Best-laid plans

When expectations don't align, student pushback can be dejecting  

Anonymous

As a teacher, just like everyone else, our worlds were flipped upside by the Covid-19 pandemic. In the spring, though methodically, we scrambled to provide students with a meaningful education and provide them with the guidance, support, and flexibility we know they all needed. It was, well, rough. There's no 2 ways about it. Some shit just didn't work the way we hoped.

Fast forward to summer. The overwhelming guilt that we had failed (though most didn't) was deafening. It literally consumed us. Every conversation with our colleagues, our friends, and our families became about how to do better. As educators, if there is one thing we are good at, it's learning. So we, even though we've had YEARS of education, went back to the books. We read articles on best practices for online teaching, we investigated flipped classrooms, we studied how to deal with accessibility issues, and we reanalyzed our classes top to bottom.

Though we didn't want to admit it, we knew what was coming. Our classrooms in the fall weren't going to be the same. We took ALL of this new information, talked with one another, and developed a plan. But a plan for what. We had no fucking clue what the fall was going to bring. So guess what… we planned for EVERYTHING. In the middle of that plan, was THE plan. THE plan was our main approach. This is what it's going to look like based off what we currently knew was sort of kind of the plan to get students back in the classroom.

This new plan required work.. and a lot of it. Have you ever developed lesson plans for an entire course? It's not an easy task. But we had to do it. Many of us had lesson plans from previous years, ready to go if COVID wasn't a thing. That's the beauty of that 9-month contract, summer off teaching gig. Once you have the plan set, you get to just make modifications and use all of your stuff from previous years. Not this year though. We had to start over, from square one.

You might not think that redesigning a lesson plan is that much work, but let me give you an insight into what a single chapter of my 16 chapter semester looks like. One PowerPoint lecture which consists of about 75-100 slides of content, one text document which ranges from 40-75 pages of text, one study guide, one homework assessment, ¼ of an exam. Multiple that by 16, you have my semester's teaching content. But this year, I had to do new things, that one PowerPoint presentation became an interactive learning module that included links, buttons, navigation tools, video recordings, and more. All in all, for one interactive lecture I have about 40-60 hours of work. But that's only one week of work right? Summer is 3 months! Well, that's still only 12 weeks of "free time" and doesn't include the 1-½ months I spent researching best practices and then another ½ month learning new programs to implement this. On top of that we still had meetings to attend and.. AND.. AND… we aren't getting paid!

Fast forward to fall. Time to finally showcase all that hard work I put into my class. Time to see the excitement of students experiencing a new way of learning. Time to get back to some form of normalcy. WRONG. Time to come back to "this isn't what I signed up for", "this isn't fair", "I don't learn well like this", "this isn't what I pay money for", "I deserve money back". You know what that says to me? "I shouldn't have to pay you your normal salary for the insane amount of work you put into my education".

Honestly, it's day 2 and we're already exhausted. Exhaustion doesn't normally hit until fall break at which point we get a small moment of relief to recharge. Except… not this year. We gave it up so students could actually come back to campus. "This isn't what you signed up for"? F-off and go become a garbage bin. I'll spend my time teaching those who actually give a damn.