are all pretty open and forgiving and communicative and talking with each other and doing our best to make it work out. We did want to be a family unit living with each other, and frankly, I wouldn't have agreed to even regular housing if I didn't think that was going to work out.
Oh hey, speaking of stressed out, how's the job?
Job has started in earnest --we're almost finished the third week, and the end of the first real class cycle (alternating A and B weeks; first week was special schedule to see all classes). Virtual teaching absolutely sucks, which doesn't mean I'm not good at it (I am good at teaching). I am extremely behind on my grades, but that doesn't actually count until the start of my second real A week when I ought to have everything returned to the students.
My first day of lesson prep, it took me nearly eight hours to get everything set up and arranged and organized for my first day of classes [two sections of Algebra 1 CP (college prep/regular level), one section of SEI (sheltered English immersion/multilingual learners), I can overlap about half the prep between them.] By the end of first week I was down to ~3 hours prep time. This is really truly unsustainable, but I don't actually expect to get much faster than that for A weeks, because I am genuinely redoing every single one of my fucking lesson plans to work with a 90 minute schedule (used to be 55) done entirely remotely (used to be...yeah.)
We are currently not allowed breakout rooms1, so there is no group work unless I get REALLY clever with it. Clever costs time. Traditional skills-based assessments are pretty fucking pointless when there's no reasonable way to prevent cheating2, so figuring out if they've learned anything requires a lot more conceptual questioning and being clever about *that*. Clever costs time. SEL (Social Emotional Learning) is incredibly important this year, especially for freshmen like my four Alg1 classes, because the students don't feel like part of a community being separated into their own houses and not able to engage with each other in little social ways like normal, so I have to be clever about getting that into my lessons. Clever costs time.
I am often gaining energy by doing hyperfocusy long spans of worktime, because I do love pedagogy. It is also _heinously_ not sustainable for me to be doing That Much Every Day. Thank fuck my B-weeks are gentler [1 more section of Alg1 SEI, one section of junior/senior "Advanced Math" -think "oh shit you need to graduate and need another math to do so"] because the Alg is prepared by me in A-week and the AdvMath is prepared (largely) by my coworker Karen who taught it last year and teaches it this year in A-week. But yes, I need to do more work for that as well sometime this week, in addition to the aforementioned grading.
As always, yadda yadda dream job etc etc.
How you doing though?
Up and down. It's a pandemic, we're headed toward a civil war, and I probably need to get an IUD3 before birth control gets badly criminalized and I suddenly become At Risk for pregnancy. (genuine Boston-area inquiry --anyone know a doctor who'll do as-full-as-possible sterilization for a presumed xx 31 year old? Alternatively, anyone wanna pretend to be my husband and claim that you definitely don't want kids so it's now acceptable for me to choose that sterilization?)
But like, dream-job is still dream-job, I love my little family I'm living with, I have good friends and many of them, and I'm slowly forcing myself (kicking and screaming) into better health habits around like "sleeping enough" and "trying to be gentle about what I can and can't accomplish vis-a-vis ADHD".
Oh, and also I've successfully run a Discord Server foroveralmost exactly six months now, as a place for people to do brain-management stuff (Accountability Club! Ideas and Help! Today's Challenge!) but also for folks to hang out and Chat About Stuff. I'm actually incredibly pleased that it mostly runs itself --there's ~60 people on the roster, maybe 15 of whom are at all regularly active and engaged. I've had to step in two or three times total to do Dictator stuff, and haven't had to kick anyone out yet, and I feel good about all this. Also there's an obligatory Discord Pet Channel and people post pictures of their cats-and-or-occasionally-babies there.
(This is a very soft recruitment drive --you're welcome to check this flocked post for an invite if chatting with random friends of Kat sounds appealing. It's very compartmentalizey, which also means I've been told it feels very overwhelming (there's like fifteen channels because that's how my brain do.)
I think that's plenty of post. If you have other questions, please do ask in comments! I'm in a talky mood right now.
~Sor
MOOP!
1: I was gonna put some sort of footnote here, but honestly, I got nothing. It's a fucking bullshit legal thing, because something something c/hild prnogrphy when some dumbass senior shows their genitals on-screen, but wow maybe we could focus on teaching our kids how to be good citizens who don't whip out their genitals. Or at least how to set boundaries and report if other kids do that sort of thing. And maybe we could not assume our students are going to be sheissekopfs in the first place and instead assume good things about them like they want to learn. And maybe we could HAVE A FUCKING VALUABLE TOOL FOR TEACHING.
2: I'm certainly not going to engage in inequitable bullshit about having kids turn on cameras and carefully show off their entire room and then do the test while I stare at 18 tiny picture frames at once hoping to catch sight of which ones are cheating when there's about fifty gabillion ways to do just that. Like, I guarantee that not only is All That Bullshit ableist and cruel, I also promise I cannot successfully monitor that many children through that tiny a view. So we test in other ways.
3: Not to play the rape survivor card, but yeah, there are pretty serious reasons I don't want one. Heck, I'll play my whole hand here --my current birth control method fully stops menstruation and it seems like there's only a 1/3 chance of that on the IUD, so I can get the double whammy of "sucks as someone with trauma about things being stuck into my vagina that I don't want" and "sucks as someone whose most serious dysphoria is around menstruation".
4: Including once just straight up saying "hey, this conversation seems valuable but it is specifically triggering to me, so I'm not going to ask you to stop but I am going to insist that it happens entirely within spoiler tags so I don't have to see it by accident". I was very very pleased that everyone involved listened and kept to that and I managed to both keep my space safe for me *and* provide space for people to talk their own shit out.
Wait, you're still in the hotel?
Hotel appears to be my life until the end of October, no but really this time (which is to say that we have agreement from the landorbs that if their new place isn't ready by then --the new place which was supposed to definitely be ready by Sep30-- it will be their turn to find an extra place to live for a few weeks). Hotel is currently a two room suite + a studio single-room a few doors down the hall. I work in the studio during the day, various of us sleep or yoga or do meetings over there at various times.
You must hate your landorbs so much!
Nope! My landlorbs are wonderful communicative people who have a lot of their plate and are currently VERY VERY FRAZZLED by the fact that their contractor, who swore he would have everything ready by Sep30, turned out to not be accurate. They let us know the situation as soon as they could, and we've been in communications, and they're helping compensate us for hotel, and everything's good.
Okay, but like, two months of hotel living with your roommates, you must hate *them*!
I don't love this line of not-actually-questioning you seem to have going here. Yes, Ezri and Rey and I are all a little stressed out about being in really close proximity all the time, but we are all pretty open and forgiving and communicative and talking with each other and doing our best to make it work out. We did want to be a family unit living with each other, and frankly, I wouldn't have agreed to even regular housing if I didn't think that was going to work out.
Oh hey, speaking of stressed out, how's the job?
Job has started in earnest --we're almost finished the third week, and the end of the first real class cycle (alternating A and B weeks; first week was special schedule to see all classes). Virtual teaching absolutely sucks, which doesn't mean I'm not good at it (I am good at teaching). I am extremely behind on my grades, but that doesn't actually count until the start of my second real A week when I ought to have everything returned to the students.
My first day of lesson prep, it took me nearly eight hours to get everything set up and arranged and organized for my first day of classes [two sections of Algebra 1 CP (college prep/regular level), one section of SEI (sheltered English immersion/multilingual learners), I can overlap about half the prep between them.] By the end of first week I was down to ~3 hours prep time. This is really truly unsustainable, but I don't actually expect to get much faster than that for A weeks, because I am genuinely redoing every single one of my fucking lesson plans to work with a 90 minute schedule (used to be 55) done entirely remotely (used to be...yeah.)
We are currently not allowed breakout rooms1, so there is no group work unless I get REALLY clever with it. Clever costs time. Traditional skills-based assessments are pretty fucking pointless when there's no reasonable way to prevent cheating2, so figuring out if they've learned anything requires a lot more conceptual questioning and being clever about *that*. Clever costs time. SEL (Social Emotional Learning) is incredibly important this year, especially for freshmen like my four Alg1 classes, because the students don't feel like part of a community being separated into their own houses and not able to engage with each other in little social ways like normal, so I have to be clever about getting that into my lessons. Clever costs time.
I am often gaining energy by doing hyperfocusy long spans of worktime, because I do love pedagogy. It is also _heinously_ not sustainable for me to be doing That Much Every Day. Thank fuck my B-weeks are gentler [1 more section of Alg1 SEI, one section of junior/senior "Advanced Math" -think "oh shit you need to graduate and need another math to do so"] because the Alg is prepared by me in A-week and the AdvMath is prepared (largely) by my coworker Karen who taught it last year and teaches it this year in A-week. But yes, I need to do more work for that as well sometime this week, in addition to the aforementioned grading.
As always, yadda yadda dream job etc etc.
How you doing though?
Up and down. It's a pandemic, we're headed toward a civil war, and I probably need to get an IUD3 before birth control gets badly criminalized and I suddenly become At Risk for pregnancy. (genuine Boston-area inquiry --anyone know a doctor who'll do as-full-as-possible sterilization for a presumed xx 31 year old? Alternatively, anyone wanna pretend to be my husband and claim that you definitely don't want kids so it's now acceptable for me to choose that sterilization?)
But like, dream-job is still dream-job, I love my little family I'm living with, I have good friends and many of them, and I'm slowly forcing myself (kicking and screaming) into better health habits around like "sleeping enough" and "trying to be gentle about what I can and can't accomplish vis-a-vis ADHD".
Oh, and also I've successfully run a Discord Server for
(This is a very soft recruitment drive --you're welcome to check this flocked post for an invite if chatting with random friends of Kat sounds appealing. It's very compartmentalizey, which also means I've been told it feels very overwhelming (there's like fifteen channels because that's how my brain do.)
I think that's plenty of post. If you have other questions, please do ask in comments! I'm in a talky mood right now.
~Sor
MOOP!
1: I was gonna put some sort of footnote here, but honestly, I got nothing. It's a fucking bullshit legal thing, because something something c/hild prnogrphy when some dumbass senior shows their genitals on-screen, but wow maybe we could focus on teaching our kids how to be good citizens who don't whip out their genitals. Or at least how to set boundaries and report if other kids do that sort of thing. And maybe we could not assume our students are going to be sheissekopfs in the first place and instead assume good things about them like they want to learn. And maybe we could HAVE A FUCKING VALUABLE TOOL FOR TEACHING.
2: I'm certainly not going to engage in inequitable bullshit about having kids turn on cameras and carefully show off their entire room and then do the test while I stare at 18 tiny picture frames at once hoping to catch sight of which ones are cheating when there's about fifty gabillion ways to do just that. Like, I guarantee that not only is All That Bullshit ableist and cruel, I also promise I cannot successfully monitor that many children through that tiny a view. So we test in other ways.
3: Not to play the rape survivor card, but yeah, there are pretty serious reasons I don't want one. Heck, I'll play my whole hand here --my current birth control method fully stops menstruation and it seems like there's only a 1/3 chance of that on the IUD, so I can get the double whammy of "sucks as someone with trauma about things being stuck into my vagina that I don't want" and "sucks as someone whose most serious dysphoria is around menstruation".
4: Including once just straight up saying "hey, this conversation seems valuable but it is specifically triggering to me, so I'm not going to ask you to stop but I am going to insist that it happens entirely within spoiler tags so I don't have to see it by accident". I was very very pleased that everyone involved listened and kept to that and I managed to both keep my space safe for me *and* provide space for people to talk their own shit out.
no subject
on 2020-10-09 10:01 am (UTC)As far as assessments go, I gave all my students a speech about their integrity being more important than deadlines, and I'm making them fill out an affidavit thing before every open notes take home test and quiz promising not to work with other people or copy anything verbatim from anywhere, and to my surprise it's actually going well. I don't know for sure that kids aren't cheating in ways I can't catch, but teaching them not to cheat in sloppy obvious ways and making them actually process words through their heads before putting them on their test paper seems to be having good results. Poor kids though -- test averages are down from last year despite the switch to open book and the addition of more detailed study guides. And the slower pacing.
Good luck with grading!
no subject
on 2020-10-09 11:45 am (UTC)Hehehehe : )
3
on 2020-10-12 06:14 pm (UTC)Re: 3
on 2020-10-12 06:39 pm (UTC)I am very intentionally on the three-month-at-a-time birth control, which I string together to be (ideally) infinity month-at-a-time. This means that I almost never menstruate (good! very important for my mental health! certainly not bad for my physical health (I also skip cramps!)!!) and I'm very happy with it and I see absolutely no problems whatsoever with doing this for the rest of my life, except for the fear that I'm not going to be legally able to get my medication anymore.
~Sor
no subject
on 2020-10-13 07:49 pm (UTC)Re: tube tying, have you talked to Fenway? They are also known to make a lot of allowances for non-cis folks and may help you get this covered under gender medicine.
no subject
on 2020-10-23 08:06 pm (UTC)♥